When I was a teenager, I read an article on Cracked.com about how time speeds up as you get older. The basic premise is this: your brain is better at encoding memories of new experiences into your mind than old experiences. In practice, this means that if you spend your week in a standard routine, working a job that you know well, that time will appear to have flown by when reflecting on it in retrospect. Conversely, if you spend the weekend experiencing new things, seeing new places, and basically feeding new data into your brain, those experiences will seem to have lasted much longer in your memory than the week at work. As we grow older, and the list of New Things to Try grows shorter, the opportunity for these stronger, more novel memories to become hard coded into your brain begins to shrink. At a certain point, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a kiss, or a meal, or a night-out on the town – your brain sees it the same way: repeated data. And so, it’s forgotten, and then New Years comes around again and you find yourself thinking: what did I do this year? 365 days. 8760 hours. 525600 minutes. How many of those minutes do you remember? How many can you account for?

The systematic deletion of apparently irrelevant memories is quite a strange thing for me to grasp. Sure, I understand it from a technical and practical perspective. I get why you can’t just keep every memory, of every day, forever. Realistically, I can’t argue with the fact that not every memory is precious, and indeed that some things are better left forgotten. But I do find it strange sometimes. Can you remember the details of an average day spent with your first romantic partner? Not an argument, or a first date, but an average day. Do you remember what you would talk about, between the sex and the disagreements? I can’t. But I do remember exactly where I was when I watched the announcement trailer for Grand Theft Auto V. I remember how it felt to watch the baseball scene in Twilight for the first time. I remember how hyped I was when Play.com shipped my pre-ordered copy of Gears of War 3 a day early and I got to brag about it to my friends. The genetic coding that decides this hierarchy within our memories is intricate and unchangeable, and I’m not sure if I’m even saying that I would want to change it, but, I do worry that the information we feed into the sorting machine of our mind could be getting worse.

I mentioned Play.com and pre-orders on purpose. A couple of months ago I was at my nephew’s birthday party, speaking to someone about Amazon. It was part of a larger discussion about jobs, the high-street, and money (this was a one-year-old’s birthday party and I was drinking a hot chocolate instead of a rum and coke so you’ll have to excuse the rather dry conversation). After the obligatory acknowledgements regarding how Amazon has absolutely murdered local shopping, as well as some of their employees, our friend mentioned that soon they will be able to offer shipping that brings ordered goods to your doorstep within an hour. I asked him whether he thinks that’s a good thing or not, and his reaction was that of someone who had just been asked whether or not he likes breathing. Of course it’s a good thing. How could it not be a good thing? Sometimes you want something, and you want it right now. How could the convenience of delivering on that desire ever be a bad thing? In the moment, I didn’t really have a good answer to those questions. Admittedly, I conceded, there have been many times in my life where such quick delivery would have been extremely helpful. Anyway, conversation moved on, I eventually found a glass, and eventually I filled that glass with wine, and a good time was had by all. But in the following days, I couldn’t get the Amazon conversation out of my head.

Whenever you ask people what superpower they would have if they could choose only one, the conversation invariably cycles through the pros and cons of the same handful of options. Immortality rocks for like three hundred years, but eventually the same issues with time and memory that I mentioned earlier would start to ruin your brain, and eventually you would probably just be left losing your mind on the empty husk of Earth, drifting through space, waiting for God to call it a day. Flying is cool but you really need to have a few extra powers thrown in there to make it worthwhile, i.e. super-bugscan’tsplatteronyourface and super-can’tbetargetedbyguidedmissiles. Invisibility is probably a more sensible pick, but it’s always wise to be wary of the creeps and pervs who choose it. Super strength is boring and essentially useless in a world where you can be banned from competitive sports for having the wrong level of hormones. Mind-reading is asking for trouble and reduces your experience as a human to that of trial and error in making people like you. So you see it’s slim pickings. Eventually in a conversation like this, someone will bring up teleportation. Everyone will agree that it’s a pretty solid choice. Then someone will maybe mention that it’s actually feasible that scientists will be able to invent a teleporter at some point in the future. And then someone will probably mention that the teleporters from Star-Trek were technically killing everyone who entered them and reproducing perfect copies of their bodies over and over again. It’s a compelling subject, and it’s easy to see why.

Everyone loves a holiday. A universal truth, countered only by some of the dullest people alive. During my average week at work, there is no daydream more common for me than that of being in a different country, no spreadsheets to be seen, an ice-cold beer perched atop a book I keep meaning to open. It is sometimes genuinely upsetting to think about. And yes, I am in the fortunate position where a lot of flights, to a lot of beautiful places, are absolutely affordable to me. But wouldn’t it be so much easier if I could teleport there instead? In the blink of an eye, trading a rainy office block in Nottingham for a sunny beach in the Maldives. Wouldn’t that be so much more convenient? Perhaps not.

When we refer to the act of traversing the globe, of visiting the many wonders, natural and manmade, that every continent and every nation has to offer, we refer to it is as travelling. This is no mistake. We could call it sight-seeing, or city-spotting, but we calling it travelling. This is due to the significance that is lent to a trip by the very act of movement, and of the time which elapses during that movement. Many people hate flying, or getting the train, or riding the bus, but an inarguably important part of the joy of being somewhere else is Being Somewhere Else, and nothing really brings home the feeling of Being Somewhere Else quite like that first moment of stepping out of a train station in a new city, or climbing down the airplane steps in a new country, the humidity striking you, your breathing adjusting to the atmosphere like you’ve landed on an unfamiliar planet. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no nobility in the act of sitting still for six hours while someone else flies a plane across the ocean, but there is something magical about the fact that you have moved, through time and space, to somewhere far from familiarity, far from home. In many ways, it can be seen as a leap into the unknown, and not one that can be immediately reversed.

If you were given access to a teleporter, a small handheld device that could zap you into existence anywhere on the globe at a moment’s notice, where would you go first? I’m going to fill this sentence with words so that you have a moment to think without me giving you any ideas, and now I’m going to guess what first jumped into your mind: Egypt, New York, Paris, Venice. If it was any of these, you owe me a pint, and then a second pint.

Once you’ve ran through the big ones, where would you go next? Somewhere from your childhood perhaps. An old school. An old job. Somewhere with sentimental value to you, maybe even somewhere that you literally aren’t able to visit anymore outside of this device – perhaps the house you grew up in, now inhabited by strangers. With the power of instant travel, nowhere is off limits, and any thought, any idle curiosity that floats through your mind, can be immediately satisfied. One click, and you’re there. Now you know what the Mona Lisa looks like up close. And now you know that they don’t actually keep the aliens at Area-51. And you know exactly how windy it is at the top of the Burj Khalifa. All these experiences, things that would usually define a weekend, or a week, or a lifetime in your memory, reduced to the idle play of one hour in a teleporter. That magic of travel, and the achievement of movement, it no longer exists to someone who never even needs to walk to the shops, never mind get a bus to a national park. Now imagine if we all had that option available to us. If everyone on Earth held a teleporter in their hand. In that world, what does home mean? In a universe where anyone can be anywhere at any time, and where everyone can have the same experiences at a moment’s notice, what does it mean to meet someone? To speak to someone? Dating is difficult enough when hundreds of alternatives are one swipe away, but what happens when you app-ify real life, and switching between Asia and America is as easy as switching from Instagram to Twitter? When the planet is shrunk to the size of a phone screen, and the meaning of the word ‘place’ is forgotten, what happens to time?

When I think now about the idea of Amazon, and of one hour shipping, and the inevitable push beyond that for thirty-minute shipping, and the inevitable push beyond that for ten-minute shipping, I think of the following quote from author Kurt Vonnegut, speaking about his wife’s response to him going out to buy an envelope:

Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope, because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know.

Things are constantly getting faster. We used to read books, but then TV came out and that was quicker so we started watching that instead. Then YouTube came out, and that was quicker so the younger generation started watching that instead. Then TikTok came out, and that was quicker than YouTube so again the younger generation started watching that instead. It’s not a unique observation to notice that gratification is getting faster at every turn – every week I have conversations with friends and colleagues who have noticed their attention span declining as they consume shorter and shorter content, their thumbs at this point highly trained in the act of swiping away something that doesn’t immediately grab them. But my concern is what will happen to our memories during this period? Will the memories of my twenties begin to blur faster as I feel myself swallowed by my phone? Will I still remember the funniest TikTok I saw this year in 2030? I don’t even remember the funniest one I saw today, hours before writing this.

There used to be a time when you would order something off of the internet and the window for delivery that they’d provide would be five to seven days. In that time, anticipation would build, and you’d grow genuinely excited. Then if your item arrived in four days, it felt like you had been touched by God – the sky seeming more blue, the Sun feeling more warm.

Such is the inconsistent magic of inconvenience.

We won’t know what we’re missing once it’s gone.