Convenience Is Making Us Worse at Waiting

We built a world that is very good at removing friction. Food shows up at the door. Movies start instantly. Packages move across the country in a day or two. Songs, answers, rides, or recommendations are a few taps away at all times. We save time, reduce our effort, and make life smoother every day. However we have noticed the easier it becomes to get what we want right now, the worse we become at waiting.

Waiting used to be very common in life. We waited for a show to come on. We waited for a letter, a grade, a response. The delay was annoying, but it forced patience into the structure of life. Now that a lot of waiting has been removed, when we do have to wait, it feels much worse than it used to. The Internet took minutes to load apps, now a five-second page load feels broken. A delayed text starts to feel personal.  A video buffering for a moment feels like an interruption rather than a normal limitation of physics. The speed of things now has reset our baseline for how life feels.

If food can arrive in twenty minutes, then cooking feels slow. If a show can be binged in one sitting, then weekly episodes feel inconvenient. If AI can generate a summary in seconds, then reading can start to feel inefficient. However some nuanced parts of life are slow, and us speeding up is hurting us. Trust is slow. Getting in shape is slow. Learning a skill is slow. Building a company is slow. Our systems train us to expect result immediacy, while the things that are related to personal life require repetition, uncertainty, and time.

It feels like everyone wants to make progress faster. Being for better bodies, career progress, getting answers faster. We want the answer before the question has even fully formed. And I see proof for this as there are so many ads in social media that cater to that desire to advance in life faster. Not only are we overstimulated by short form content, we are losing our tolerance for delay.

What I have learned recently, with everything going on in the world, I need to build patience by living through the pause without immediately trying to kill it, by sitting in the uncertainty a little longer, by letting things take the time they take. Just spend time with myself to think through what is going on, and make more long term plans. I do not think convenience is making us lazy. I think it is making us less practiced at waiting for things. So when we don’t see immediate results we get frustrated and give up rather than having the patience to see the result of our work.

I enjoy writing these reflection pieces very much. Read my related blog I recently wrote about potential and its pressure. That led to me realizing waiting is a thing that is hurting me in realizing potential and living with it.