What happened to ‘Patience’?
Between liking your friend's post on Facebook, updating your Twitter status, playing Angry Birds, e-mailing, commenting on a Watt pad story, and judging your friend's latest "Draw Something" creation, I’m guessing you don't have a whole lot of time to wait for a webpage to load. In fact, I’m guessing you have almost NO time for a webpage to load. Right? Turns out, that’s true: 1 in every 4 person will abandon a web page that takes more than just 4 seconds to load. In other words, technology is making us obsessed with speed and unwilling to wait for anything that isn't extremely fast.
Technology is advancing at extraordinary rates. We have gone from the first computer which consumed an entire room to one that can be carried in our palms. Fast computers have become faster, phones have become fax machines, and what more? Even Australian shopping malls are now at our fingertips. And all of these changes have occurred in only a few short decades. Today’s world is faster than ever, thanks to technology. But does this mean that we are more impatient than ever as a result? We refer to technology as "progress", and in a sense it is. But at what cost? How many times have we gotten upset when a bus or a plane has been late? How about when the copier jams and sets us back four or five minutes? When the computer shuts down while we are doing our work and it hasn’t been saved? We have become more and more impatient with each movement "forward" with technology.
We’re in the Age of Impatience. We’re addicted to technology and instant gratification. We want more information quicker and in fewer words. We obviously find it easier to catch up with 100 friends on Facebook than to spend time with just one. We: eat fast food, use the self-checkout lines in grocery stores, try the "one weekend" diet, honk when the traffic light turns red, speak in half sentences, start things but never finish them, cut corners, take shortcuts and most importantly…we text.
We have also become impatient with..... Impatience. We run out of patience with impatient people.
As our culture now encourages us to move quickly from one place to the next, one image to the next, one "news" item to the next, one Sunday of football to the next, and one train to the next, we find that not only is our virtue of patience deteriorating but our attention spans are also withering. We find it very hard to focus on one topic for a long time and begin losing concentration on any talk or lesson that is longer than 30-45 minutes. Not waiting is causing us to make bad decisions and to be less focused; less focused at school, at work and at almost everything else we do on a day to day basis.
