Can waiting improve your life?

And why getting better at it just might improve your life

BACK BEFORE THE PANDEMIC, WHEN THE GQ STAFF ALL WORKED TOGETHER in an office, a favourite in-office activity was discussing how long we had to wait for the building’s lifts. Or, more accurately, griping and grousing about how long we had to wait for the lifts because waiting is something seemingly everyone finds annoying. Now, these days, it can feel like all we’re doing is waiting: for the US election to finally happen, then for election results. Or waiting for a vaccine, and the pandemic to finally end. Waiting to see what life might look like on the other side of this. It’s… not a great feeling. But what if it didn’t have to be this bad?

Jason Farman has some answers. A professor at Maryland University in the US and the author of Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World, Farman has spent years studying our relationship to time, and how it has evolved throughout history and across societies.

GQ caught up with Farman for a conversation about why humans have such a difficult time with waiting, the perils of living in a society that can’t tolerate pauses, and what we can do – and learn from other cultures – to make seemingly interminable waits just a little bit more bearable.

GQ:

Jason Farman: We think of our time as separate – and also as our scarcest resource. When we imagine a productive time – time being

used wisely, time being used well – waiting is contrary to all of that. If you make me wait, you’re limiting my ability to be successful in life. Other people control our time in a way that makes us feel powerless. We don’t feel in control. I think that sense of powerlessness and lack of control drives our hatred of waiting.

But not all cultures have a problem with waiting. It depends on so many factors: how society thinks about time and collective relationships with one another, whether people think of their time as intertwined or they think of their time as separate.

GQ: Of the research you’ve done into other cultures and how they relate to time and waiting, what have you found most interesting?

JF: I spent quite a bit of time in Japan. How people line up is very different. If you line up for the subway in Japan, it’s very orderly. There are lines drawn in front of every door that people queue up behind. That carries over into these moments of national crisis. After the Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima crisis in 2011, as people queued for resources such as food and water, it was incredibly orderly; there was no chaos. There was no stampeding. It was people honouring the wait as a symbol of their interconnectedness. Waiting wasn’t seen as a negative thing. Waiting was seen as a contribution to society. We’re all facing this crisis, and together we’ll wait for our resources because you’re just as important as I am.

A colleague of mine who studies and works closely with communities in Uganda mentioned to me that people in the community she works with will sometimes gather at the bus stop to head into work about an hour before the bus ever shows up. It’s how they reiterated their connectedness: waiting together.

You always have these viral videos on Black Friday of people stampeding through the entrances of malls. Culturally, there are stark contrasts with our willingness to wait and how we prioritise ourselves over communities. The experience of time isn’t universal. Our cultures have such an impact on how we perceive time as human beings. It’s not subjective hours and seconds that pass in a day.

GQ: I’m also thinking of how we experience waiting for election results, and how our cultural expectations affect that. It feels like we know it’ll take a few days, but we still get impatient.

JF: If [a waiting time] can beat expectations, then people leave the experience feeling positive about it. But if it takes longer [than expected] or there’s a lack of feedback, it’s like the buffering icon on your computer that spins, and you don’t know when it’s going to end. That’s what the election was like for most people. I think that was part of why conspiracy theories emerged. We fill the waiting time with meaning when it’s complex, and we don’t understand what’s happening behind the scenes.

GQ: Twenty-four-hour news networks have to fill space with news even when nothing new is happening.

JF: How does the media cycle look if pauses are valued? What does Twitter look like with pauses? What does the 24-hour news cycle look like with a moment of pause and reflection? It’s built to eliminate that completely, and that was part of the concern that led me to write my book.

What happens to us as individuals and as a society if we eliminate waiting times from our lives completely? We want to eliminate them because we imagine them as being the antithesis of productivity and the good life.

I think we’re going to have to build in pauses and boredom and daydreaming to get people to imagine new futures. I think we’ll have to build waiting times into our workweek to get people to come up with new and inventive ways to solve problems.

Boredom, daydreaming and waiting activate a part of the brain called the default network, which is often referred to as the imagination network. Have you ever taken a shower, and then all of a sudden you’ve had a revelation? Or sat in traffic and you’ve solved a problem, or a new idea has come to you?

It’s because you’re letting yourself daydream and be bored, and those are the moments when your brain makes connections that you couldn’t have found if you’d thought them out. We need these moments of pause for our brain to make creative and inventive connections across ideas, but we’re not letting the workforce do that in any way. We’re just asking people to use their time productively, but our definition of what productivity means is skewed.

GQ: What are the costs to society when there are no pauses?

JF: I think we’re losing the capacity to do nothing. In my life, I have a difficult time standing in a queue without taking my cellphone out of my pocket and scrolling through Twitter. I feel like I need to be doing something at all times, otherwise, I feel guilty about my use of time. The end result of that is higher stress levels and an unhealthier population.

There’s always something to pay attention to or something to do, and we feel like we’re accomplishing something by checking email, or our Twitter feeds when we’re queuing to get coffee. If we could get past the desire to occupy every minute of our days, we’d devote hours to things that we care about rather than feeling burned out from paying attention to things all day long.