As I start this essay, the maintenance people are an hour late. The motor on my AC broke down and we’re in the middle of a heat wave and I’m in the middle of losing my mind because the maintenance people are an hour late. I really needed to get out of the house tonight.

Do you know that marshmallow test? Kid in an empty room–if they eat the marshmallow nothing happens, if they wait a couple minutes they get a second marshmallow. Results show that the kids who waited went on to become more successful in life. 

The way they conducted the experiment in our class was a lot less indicative of success. They explained the experiment, told us what each outcome meant, THEN asked us what we would do. The choices boiled down to “Successful” or “Not Successful”.

I like to think I’m not in the same boat. One study saw that Gen-Z’s attention span is 8 seconds compared to the Millennial’s 12. Another saw that our instant-gratification environment has reinforced impatience. But why is waiting such a pain in the ass for us? 

Getting the obvious out of the way, the immediacy in technology played a major role in our attention span being cut almost in half. Short-form video content is a true brain destroyer–if we don’t like what we see in 0.5 seconds, we move on. 

There’s also the speed at which the novelty is presented to us. My millennial friends have no trouble waiting. In any situation they’ll follow-up once then trust in God that their food will be served, service be rendered, X be Y’ed. Of course they can wait–during the early years of the internet every page took two human minutes to load. Unfortunately, everything is at our fingertips, all the time, instantly. 

Factor in societal pressure (some parts real, some parts imaginary) and waiting for things to happen becomes a drag. Because we’re exposed to everyone’s lives, a shadow hangs over our heads that tells us to make something of ourselves as early as now. 

Patience is, and always will be, a virtue. There’s a great deal of peace that comes from knowing things will come in due time, and I could never argue otherwise.

But patience and impatience aren’t mutually exclusive, and are both necessary.

Yes, there is merit to waiting for things to happen. But sometimes moving forward is an imperative, which sometimes that requires a moment of “okay, what the fuck is taking so long?”. Ergo, impatience. 

Life is often analogized to a marathon, but really it’s more like a hamster wheel with incentives at every checkpoint. You’ll get to a comfortable spot eventually, but there are real merits to getting there fast, and we can’t ignore that. Sometimes, you have to get your foot in the door and pry things open. 

After all, what are we entitled to in this life, except for our own time? We’re only given so many minutes on this Earth. If you don’t give things a nudge, they might never move. So be impatient, responsibly.

After another hour and several follow-up calls, the AC guys arrived. The calls may not have amounted to anything, but I felt like I was moving and that’s not nothing. It was like waiting in line for the elevator. Sometimes you need to walk up 20 flights of stairs just to feel like you’re going somewhere, even if it takes more energy.