Has anyone else lost some patience in the pandemic?

We all know that good things take time, but do we have the patience to wait for them?

I often feel like I don’t have the time to wait for things to pay off long-term. I’m 24, which I’m aware is still very young, but I still feel as though I’m too late (and old) for certain things, but I guess that’s what happens when you live in a hyper-successful, instant world.

At 24, I’m not a multi-millionaire business owner, best selling novelist or on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List. I’m not a home-owner or a corporate cog with an impressive salary. I haven’t really done that much in the grand scheme of things and in the meantime I’m left wondering if what I have done is enough?

Essentially the paradox has begun. At the ripe age of 24, I feel both too old and too young, I’m both behind and ahead and I’m not successful, but equally not unsuccessful.

That’s not solely from the ridiculous pressure I put on myself or that society places on overachieving teenagers, but it’s also our collective lack of patience. I’ve written about the reality of living in an instant society before, but in short it means that we expect things to happen immediately… we probably have Amazon Same Day delivery to thank for that. As a result, we’re more impatient.

And the pandemic has only made this worse. With increased screen time and the rise of TikTok (which I do love but feel the effects of), our attention span has dwindled down to only a few minutes. In 30-60 seconds on TikTok you can see a video of a transformation that took anything from one to three to five years of work to achieve. Whether that’s mental, physical or professional, in reality it could never happen that fast. Of course, we don’t watch that journey at normal speed as it takes too long and it would also be incredibly boring.

The reality of ‘good things take time’ is that good things do take time, but some of that time is spent doing mundane, repetitive actions to get to that nugget of goodness at the end. That real-time journey takes determination, incremental steps, setbacks and it’s a long and uncertain path.

For a while now, I’ve thought that this section of my life would be a montage in a movie. It would be collated together and the boring sections of sending pitches, sorting taxes, walking the same route, eating the same lunch, chasing up emails, rewriting articles, that would all be edited out. Yet, it’s those small things that actually add up to the final big change in the movie.

This week I became frustrated with myself, I thought I’m working too slow, I haven’t achieved enough and I’m not being productive enough. While all of those things might be true on a given day, it isn’t the whole truth. I just feel rushed by external pressures of life and pesky old comparison to work and achieve things faster. I even compare where I thought I’d be with where I am now, which is an awful way to spend your time and energy, as if you don’t set realistic goals (like me) then you’ll always fall short.

I also struggle to think long-term about my life (which I wrote about for the Metro here) so it becomes infinitely more difficult to be patient for those long-term wins. But I’m getting better than I was as I know how rewarding those long-term goals will be. It’s almost about retraining your brain to think differently about your goals and projects, after years of social media use, instant successes and at home streaming services. Everything can be accessed now, but it’s you that has to put the work in for that quick purchase to make a difference to your life. It would be like buying a self-help book to help you overcome something you’re struggling with, but not reading it. The instant reaction of buying the book hasn’t changed anything for you. But the long-term outcome of reading the book and applying the principles to your own life could be life-changing.

Thankfully, patience is something we can learn. It’s like a muscle – the more you use it the more you can build it back up again. Part of becoming more patient is accepting that the majority of things you really want are going to take a long time. It might seem frustrating initially, but you have to accept that the time is going to pass anyway, so why not use it to do something that matters to you?

At the end of the day, if it makes you happy (and it makes the boring bits worthwhile), it doesn’t matter how long it takes. I think patience is about accepting good things take time, knowing that you’re closer than if you never started at all and not comparing your journey to anyone else’s as everything happens at a different time for different people.

Good things take time, so take the time to do things and then it’ll all turn out good.