Losing our Patience

One value that my wonderful Mother spent years instilling into me as a youngster was patience.  Being patient and waiting for things to happen, not rushing and not wishing your life away.

Anyone who knows me knows that I do not have very much patience. This is one thing that I have been working on, but it is tough to do.

pa·tient \ˈpā-shənt\ - adjective :

able to remain calm and not become annoyed when waiting for a long time or when dealing with problems or difficult people.

I also heard that good doctors have a lot of patience.

Looking at how life has changed in the past 2 decades that I have seen, there is a huge shift in the patience that people have in general.

I remember in 3rd grade writing to a pen pal in a neighboring school district.  Waiting weeks to hear back.  And in college, writing letters to friends and family to let them know how things were going.

When is the last time you wrote a hand written note to someone and mailed it?  I actually wrote one to my friend Lily when I sent her a gift back in January.

Why would you use traditional mail when there are lots of other forms of near instant communication such as: e-mail, SMS texting, viber, cell phones, Facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat and I am sure there are plenty more new things up and coming in the next few years.  I have had friends who send me an e-mail about something.  When I did not respond immediately they decided use another form of (seemingly more instant) communication such as text messaging to alert me that they had sent me an e-mail.  Annoyed, I go to check my email and it is something quite insignificant that could have waited a few hours, or even days, and not affected anything or been critical.

I am curious, how many times in the past week have you sent someone a text and then stare at your phone for 5, 10, 15, or even 30 minutes waiting for them to text back.  I hate to admit it, but I have done this idiotic behavior in the past week.  It is something I need to work on.

And the younger folks, they have even less patience.  As I work with the young 20 somethings out of college, they may only be a decade behind me but they have so much less patience that even I posses.  And then looking further into the new crop of teenagers, it seems as if they have even less patience.  It is hard to know for sure because teens tend to be less patient in general, but the kids and their now generation of instant photos on their iPods, smartphones, tablets, etc. it is hard to see that the trend of less patience is going to continue to get worse.