Crowds of people push themselves and their loaded shopping carts through the supermarket to form queues in front of the checkouts. Where to hire now? Of course in the wrong queue, that’s clear. The beginning of the waiting passes in a good mood. Daydreaming a bit or fiddling around on your smartphone can also be seen and enjoyed as a mini break from everyday life. Slowly but steadily the position in the queue is improving. One more customer and the wait is over. It’s just unfortunate that a problem arises now of all times: The customer wants to exchange a product, the roll for the receipts is empty, the EC card is defective and there isn’t enough cash – something is delaying the matter so close to the destination. And suddenly great impatience breaks out: What nonsense, is something moving forward here, damn it?
Nobody likes to wait. When signal disruptions hold up the S-Bahn, the parcel delivery person doesn’t have the desired shipment with him or there is no response to a proposal for a project, Lebenszeit dissolves into impatience. Like the psychologists Annabelle Roberts and Ayelet Fishbach now in Social Psychological and Personality Science to report, waiting time chafes the mind the most sorely when the goal has almost been reached or the longed-for event has almost happened. This applies regardless of how long the waiting time is overall. The decisive factor is not that after a miserable long endurance, your nerves are simply worn out because of the time lost. Roberts and Fishbach argue that it is the sheer proximity to the goal that fuels bubbling impatience. There is a deep urge in people to bring things to an end. This is a source of impatience.
Only before unpleasant appointments does time fly
The psychologists had test subjects rate waiting times for various events. Participants reported how impatiently they were waiting for the results of the US presidential election in 2020 or for their first Covid-19 vaccination dose in spring 2021. In addition, the psychologists confronted them with a less special situation: namely, waiting for a bus. In all cases, the impatience increased at the end of the waiting period. This was true, for example, when the results of the US presidential election were already foreseeable but had not yet been announced. The expectation of the vaccination date also caused the greatest impatience in the last phase, although the majority of the test subjects were already less afraid of Corona than at the beginning of the waiting period a few months earlier.
“The stress of waiting escalates when the goal is almost reached,” write Roberts and Fishbach. Anyone who is waiting for birthdays or Christmas presents with children can experience this escalation in heightened form. And of course, as studies have also shown, impatience breaks out especially when we are waiting for a positive, longed-for event. The other way around, time unfortunately flies: suddenly you have a dentist appointment or a public lecture, which just a few weeks ago were just small, harmless calendar entries.