"If you can wait and not be tired of waiting." According to Rudyard Kipling, that was part of being a man. My sense is we need to strike a balance between productivity, entertainment, and thinking. I'm not ready to "raw dog" a flight (a new trend of staring straight ahead for an entire airplane flight), but I do consciously try to put down my phone sometimes when I am on the train or waiting for something to stay within my thoughts versus always trying to make sure I am entertained. My unscientific view is that our brain goes to mush if it constantly requires entertainment versus thinking for itself or gets worn out if it is always being productive.
Patience, along with Assertiveness, Introverted or Extroverted and Attention to Detail can be easily measured by testing. The results of these test measure the values from very low to very high along an axis that typically fills in to be a bell curve for the population tested.
A couple of examples where patience or lack of it become important. Bookkeepers for example will do better if they are impatient (work fast) with high attention to detail (accurate). A person with a lot of patience and low attention to detail produces slow and sloppy work. Pilots for another example, perform better with moderate levels of patience, high attention to detail and moderate levels of extrovertedness. This results in a pilot who acts promptly in an emergency, does the right thing and communicates well with the rest of the crew.
Patience in itself is not a particularly great virtue in relationships or the workplace.
I find myself somewhere in the middle on this. I can be extremely impatient, but I also can go for quite sometime without "external stimulation" to entertain me.
Regarding Disney, I kind of hated it. My family had a 3-day pass and the experience was so marginally fun and even the kids were unimpressed compared to Busch Gardens, so we didn't go back after the first day (we live about 80 minutes from Disney World). Here's the thing: I hate waiting in lines, but I especially hate waiting in lines for something that doesn't provide much satisfaction and/or extra value at the end. That was Disney, from the line to get into the parking lot to almost every single ride, not to mention paying exorbitant prices for whatever mediocrity (food, ride, etc.) was at the end of each line.
The same goes for restaurants, especially "hip" places that serve pretty much the same food you can get at a dozen other places within a 15 minute drive. As I've told my kids many times, I'm not going to wait in the Florida heat to eat eggs. I also used to scoff at the idiots (my apologies if I offend) who wait for hours to see a movie on opening night when the next weekend there will be no wait at all. And what about the absolute f***wits who used to camp all night outside the AT&T store to be "first" to buy a new model of iPhone when they could just order it online and have it a few days later? (Does this still happen?)
On the other hand, I'm one of the few people, even among Gen-X'ers like myself, who isn't wearing some sort of headphones and carting their phone around at the gym. (As an aside, some of those people spend way too much time looking at their phones between sets when other people - impatient me, for example - are waiting to use the f'ing equipment. You wanna scroll Tinder, Bucko, go sit in your car.) And as a runner, I never run with headphones, even when I was doing 3-hour+ marathon training runs, preferring to concentrate on my run or just enjoy the scenery.
And if I'm in the mountains or somewhere out in nature, I can go hours without needing electronic stimulation.
All of that said, I find myself increasingly addicted to the constant barrage of stimulation. When I watch sports, especially football, on TV, I'm often bored and end up turning off the volume and watching Netflix on my iPad. Of course, (here I go on another tangent) that could be because the rule changes have made the sport I obsessed over as a kid nearly unwatchable. (I thought the NFL had gotten bad until I tried to watch an entire college game this weekend outside of a bar setting. That was almost painful. But somehow both college and pro football seem to be as popular as ever.)
One more thing, people should be able to get information about a place of business from a business's employees because that's part of their f'ing jobs. If I want to know what the store's hours are, I shouldn't have to get out my phone and Google it. That Nick Bilton seems like an insufferable douchebag and a phenomenal prick. His mother is lucky that she doesn't have to talk to him except via X. What a POS.
I haven’t read the book yet—but my first thought is I hope she references traditional Jewish thought regarding waiting for the Messiah. We say as part of the Ani Maamin statement of what we believe - that we believe in the coming of the Messiah. And even though he tarries, in spite of everything , we still wait. As a friend one quipped- one of the greatest understatements of all time ! In Yiddish we say Have patience!
These important considerations have also a deep impact on our democracies. As a result of impatience, people tend to prefer immediate rewards to future benefits. It often implies poor political and economical choices. In the communication activity, it is also dedeeply detrimental. All arguments must be very short and thus oversimplified, which result in dualistic attitudes, good versus bad, true versus false etc. But reality is so much more complex.....Therefore it means that our relationship to reality is often twisted and distorted.
We have become a society accustomed to instant gratification. For me the perfect illustration of this is the fact that almost NO expectant parents wait until a child's birth to find out the sex of the baby. What better surprise in the whole world than hearing at the moment of birth "it's a boy" or "it's a girl". Pure joy for us each of the five times my husband and I heard it.
Spot on. I try to remind my adult children the many benefits of being forced to wait. My #1 example amidst the annoying reality for those whose early teenage years were pre-mobile phone, the dreaded exercise of waiting for someone (i.e. their parent) to pick them up. Such an instance in my own high school life ultimately resulted in my three kids' existence. Waiting after tennis practice for mom's late pickup resulted in meeting my lovely wife (who was similarly waiting after swimming practice for her own). Count serendipity as another victim of this lost art.
I was frequently the last or one of the last kids picked up after practice. It certainly taught patience. Now, at my daughter's HS anyway, the coaches aren't allowed to leave until all of the students have left/been picked up. Her freshman year, I got off to a bad start with her cross-country coach because I told my daughter she needed to wait 30 minutes because I was in the middle of something at work.
An excellent piece. And I entirely agree with the argument propounded therein, because I've noted in my own fine self a tendency towards impatience because something doesn't happen as fast as a purchase and delivery from Amazon. I often catch myself in those moments and chastise myself for such irrational thinking, but it doesn't stop me from feeling those same emotions the next time I feel inconvenienced, so to speak. So for now, I simply try to be aware of those times, because repeated awareness is the beginning of change.
I grew up in a village in 1970s Ireland where the phone system wasn't yet gone automatic. So to make a call to Dublin required first calling your local post office - the only number your home phone connected to. (This meant we had a rotary dial phone with no rotary dial, just a crank handle that essentially summoned a butler in the post office.) Then you would tell your neighbour Mrs. X (if she wasn't busy eating dinner) the number you were trying to connect to. Then Mrs. X would repeat the process with Mrs. Y in a town thirty miles away, who would then repeat the process with some other operator until finally, after about twenty minutes of people manually plugging jacks into (hopefully the correct) sockets across the nation, a person on the west coast of Ireland could speak to someone on the east coast. (And Ireland is about the width of the average US state.)
So I think you can imagine that if you had described the Internet to the kid who made those phone calls, and then added that people who had access to this marvel would complain about its speed, that kid would have assumed you were describing both science fiction and satire.
Pascal was obviously right that all humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit alone in a room, without a device. Now worse than ever. What hath Jobs wrought?
Books, magazines, newspapers, crossword puzzles. The mid-20th Century had its own ways of filling idle moments--and, of course, of dulling the pain (cigarettes, coffee, radio, TV). The world hasn't changed that much.
"If you can wait and not be tired of waiting." According to Rudyard Kipling, that was part of being a man. My sense is we need to strike a balance between productivity, entertainment, and thinking. I'm not ready to "raw dog" a flight (a new trend of staring straight ahead for an entire airplane flight), but I do consciously try to put down my phone sometimes when I am on the train or waiting for something to stay within my thoughts versus always trying to make sure I am entertained. My unscientific view is that our brain goes to mush if it constantly requires entertainment versus thinking for itself or gets worn out if it is always being productive.
Patience, along with Assertiveness, Introverted or Extroverted and Attention to Detail can be easily measured by testing. The results of these test measure the values from very low to very high along an axis that typically fills in to be a bell curve for the population tested.
A couple of examples where patience or lack of it become important. Bookkeepers for example will do better if they are impatient (work fast) with high attention to detail (accurate). A person with a lot of patience and low attention to detail produces slow and sloppy work. Pilots for another example, perform better with moderate levels of patience, high attention to detail and moderate levels of extrovertedness. This results in a pilot who acts promptly in an emergency, does the right thing and communicates well with the rest of the crew.
Patience in itself is not a particularly great virtue in relationships or the workplace.
I find myself somewhere in the middle on this. I can be extremely impatient, but I also can go for quite sometime without "external stimulation" to entertain me.
Regarding Disney, I kind of hated it. My family had a 3-day pass and the experience was so marginally fun and even the kids were unimpressed compared to Busch Gardens, so we didn't go back after the first day (we live about 80 minutes from Disney World). Here's the thing: I hate waiting in lines, but I especially hate waiting in lines for something that doesn't provide much satisfaction and/or extra value at the end. That was Disney, from the line to get into the parking lot to almost every single ride, not to mention paying exorbitant prices for whatever mediocrity (food, ride, etc.) was at the end of each line.
The same goes for restaurants, especially "hip" places that serve pretty much the same food you can get at a dozen other places within a 15 minute drive. As I've told my kids many times, I'm not going to wait in the Florida heat to eat eggs. I also used to scoff at the idiots (my apologies if I offend) who wait for hours to see a movie on opening night when the next weekend there will be no wait at all. And what about the absolute f***wits who used to camp all night outside the AT&T store to be "first" to buy a new model of iPhone when they could just order it online and have it a few days later? (Does this still happen?)
On the other hand, I'm one of the few people, even among Gen-X'ers like myself, who isn't wearing some sort of headphones and carting their phone around at the gym. (As an aside, some of those people spend way too much time looking at their phones between sets when other people - impatient me, for example - are waiting to use the f'ing equipment. You wanna scroll Tinder, Bucko, go sit in your car.) And as a runner, I never run with headphones, even when I was doing 3-hour+ marathon training runs, preferring to concentrate on my run or just enjoy the scenery.
And if I'm in the mountains or somewhere out in nature, I can go hours without needing electronic stimulation.
All of that said, I find myself increasingly addicted to the constant barrage of stimulation. When I watch sports, especially football, on TV, I'm often bored and end up turning off the volume and watching Netflix on my iPad. Of course, (here I go on another tangent) that could be because the rule changes have made the sport I obsessed over as a kid nearly unwatchable. (I thought the NFL had gotten bad until I tried to watch an entire college game this weekend outside of a bar setting. That was almost painful. But somehow both college and pro football seem to be as popular as ever.)
One more thing, people should be able to get information about a place of business from a business's employees because that's part of their f'ing jobs. If I want to know what the store's hours are, I shouldn't have to get out my phone and Google it. That Nick Bilton seems like an insufferable douchebag and a phenomenal prick. His mother is lucky that she doesn't have to talk to him except via X. What a POS.
I haven’t read the book yet—but my first thought is I hope she references traditional Jewish thought regarding waiting for the Messiah. We say as part of the Ani Maamin statement of what we believe - that we believe in the coming of the Messiah. And even though he tarries, in spite of everything , we still wait. As a friend one quipped- one of the greatest understatements of all time ! In Yiddish we say Have patience!
These important considerations have also a deep impact on our democracies. As a result of impatience, people tend to prefer immediate rewards to future benefits. It often implies poor political and economical choices. In the communication activity, it is also dedeeply detrimental. All arguments must be very short and thus oversimplified, which result in dualistic attitudes, good versus bad, true versus false etc. But reality is so much more complex.....Therefore it means that our relationship to reality is often twisted and distorted.
another great, thoughtful, article from the best publication out there.
We have become a society accustomed to instant gratification. For me the perfect illustration of this is the fact that almost NO expectant parents wait until a child's birth to find out the sex of the baby. What better surprise in the whole world than hearing at the moment of birth "it's a boy" or "it's a girl". Pure joy for us each of the five times my husband and I heard it.
Spot on. I try to remind my adult children the many benefits of being forced to wait. My #1 example amidst the annoying reality for those whose early teenage years were pre-mobile phone, the dreaded exercise of waiting for someone (i.e. their parent) to pick them up. Such an instance in my own high school life ultimately resulted in my three kids' existence. Waiting after tennis practice for mom's late pickup resulted in meeting my lovely wife (who was similarly waiting after swimming practice for her own). Count serendipity as another victim of this lost art.
I was frequently the last or one of the last kids picked up after practice. It certainly taught patience. Now, at my daughter's HS anyway, the coaches aren't allowed to leave until all of the students have left/been picked up. Her freshman year, I got off to a bad start with her cross-country coach because I told my daughter she needed to wait 30 minutes because I was in the middle of something at work.
An excellent piece. And I entirely agree with the argument propounded therein, because I've noted in my own fine self a tendency towards impatience because something doesn't happen as fast as a purchase and delivery from Amazon. I often catch myself in those moments and chastise myself for such irrational thinking, but it doesn't stop me from feeling those same emotions the next time I feel inconvenienced, so to speak. So for now, I simply try to be aware of those times, because repeated awareness is the beginning of change.
TL;DR.
(Kidding) :-)
Waiting? Please don't tell me about waiting.
I grew up in a village in 1970s Ireland where the phone system wasn't yet gone automatic. So to make a call to Dublin required first calling your local post office - the only number your home phone connected to. (This meant we had a rotary dial phone with no rotary dial, just a crank handle that essentially summoned a butler in the post office.) Then you would tell your neighbour Mrs. X (if she wasn't busy eating dinner) the number you were trying to connect to. Then Mrs. X would repeat the process with Mrs. Y in a town thirty miles away, who would then repeat the process with some other operator until finally, after about twenty minutes of people manually plugging jacks into (hopefully the correct) sockets across the nation, a person on the west coast of Ireland could speak to someone on the east coast. (And Ireland is about the width of the average US state.)
So I think you can imagine that if you had described the Internet to the kid who made those phone calls, and then added that people who had access to this marvel would complain about its speed, that kid would have assumed you were describing both science fiction and satire.
There is a painful difference between patient anticipation and waiting. Just as there is a painful difference between solitude and loneliness
A great thing to read on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Thanks for this, it was excellent.
I'm reseeding my lawn and I needed this right now 😅🙏
Pascal was obviously right that all humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit alone in a room, without a device. Now worse than ever. What hath Jobs wrought?
Books, magazines, newspapers, crossword puzzles. The mid-20th Century had its own ways of filling idle moments--and, of course, of dulling the pain (cigarettes, coffee, radio, TV). The world hasn't changed that much.