The case for the instant message
People love to criticise anything “instant.” Instant gratification. Instant messaging. Instant reactions.
As if speed automatically cheapens meaning. As if slowness, difficulty, and suffering are the only valid currencies of life.
It’s a strange bias: the idea that anything real must take time, must be earned through effort or pain. But that’s not how humans work. Some truths arrive fully formed, without ceremony. An instinct is an instinct. A thought of someone is a thought of someone. You don’t schedule it, you don’t manufacture it — it just hits.
And that’s why I still think an instant message has a kind of purity. Not the spammy dopamine-hit people complain about, but a real-time pulse of consciousness: you appeared in my mind, and I didn’t pretend you didn’t.
There’s no performance in that. You can’t fake the timing of a genuine impulse.
This is exactly why I still love being alive on this planet — because humans are, at their core, creatures of immediacy. We respond. We feel. We notice each other in the cracks between tasks. That immediacy isn’t a flaw. It’s the part that can’t be replicated or delayed.
Elon dreams of exporting life to Mars. I respect him for having the audacity — and the machinery — to try. Rockets are one way to build the future.
My method is quieter, but it’s the same impulse: to build evidence that this world is worth staying for.
Not through colonies, but through words. Not through escape velocity, but through the small, instant, unfiltered signals between two people.
Maybe the world underrates that. I don’t.