I consider myself a fairly impatient person. Always have been. But then, I have never met anyone who told me they like waiting. Do you know anyone who likes waiting? I really don’t. And I feel the tolerance for waiting is diminishing more and more. It’s June and I’m already waiting for the first Christmas decorations to be sold in the supermarkets. I’m sure it won’t be long… The thing is, we’re hardly catching up with ourselves anymore.
INSTANT GRATIFICATION. The buzz word of our times. Amazon delivers within a day, we can binge-watch a myriad of series on Netflix and the next fuck is around the corner when we right-swipe on Tinder. It’s great, right? The companies have long understood that they cater to eternal 3-year-olds. Impulse control is totally overrated. If we want that cookie, we gotta have that cookie. NOW! And please… don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Also, instead of saying you are impatient, you might want to rephrase it and call yourself efficient. It sounds much better because it has that grown-up, economic ring to it. You just never want your input to exceed your output – and who wouldn’t understand that?

Thank God efficiency has conquered our love lives as well. Due to the arrival of Tinder (& Co.) you don’t need to go out anymore to actually connect with potential mates. And instead of sitting through the tedious process of gradually getting to know each other and establishing trust (boring!), you can dispense with the preliminaries and discuss sexual preferences right away. Or if you’re daring enough and the pictures are somewhat promising, you might even skip that and invite your temporary object of desire over to Netflix & chill. And even if the encounter doesn’t live up to your expectations, at least you know you have kept your financial and time-wise input at a minimum.
It’s also smart to hedge your dating options to secure instant gratification at all times. It needs some basic organizational skills, mind you, but it definitely pays off. Not everyone’s a quick-starter, and sometimes it does take 1 or 2 actual dates before the house party is going to take place. Or you might suddenly be left high and dry by one of your seemingly reliable contacts because they met someone else (read: better). Shit happens! So if you want to provide for these contingencies, you rather play the numbers game. And although some of you might counter that promiscuity had long existed before the arrival of dating apps, in terms of efficiency, selection and convenience there is simply no comparison. In short, Tinder made it possible to operate on the premise that when you’ve got an itch, you scratch it. Any place, any time. And we all know how good scratching can feel. At least for the moment. Uh-huh… But then the itching usually gets worse and you need to scratch harder. It’s what scientists call the itch-scratch cycle. Once you’re in there, it’s pretty hard to get out. You just can’t stop the stupid scratching.

I’m sure you’ve heard about the Marshmellow Test – an experiment on delayed gratification and self-control conducted by the psychologist and Stanford professor Walter Mischel in the 1960s. 4-year-old pre-school kids were led into a distraction-free room, were seated at a table and were presented with a marshmellow. They were told that they could either have this one marshmellow right now or – if they could withstand the temptation of eating it for 15 minutes- they would get a second one. Then they were left alone in this empty room with nothing but the marshmellow. It was fierce. I mean, most of us can’t even handle waiting at the bus stop for 5 minutes without fidgeting with our smartphones. And that’s not even a conflict situation. So, not surprisingly, not all of the kids managed to hold out for the second marshmellow and had eaten the first one before the researcher returned. Over the course of five decades, Mischel and his team did follow-up studies to examine how these children, then adolescents and later adults, were doing in their lives. And it turned out that those who were able to delay gratification proved more successful in whatever capacity they were measuring. They would perform better at school, land a better job, earn more money, enjoy a more vigorous health and lead happier lives with fewer negative outcomes.
The bottom line is that self-control and willpower, both of which is necessary to be able to resist a temptation, are clear success factors. This seems quite logical to me. The good news is that self-control is like a muscle that can be trained. And the more we’re able to use it, the less we are victims of our desires. It has a lot to do with growing up.

But the ability to delay gratification is not only about self-control and discipline. There’s also a more, I’d say, psychological dimension involved in that. According to A Course in Miracles, “those who are certain of the outcome can afford to wait, and wait without anxiety.“ That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? If you know you’ll eventually get the second marshmellow, it’s much easier to wait than if you’re unsure about it. The problem with waiting is – more often than not it implies a great deal of insecurity, which causes fear. And instant gratification is the solution if you don’t wanna feel this shit! Patience, on the other hand, requires trust. And who do you really trust? Do you trust yourself?

Now don’t get me wrong – this whole piece is not an ode to the good old days where everything was better. I am a fan of efficiency. And I think that in many aspects it has made life a lot easier and, yes, also better. But I do believe the growing inability to wait is getting pathological, and we are more and more caught up in an itch-scratch cycle. Of course we can keep scratching. But the itching is really just a symptom. Treating the cause of it might actually be the smarter and more sustainable option. Or you just wait it out. Most itching is only a temporary sensation and resolves on its own.