Liberty Lifestyle: Patience Is a Virtue, So What Happened to It?

“To lose patience is to lose the battle.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Waiting for something, being patient, used to be woven into everyday life. Now it’s almost treated like a system failure. Instant gratification is what society is about now. If we can’t get something immediately, then we move on to another task or a different way of achieving our goals. Having patience is a virtue, but it’s more than that. There are health risks associated with being too eager to have everything done immediately.

What Happened to Patience?

There was a time when we waited for pretty much everything. Our ancestors didn’t have access to technology like we do today, so they had to wait weeks, even months, for mail to arrive. Photographs used to take a while to develop, but now we can snap a shot with our cell phone cameras and have them right away. And let’s face it, if a webpage takes more than a couple of seconds to load, we abandon it and look for other sources on the internet.

Convenience is great and helps us better organize our daily lives, but it can also cause problems. A psychological concept known as delay discounting can result when we want to have instant gratification instead of practicing patience to get what we want. As PubMed explained, delay discounting is the tendency for people to value a reward less if they have to wait for it. Think of how some people would rather get $50 today than wait a year and get $100. The longer the wait, the less valuable the future reward seems.

But that approach may not be so healthy. “Steep delay discounting is related to a wide variety of maladaptive behaviors that, although potentially rewarding in the short-term, are detrimental in the long-term,” a PubMed article pointed out. “Delay discounting is associated with drug abuse, gambling, obesity, risky sexual behaviors, preventative health behaviors, and personal safety.”

Waiting for Health

What is so beneficial about having patience? It has both mental and physical impacts. When we have to wait for something, it helps build perseverance, anticipation, and appreciation. Think about the excitement we experience when we are planning a vacation or waiting for an anticipated movie to be released. It increases the pleasure endorphins in our brains while also teaching us that instant gratification is not everything. Consider the appreciation we get when we save up for a big expense item such as a house, car, or boat. If we just ordered it off Amazon and had it instantly, we don’t usually appreciate the time and effort it took to get it as we would saving and waiting for it.

Patience is a moral virtue that is rooted in courage and self-control. It represents our calm endurance of hardship and delays, without giving into destructive emotions such as anger or despair, or making hasty and rash decisions.

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Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger) was a famous Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist who lived from about 4 BC to AD 65. He said: “It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much.” As Daily Philosophy explained, “Seneca taught that frustration comes from expecting life to run smoothly. When you anticipate obstacles, you are not disappointed — you are prepared. Patience begins with realistic expectations.”

Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived from 535-475BC, said, “Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.”

To many, patience is considered a core human good, but it also has health advantages. As technology and convenience become more a part of our lives, let’s hope we don’t altogether lose that all important human commodity. Perhaps the greatest thing we’ve lost isn’t time spent waiting. It’s everything that waiting used to teach us.