Rational Impatience

I don’t like waiting.  In particular, I don’t like waiting when I don’t know when the wait will be over. 

If I’m driving somewhere, I’d rather take a back road route that I believe will have flowing, if slower traffic than the freeway if there is a chance that I will get stuck in a traffic backup. 

The delay doesn’t have to be long before my anti-waiting reflex kicks in.  It can happen in a fraction of a second if the computer doesn’t respond in the near-instant time I expect. 

Do I have a problem with impatience? 

Probably, but it seems that the accuracy of time framing is important to our human minds and to decision making. 

Maria Konnikova, writing recently in the New York Times, discussed research indicating that what we might perceive as a lack of self-control – the inability to pass up a short term superficial reward for a greater long term reward – might not have to do with “willpower.”  Instead, it might be caused by uncertainty in, or an inaccurate understanding of, the delivery of the longer term reward. 

One seemingly logical idea is that the longer you wait, the closer the reward is to being delivered.  But the opposite is often the case.  If you expect something to happen in 5 minutes, and 10 minutes have gone by, it may be a more rational decision to abandon the wait than to continue it. 

If this is how our brains work, we have to think about why – and not in the context of waiting for the next Metro train or getting stuck in traffic due to an accident on the Beltway. 

It is probably due to decisions more like – “I thought if I came here at dawn and sat for an hour, the antelope would come to drink and I would have something to eat.  It has been more than an hour - no antelope - I need to go find something else, sooner rather than later!"

This has opened up a good area of exploration for me, giving me some ideas, and tools to better understand how I deal with the frustration of waiting in uncertain situations.