“All men desire peace, but very few desire those things that make for peace”

These are the words of Thomas A Kempis, a German-Dutch canon regular of the late medieval period. I found them on my Instagram page—posted as a nice, little quote meant to inspire or provoke a thought, perhaps. I had paused to consider it, and I thought: Very right, Mr. Kempis. Very few indeed desire those things that make for peace, and that’s because those things that make for peace are hard to cultivate. I suspect that those “things” you speak of, to be obtained, require an arduous, tedious process. A course of action that feels like dying. The peace you speak of , being the reward of a prudent effort at self-discipline, would hardly be attained through the way of life we have now adopted.

We are about a life of rewards that come swiftly and in plentiful short bursts. We love our instant gratifications and we live for them. Our lives are now peppered with things that encourage a desire for instant rewards: instant messaging, fast food, high-speed download, express delivery. Waiting and delayed-gratification have slowly become a thing of the past. Instant gratification and rewards have become a thing that is now desired in areas of life where they have no business thriving. Our rewards must either come fast or we want nothing to do with it—we want nothing to do with the hard stuff that could lead to peace. 

Take a smartphone, for instance, it’s a host to a whole lot of “instants”: We have apps that provide access to anything ranging from a staggering notification of likes to a plethora of love interests to choose from, and dispose of at will. We order, we swipe, we double tap. We give a whole new meaning to the expression “at our fingertips.” Our egos are placated. Our brains’ pleasure centers are assaulted on a daily basis. We fritter away our lives on the altar of instant rewards. We sacrifice everything, never considering the price we are paying.  We get our reward. All in an instant. It’s all we want.

The music pours from our Spotify app, a playlist fills our ears with its sound so that we don’t have time for silence—that dreadful silence that we have sometimes heard heralds a peace. We don’t entertain silence. We fill it. We stuff things into it. Things that bring fleeting pleasures and a lasting restlessness—instant rewards that evanesce ever so quickly. But we are never ever out of supply for sources of these rewards and we are perennially in demand for them.We are on Instagram  pinning up our photos and videos. Then we wait for the likes. We wait for our reward. We watch it pour or trickle in—the flow will determine our mood. As they say, the more the merrier.

When we want another human for a reward, we swipe right or follow. We go through the motions of acquiring them like a piece of merchandise and toss them aside when they no longer spark joy. Then we are back again on the apps that host a catalog of humans to choose from. We are back to swiping, to acquiring a new human. We go in with no intention to give but to receive. To instantly receive our reward in human form and to toss them back out when the novelty of being with them wears off.

Our reward is sometimes sweet. It’s been described as a drug of the dangerously addictive kind. It’s in our food. Sugar, lots of it, in different forms. It promises instant energy and instant delight to the taste buds and brain.We drink it. We eat it. We can’t resist. We fill our stomach till our bodies begin to grumble and crumble from all the spikes and decay it wreaks. But we want it, anyway. 

We are restless, wired, strung out from the stimulation that comes from these many instants, and so we lack peace. We exist in an all-time high so that we can’t descend to the low that leads to a peace we have barely learnt to desire but are in dire need of.

We live only for the instant variety of rewards, even though we pay the price–the price of having an attention span that’s shot to hell, a health that is coming apart, a life that is subpar at best.

We don’t attempt to discover the peace that comes with the habit of settling down with a good book, at stressful times, and consuming it to the last word. We’d rather have words in easy-to-consume bits on our screens. And when a long piece threatens our focus or enjoyment, we lament—tl;dr (too long; didn’t read).

We don’t take a stab at discovering the peace that comes with allowing moments (or pockets) of silence in our lives, allowing our minds to have thoughts that have no external influence. We don’t dare allow ourselves the opportunities to see what lurks in our seemingly unexplored mind  and find the courage to face it.

We don’t do self-discipline or self-control–the stuff of true peace. Delayed gratification, long-term benefits, perseverance, patience-–these are foreign to us. Life is lived and experienced on the surface. We wallow in our ignorance and lack. We don’t recognize our restlessness for what it is—a sign that something is wrong, that we are on the wrong path.  We don’t dare try to do the real work of finding true peace. We don’t desire it because its methods and rewards are anything but instant. It requires too much of us and from us. It requires what seems to us as impossibly difficult. And so we choose and cling to our cheap thrills, with their instant rewards and dire consequences. 

This is how we like our rewards: if they fry our brains, chip away at our souls, and obliterate any chance for some real, lasting peace. We may never know what peace we are capable of experiencing; if only we would dare to consider the alternative to our restless seeking, to desire it, to quit our feverish chase of instant rewards. But we don’t try, we won’t try, we can’t try; it’s daunting. So we stick to what we know.  Because that is how we like our rewards.