Death of patience: How AI has trained us to stop waiting

There was a time when waiting—when patience—quietly trained us to value things more, whether material or sentimental. From ordering food and letting anticipation build, to counting days before meeting someone special after a long gap, waiting made experiences feel a little more meaningful. As humans, we’ve long assigned worth through different measures, and time has been one of the strongest. If a dish takes longer to prepare, we assume it’s richer and more worthwhile. If a project demands months of effort, the outcome feels earned. Over years of lived experience, many of us internalise a simple association: the more time something takes, the more likely it is to be valuable, fruitful, and worth it.

But in today’s status quo, patience is thinning out faster than ever. We live in an age of accelerating technology where almost everything is easier to access, quicker to obtain, and smoother to navigate. Instant gratification has become a default setting—reinforcing dopamine through fast responses, auto-completions, one-tap deliveries, and chatbots that answer before we even finish asking. And as speed increases, something subtle shifts in our psyche: if everything comes easily, why struggle? If minimal effort brings near-instant outcomes, what happens to our relationship with value?

Waiting, of course, has never been glamorous. It often carries boredom as a companion, and boredom is precisely what we’ve trained ourselves to avoid. Yet boredom has an underrated role: it creates space. The “empty” time that feels uncomfortable is often the same time in which the mind wanders, reflects, connects unrelated dots, and quietly generates insight. When handled well, boredom becomes a workshop for creativity. Simply sitting with thoughts—without immediately outsourcing them—can reduce the impulse of cognitive offloading, restore attention, and invite introspection.

AI, undeniably, offers the privilege of instant gratification at an unprecedented scale. Extensive answers arrive at lightning speed, summarised, structured, and ready to use. But even in the age of AI, waiting—persistence, patience in thinking—remains essential to the creative process. Waiting is a distinct art: it nudges the mind to explore multiple angles, entertain alternatives, and discover possibilities that don’t surface when everything is served instantly.

The erosion of patience also erodes something else: our willingness to sit with ourselves long enough to reflect. Perhaps it’s impulsive thinking that demands the “right” response immediately—at the right time, in the most convenient form, with maximum effectiveness. Yet it’s worth noticing how algorithmic exposure to instant answers may be reshaping our expectations and behaviours. We begin to expect clarity without confusion, solutions without wrestling, and results without the slow work of arriving there.

Many ideas were born from wandering—mental and physical. But a mind that knows everything is one click away is also a mind that gets distracted easily, prioritising “joy” and “convenience” as its dominant attention anchors. The same moments we once endured—waiting for a reply, sitting through stillness, letting curiosity unfold—now feel unbearable even for short stretches. In a quiet way, we are also outsourcing our patience to machines, leaning on instant responses not just for information, but for relief from uncertainty.

And still, there are things AI cannot replicate: the texture of lived experience, the slow ripening of insight, the moral weight of choices, the clarity that comes from sustained attention. Even now, deep thinking and careful, analytical decision-making matter as much as ever. As technology evolves at speed, the quality of our outcomes should evolve too—not only through faster tools, but through better humans: humans who can pause, persist, and think with both efficiency and introspection.