I can’t precisely recall why but the other day I read the entire Wikipedia article on the late Canadian actor John Candy. Maybe I caught a glimpse of him in Home Alone playing on TV since it’s Christmas time and all. After all, his performance is one of the highlights of the movie outside of Joe Pesci being hilariously tortured. Nevertheless, the article I waded through contained all kinds of interesting trivia: his date of birth, his complete filmography, a summary of his life and relationship to Wayne Gretzky. After finishing reading the article I was suddenly hit by a minor epiphany.

See, I remember a time long ago when Google was just a pair of nonsense syllables and information wasn’t as easily accessed. Back in those days, children, the most popular search engine was the person standing behind the counter at a place called the library. And unlike Google, when you presented your query to this person it could take up to minutes to finally access the information you sought, provided the library had the physical information in the first place. And then you would have to go to a shelf and leaf through a publication trying to find the one thing you needed to know, to which the answer could already be outdated and useless by the time you found it. And to preserve ink the information could have been compressed into two measly sentences. It was like going to find information on noteworthy Canadian actors, waiting for twenty minutes and being awarded with the fact that Mike Myers’ favorite fruit is pear.

I know that this sounds like the grumblings of an old man who had chase the neighborhood kids off his lawn for the third time that day, but honestly this revelation is part of a bigger picture. Bear with me.

There are some people who, for who knows why, take a 13-hour straight flight to Surabaya or wherever and then proceed to bitch and moan about the onboard WiFi being slow. First off, Your Digital Highness, you are essentially in a metal can speeding hundreds of kilometers per hour through the air being carried to your holiday destination, which, by the way, a few hundred years ago took a year, a sturdy galleon and a few dozen scurvy-ridden sailors to reach. Second, you are literally thousands of meters above the ground able to instantly communicate with anyone on the planet who can figure out setting up an email account, and you’re disappointed that Facebook can’t load a cat video in under two minutes. The onboard WiFi is practically the culmination of our greatest technological achievements as a civilization: feasible international travel and global wireless communication. And people are so jaded to having it that this realization flies straight past them, pun intended.

So there I was, staring at the Wikipedia article on John Candy. Would I have read it if reading it meant a bus ride downtown and sitting down in front of a book? Probably not. Did I even need that information in the first place? No, and that is why this is such a big deal to me. I didn’t need to know all the turning points of John Candy’s life, but there it was, accessed by a click of a mouse. It was so easy to acquire that I might as well have read it, and so I did without thinking twice. How convenient is my life that if I actually needed to know something, I just could?

Life nowadays is full of little things that we take for granted. The onboard WiFi is not something that is vital to your mundane travel experience but some still complain about it despite everything involved being literally magic to people generations ago. Not enough people appreciate the niceties of today’s society and how much more convenient our lives are because of them. Next time I’m about to express my jadedness towards these things, I will just think of John Candy instead. Rest in peace, you beautiful man.