The lost time of digital and eternal love

They say – and the trace of Italian in the high school exam reminds us today – that we can’t wait any longer. That we have the poised patience of a cloud before the storm. It’s a matter of habits, it’s not our fault. Digital has made everything instantaneous and erased timetables. If you want to buy something you don’t have to wait for the store to open, you can do it online right away. And if you want to see a film, you don’t have to wait for it to be programmed into the schedule of a TV station, you can watch it whenever you want.

This fact of having everything at your fingertips does not only concern digital: for example, at the local market the strawberries, which I once looked forward to with nostalgia, now I find them all year round and when I saw the grapes on the stalls a few days ago I I asked what month we were in: it was May.

However, it is digital that created the world completely and immediately. And even before shopping, messages between people are the thing that has changed the most. I was born with postcards still there: when you left and sent one, it could take weeks before it reached its destination. Today you take a selfie under a monument or a sunset and your postcard arrives immediately: Mom, look how much fun I have. Being able to share with our loved ones what we do in the moment we live it is wonderful and I would never go back to the world I was before.

But there is a downside: it is impatience.

We no longer know how to wait and that waiting wasn’t necessarily wasted time: it was a measure of the value of things. In novels lovers wait their whole lives if the love is genuine. But now we want an answer right away. Prince Charming is in a hurry. The moment we send a message, the countdown starts. There are software that tell when the mail has been read. On Whatsapp it’s easier, there’s a double blue check. Which is a kind of formal notice: as a bailiff certifies that you have read, yet you have not replied. Why? Am I not important enough? Have you nothing to say? A few days ago my daughter suddenly removed the double blue check: in practice I no longer know when she reads my messages (and she does not know when I read hers) than her. I thought it was an independent choice of a teenager who is becoming an adult when she said to me: “Some answers, Dad, take time, I want to be able to think without feeling at fault”. Taking back time means believing in eternal love.