In the Internet Age of "Instant Gratification," Modern Life Seems to Have More and More Flashpoints for Impatience | 100 Big Questions About Life

"Mildly irritated, prone to the occasional spontaneous combustion" — the emotional baseline of modern life, most of the time.

If you were born in the last century, you can probably still see where the feeling in Mu Xin's poem Once Things Were Slow (《从前慢》) comes from: "In the old days the light of day passed slowly, and carriages, horses and the mail were all slow." But if you are a digital native born into the internet era, you have most likely lost any chance of feeling the life that poem describes. Shopping means express delivery, eating means food delivery, going online means a smartphone, working means a computer — everything is on tap, ready the moment you want it. If technology can solve a problem, there is nothing you have to wait long for.

A fairly common discussion in recent years asks whether people in the internet age have grown less and less patient. "IWWIWWIWI" (I want what I want when I want it), "Attention Deficit Disorder," the "Culture of Impatience" — each names the same worry about what this trend is doing to the human mind. The worry is not unfounded: an article read on a phone gets filed under "TLDR" (too long, didn't read), which is how clickbait headlines were born; in the streaming era it is so easy to skip a track that pop songs have got shorter to match; and according to a 2009 study from Columbia University, making a website one millisecond faster can be worth more than $100 million a year. If the internet has one permanent trend, "fast, and getting faster" is probably the clearest answer.

"Instant gratification" and "delayed gratification" began as academic terms; now they get used to talk about the relationship between people and the internet. Product designers who understand human psychology will tell you that people love instant gratification and hate waiting by nature, and that the limits of time and space simply forced us to hold back. Seen that way, we have not "become" impatient — we were never patient. High-speed internet reset our expectations and gave that impatience room to spread into every corner of life. Once you expect an answer in seconds, anything measured in days is unbearable. For a long time humans lived by the delayed gratification of planting in spring to harvest in autumn; now the internet has returned us to the raw pleasure of the foraging age. The small satisfaction of "tap the screen, get a response" — the click-treat — is no different from picking a fruit and eating it. Merchants who are good at pleasing users have spoiled us one tap at a time.

But note: pointing this out is not the same as saying "society is getting more and more restless." "Restless" is too big a charge, and it goes beyond what we are discussing here. Nor do we want to set "instant gratification" against "delayed gratification," or read the first as simple short-sightedness or self-indulgence. The most we can carefully say about the present is that life's margin for error is shrinking: the time people are willing to spend, in their heads, on any of a hundred everyday steps keeps getting shorter, and any detail that fails to match expectations can set off impatience.

That impatience is of course not simply a bad thing — nitpicking does push society forward. But for the people living inside it, the experience is not necessarily pleasant, because it means anyone who wants to survive "efficiently" had better keep raising their own response speed, or count as "out of step with the times" (think of the parents forever mocked for not knowing how to use smart devices). We look like we are optimizing our own efficiency; in fact this kind of time management is optimizing us. Modern life is a minefield: you can have two loops of prayer beads around your wrist and a web page that will not load for half a minute, a food delivery that does not arrive within an hour, or a package still missing after two weeks will set your mood off at random anyway.

So how long does the average person's patience last online these days? Drawing on earlier research, we picked out the following numbers:

10 Numbers About Patience

30 seconds: In research firm OnePoll's survey of the online shopping experience, half of respondents said they might lose patience if checkout ran longer than half a minute. A quarter would quit at the step of re-entering their address; a third would give up while re-typing their credit card details.

15 seconds: According to web design firm Go-gulf, 55% of pages online get 15 seconds of attention or less. The average attention span while browsing a web page has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds this year.

20%: Also from Go-gulf: people read only about 20% of the content on a page they visit, and only 10-20% of readers scroll to the end of an article.

2 seconds: A 2012 study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that people start to lose patience once an online video buffers for more than 2 seconds. Users on faster connections are willing to wait even less time for a video to load than users on slower ones.

6 seconds: The length of YouTube's pre-roll ads on mobile. YouTube began pushing a 6-second ad product last year to replace the original 30-second pre-roll.

3.5 minutes: Billboard's numbers show that the median length of a song on the singles chart was 4 minutes 6 seconds in 2000 and a bit over 3 minutes 40 seconds in 2010, and has fallen further to 3 minutes 31 seconds this year — 35 seconds shorter in 18 years.

5 seconds: A 2014 Spotify report found that 21% of songs are skipped within 5 seconds of starting. In the open-ended survey our lab ran, "What are your listening habits?", the top answer was also "using shuffle or recommendations while constantly hitting skip."

10 seconds: To catch a listener's attention, song intros have got shorter too. A 2017 study in the music psychology journal Musicae Scientiae analyzed 303 hit singles and concluded that intros generally ran more than 20 seconds in the 1980s and now come in under 10.

1 word: Research firm Priceonomics went through years of Billboard Hot 100 data two years ago and found that a song with a one-word title is 2.5 times as likely to reach the chart today as in the 1960s. Over the same stretch, the average length of song titles has dropped sharply.

A few hours: From a YouGov survey this year. Asked, "Not counting the times you have to open your phone for work, how long can you go without looking at it?", 31% chose "a few hours" — the most popular answer. 17% said they could last a whole day, and only 13% agreed they could get through several days without a phone.

It does look like our threshold for waiting has risen: nearly every precious moment of lingering can now be counted in seconds.

Building on an earlier open-ended survey from our lab, "What are you especially impatient about these days?", we have gone on to sum up the following 11 delicate scenes that sit right at the tipping point between calm and eruption:

11 Small Tipping Points of Patience

1. Closing an ad: You open an app and a 5-second splash ad appears. In the spirit of not wasting a moment, you carefully tap the × in the top right corner and somehow land on the advertiser's page instead, so you have to tap the top right corner again to get out. Well — that round trip took a lot longer than 5 seconds.

2. Getting a WeChat voice message: You are typing back and forth when the other person suddenly sends a 40-second voice message. Not in the mood to listen, you tap "convert to text," and the transcription barely makes sense. So you turn the volume down to make sure it will not play out loud, carefully tap play and hold the phone to your ear — and if your ear brushes the screen halfway through, you may have to start over.

3. Watching a show on your phone: First you sit out a 90-second ad, then drag the progress bar to exactly where the episode proper begins (if there is no skip-intro button). A few minutes in, you decide this episode is padded; you want the next one but do not want to sit through another ad, so you resolve to hit fast-forward every three minutes and drag your way through the whole episode in fits and starts.

4. Opening a package: You start out planning to do it by hand, wrestle with the clear tape on the box for ten seconds, then decide to use a tool. You look around your desk and find no scissors, glance at other people's desks and find none either, and cannot help thinking that "opening the package is the most maddening part of online shopping." In the end you grab your own keys and slit the tape open.

5. Registering for something online: Too lazy to enter a phone number, you tap "log in with your Weibo account." You type in the account and realize you have forgotten the password, try a few times and finally guess your way in — only for the next step to be "this account must be linked to a phone number," which means entering a number and a verification code after all. Registered at last, you try to change your username, and three tries in a row come back "this name is taken." Fine, forget it, you start using the account as is.

6. Settling up at the end of a taxi ride: There is a kind of ease while the car is still moving toward your destination; the mild anxiety starts the moment it pulls over. "Is this the spot?" "How do I pay?" "WeChat or Alipay?" "Do you scan me or do I scan you?" Then add opening Alipay, the phone freezing for three seconds, tapping "Pay" when you meant to tap "Scan"... Even though you know you are not in a hurry over this one minute, some part of you just wants the trip over with.

7. Scrolling social media: There is still a flicker of anticipation the instant you open the app, but three minutes later you are scrolling the same topics — trending news, gossip, inspirational quotes, ads, fake news, and slang you can never catch up with however hard you try — and the thoughts "I can't get into this" and "am I getting old" start surfacing. Puzzled and irritated, you tap open the next social app and run through the whole process again, until there is nothing left to scroll.

8. Updating your computer's operating system: Every so often a prompt to restart pops up, and every time you patiently close it. Then one day you decide to click "confirm" — "downloading," "shutting down," "installing update 1 of however many," "installing update 2"... Any progress bar stuck at 99% brings on a wave of "is my computer broken?" panic. You finally reach "restarting," sit through a full minute of the Windows welcome screen, and decide never to update again.

9. Playing "Jump Jump": You have been at it for 10 minutes, caught exactly between "my thumb aches a bit, let's do something else" and "I want to keep going, I want to pass the next friend on the leaderboard." Part of you hopes a WeChat message will arrive so you have a legitimate excuse to quit and rest, but you cannot bear to break an unusually good run. Every extra step inflates the bubble of anxiety a little more — until your hand slips, and it is game over.

10. Waiting at home for a food delivery: Lunchtime starts with "let's order in." After you place the order there is nothing to do for half an hour, so you keep checking your phone to follow the delivery: "has it been accepted?" "has it been picked up?" "is it out for delivery?" Once the status turns to "delivering" you cannot sit still, and to give yourself something to do you might sweep the floor, wipe the table, go to the bathroom; at 50 meters out you are at the door, staring. Only when the food is in your hands and the box is open does the anxiety drain away.

11. Taking the bus home from work: After an exhausting day, the ride home is no less of a grind than the job. Beyond the long, disorderly queue for the bus, the person standing dead still on the left side of the escalator with their head in their phone, the chatter that drowns out the stop announcements, the crowded car and its less than charming smells, the raindrops off someone's umbrella landing on your clothes — the most maddening part is still, "I've sent my WeChat messages, scrolled Moments and answered my emails; why isn't the bus here yet?"

3 New Problems of the Instant-Gratification Age

Of course, the "instant gratification" way of life has not only changed our average level of patience for good; it has brought a few new problems along with it:

1. Knowledge keeps getting easier to reach — is "instant learning" good for us?

Search engines, e-books, paid knowledge subscriptions, official accounts, Q&A apps, "learn X in one minute" tutorials: every one of them is devoted to letting impatient people "reach knowledge more conveniently, more instantly." But as the old joke has it, borrowing a book beats buying one. Now that knowledge is within easy reach, will you really love it more, or will it come to feel like self-heating instant food — fast and convenient, but missing the real flavor? Or perhaps you really have picked up a great deal of secondhand knowledge this way — but how can you be sure that habitually trusting it will not leave you with the learned helplessness of "I can't do the homework unless there's an answer to copy"?

2. Can "instantly responsive" social media make dating any easier?

We took this question up once before, in "The Dilemma of Intimate Relationships in the Internet Age": the internet does seem to have made communication simple, but intimate relationships, and so-called love, do not seem to have got any simpler along with it. What we express on social networks, and the forms we express it in, keep getting more complicated (chatting, muting, blocking, going invisible...), and we grow more used to talking through a screen. Add all the kinds of entertainment competing for the little attention we had to begin with, and you have to ask: in these conditions, is a "non-instant" intimate relationship — the kind you have to cultivate — still a necessity of life? If AI becomes humanity's "instant companion" one day, will we still need to spend the patience it takes to date a person?

3. As work gets more "instant," will we turn into complete corporate drones?

If you could once use being off the clock or on holiday as an excuse to escape work, that is now essentially impossible. Instant messaging means you can join a meeting, discuss business or answer email wherever you are; short of losing your connection or your power, work and life have no boundary left between them. Freelancing, working from home, remote work, flexible hours: a job can take any form and be moved anywhere. Modern people have precious little rest time as it is — will a way of working built on efficiency and "instant feedback" turn us further into slaves to our jobs?

On the whole, in a modern life that keeps speeding up, waiting really is giving way to speed, bit by bit, intentionally or not. But that is no reason to blame each other for impatience: we are the ones who take pleasure in instant gratification, and we are the ones who suffer for it. Given that, about the only thing worth reminding yourself is that impatience is fair enough, but it has to be aimed at the right place. The less you contradict yourself — saying "I can't wait even a second" while wasting your days on procrastination — the more patience and time you may manage to win back in this none-too-friendly world.

Cover image and illustrations by Zheng Shuya