Is everybody getting more impatient?

My mom asked this same exact question, 40 years ago.

Yes. We have become spoiled. If an internet page doesn’t load in three seconds, people go to another link. I stand in front of the microwave and tap my foot, because it takes a WHOLE 90 seconds to heat up my food.

We use self checkout, so we don’t have to wait. We have on line banking, to save the horrible hassle of having to go through the bank drive through, as there might be a car in front of us.

All of this feeds into a feeling of entitlement. We are too special to have to be polite or kind or nice.

Dunno, I haven’t got time to anwser this…

@pezz I would say humour is hereditary, but it seems to have gone in reverse. You get your humour from me.

“Everybody” is not doing anything. Some people are ruder.

I don’t think people are getting more impatient as much as they are getting more things to be impatient about. While the actual amount of time we have to wait may have decreased, the desire for that time to be shorter is the same—and it’s in the desire that the impatience lies.

Like @johnpowell said: his mother asked this exact same question 40 years ago. Every generation thinks things were better in the past and that the youth are degenerating rapidly. There are several cognitive biases that help in the production of such impressions. Yet if they were accurate, civilization would have imploded ages ago.

In other words: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dunno, I wanted to be a doctor, but I ain’t got the patients.

@ucme I don’t get it.

I’m very sorry to hear it, but that’s for a different thread surely…...

@ucme I’m looking for love anywhere.

Well if patience and courtesy arent dead, they are for sure mortally wounded.

When I was a kid, I don’t care what you mail-ordered, it was going to take “6–8 weeks” for delivery. That was just a given. So you’d order it, and then you kind of knew that you had to just forget about it because 6–8 weeks was just an impossibly long period of time, especially for a kid. At some point in the distant future this thing would just show up on your doorstep, and it felt like a miracle, because you’d forgotten you’d even ordered it.

Now we never have to consign our longings to the purgatory of oblivion, because it’ll be there real soon, so our lust for the thing stays urgent and petulant. It’s kind of like how, when you _really need_to take a piss, but there’s absolutely no possibility of that happening for awhile, your bladder somehow comes to grips with that fact and stops bitching. But oh my God, when your within sprinting range of the urinal, it feels like you’ll never make it those last few feet.