We have less patience today than ever before, as a collective society, so we’ll do all of us a favor and make it quick . . . ’cause we’re impatient. (Obvi!)
For real though, this is 0% surprising.
According new a new survey, we have less patience today than ever before and 75% of us blame modern technology for ruining our ability to wait for AN . . . Y . . . THING.
Here are the scenarios and time is takes (on average) for a loss of patience:
- Waiting for a website to load . . . 16 seconds until we start to lose it.
- Waiting for a movie or TV to start streaming . . . 22 seconds.
- Waiting for a traffic light to change . . . 25 seconds.
- Waiting for a line to start moving . . . 30 seconds.
- Waiting to get a drink at a bar . . . seven minutes.
- Waiting for a completely dead phone to turn on once you plug it in . . . 11 minutes.
- Waiting for our luggage to show up after a flight . . . 13 minutes.
- Waiting for food to arrive at a restaurant . . . 14 minutes.
- Waiting for someone to respond to an important email . . . 90 minutes.
- Waiting for a refund for something we returned online . . . four days.
It’s amazing how long we tolerated waiting to get on the internet when dial up and AOL first became a thing. I mean, first we had to wait for someone to get off the phone . . . then we had to wait through all those annoying sounds . . . and sometimes it wouldn’t connect right away and you would have to hit cancel and restart the whole thing.
1991 was the year the World Wide Web became publicly available, and even though it actually did take a long time to get online, it never felt like a forever-wait. Even as a kid.
Cut to today, and if a web page takes even a half second too long to load, we’re all about ready to flip a table.
