Measuring Wait

Nice essay on our collective addition to speed. The author says:

The fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough—or rewarded at all. When things move more slowly than we expect, our internal timer even plays tricks on us, stretching out the wait, summoning anger out of proportion to the delay.

Those of us who remember life in pre-internet, pre-cellular times can perhaps attest to the change they have undergone themselves. If you were a love-lorn teen back in the day, you waited for the mailman every afternoon and sifted feverishly through the mail to see if that very special person had replied to your last letter. 

The unit of time this kid was willing to wait to be gratified (or not) was a day. So they had the luxury of moping about the lack of a letter, wondering if the object of their interest had fallen out of love or if the mail was stuck somewhere in transit or perhaps their own letter had never reached the one they loved. So many possibilities, conjectures and to think about.

Today the unit of time is under thirty seconds maybe - if they don't get a response to their text message in that amount of time, they experience that entire slew of emotions in a few minutes instead of a day. Not only does that make being love-lorn a horribly stressful experience but it kills everything beautiful and poetic about it.