Life today it seems to me moves at a faster pace each year. And our patience with others who are slower gets worse. Kindness with the disabled who get in our way and make us slow down is in shorter supply as life goes on.

In one of our stories on iNews Briefs today this impatience is even directed at the disabled. (See “Disabled persons vehicles in Cayman Islands need respect”)

In recent weeks Shari Smith, of Cayman Islands Sunrise Adult Training Centre an organisation that supports adults with disabilities, has said her bus drivers have had to deal with impatient road users when transporting her clients.

“…..when our buses are transporting our clients and dropping them off we’ve been having some not so pleasing responses from the public who have to wait,” she said.

Instead of showing one ounce of sympathy to disabled persons and thanking God they were not suffering from a similar disabling ailment they hoot their car horns and shout even obscenities at the bus drivers to hurry up and get out of their way.

And what do they do with their precious three or so minutes they have saved? Not a pennyworth of importance.

When I was taken into the Emergency Room last Friday ahead of the dozen persons who had been waiting, most I admit patiently, to be attended to, one person hammered on the nurse’s door demanding to know why I had jumped the queue.

The fact I was passing out and my whole system was closing down if I hadn’t been attended to immediately, escaped the person who had been able to sit down for ten or so minutes. I would have gladly swapped places with the person.

An excellent article by Patrick McAleenan in Metro UK asks the same question:

I WANT IT AND I WANT IT NOW! Why are we so impatient?

It wasn’t really that long ago that we had to deal with dial-up internet speeds. If you put someone on a 5Mbps connection now, they’ll make a hasty beeline to the router to see what’s broken, before posting a mini-breakdown online about their lack of instant access. Well, they will if they have any connection.

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned patience? If you have any of that most rare of virtues, then please, read on. It will only take a minute…

We don’t like to wait for anything anymore. With faster broadband, instant searches and immediate downloads, patience has become a dying institution. We can no longer take a breath and allow a break in our lives. There’s always something more important we need to have access to, rush to, watch and be part of. Why do we get so wound up if something doesn’t happen immediately for us and what kind of future are we creating for ourselves as a result?

Drew Benvie, founder of communications agency Battenhall, says there are positives to wanting everything immediately. It lets us complain quickly.

‘Social media has led us and our impatience to knock on the doors of brands – with whom we have grievances – that we would normally have been willing to wait in line to bring up in private,’ he said. ‘Now we tweet in public about a faulty product or an unpleasant experience and we expect brands to respond quickly.’

He highlighted the example of British Airways customer Hasan Syed, who complained about the airline’s service in a tweet last month. When he didn’t get an instant response from the company, he went one step further, paying for his tweet to be promoted. The resulting media coverage meant his tweet about BA’s ‘horrendous’ customer service was seen by millions.

We don’t expect to stand in a queue in the online world and this has filtered into our everyday reality. Being so reliant on ‘instant everything’ has affected how we treat one another.

Who hasn’t queued at a coffee shop and observed a customer berate a barista for serving them ‘too slowly’?

Impatience has given us a shorter fuse.

‘We live in a “whizzy whizzy bang bang” world where we expect instant gratification and our expectations have been moulded so as to be intolerant of delay,’ said Dr Sandi Mann, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Central Lancashire. ‘The customer is king – if there is a queue, we feel entitled to walk away angrily.

‘We are thus creating an angrier nation of people who are intolerant of any threat to our “want it now” society. All of which is making us more and more angry which we see in car rage, phone rage, trolley rage.’

Perhaps we should blame Google. Instant online searches have rendered mystery obsolete. There was a (recent) time when if you didn’t know something you went to a library and looked it up. The time now between not knowing and knowing is so brief that knowing feels like not knowing.

A by-product of this is the laziness of not having to remember key dates and facts, especially those that were world-changing and historically significant.

A report published this month revealed that growing numbers of adults did not know when the Berlin Wall came down (1989) or what year the September 11 attacks in the US took place (2001).

Many of those surveyed said there was simply no need to remember dates when they could look them up on the internet in a second.

As adults and parents, are we setting a bad example to children that true learning can be bypassed with the touch of a button?

Clinical psychologist and parenting expert, Dr Claire Halsey, believes the joy of learning will never disappear and that adults aren’t always to blame.

‘Children, of course, learn from observing adults operating in a fast paced style and showing their impatience,’ she said. ‘However, there is also a strong influence from television and games which engage children through rapid scene change and quick action which teach children to expect things to be at this speed.

‘It’s important to remember though that an expectation that things will happen almost instantly is also a feature of normal early childhood development, so we can’t lay all the blame with the media or adult behaviour.’

As adults, we get to make our own choices – what to eat, what to watch on TV, who to date and what to say. The old proverb states that ‘time waits for no man’, but these days it’s more a case of ‘man waits for nothing’.

Everything is faster, but is it better? The growth of fast food outlets has changed what we eat. The growth of speed dating and mobile phone apps such as Tinder and Grindr have changed the way we meet new people, pinpointing one another using GPS to transform our sex lives. Online piracy – of movies and TV shows – thrives on impatience. There has to be a better way, said Dr Mann.

‘We need to teach ourselves – and our kids – to be tolerant of delays and to use delayed time as extra time, rather than dead time.

For the original article go to: http://metro.co.uk/2013/10/22/i-want-it-and-i-want-it-now-why-are-we-so-impatient-4155143/

Yes indeed. Why, oh why are we so impatient?