Have you ever had one of those evenings when you look at the clock and are surprised it's only 9 p.m.? You think 'wow, this is great, the evening is passing nice and slowly,' then the next thing you know it's midnight and you wonder 'where did the time go?'
In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James observed, "Our sense of time seems subject to the law of contrast."
In other words, the less time we expect something to take. the longer it seems to take, and vice versa.
In our example above, the expectation of a slow pace established by seemingly slow pace already experienced, accelerates time, so to speak.
A slow pace is something that barely exists in the modern technological world. Constant connectivity, an endless barrage of notifications, algorithms bent on providing more content faster, all adds up to a whole lot of impatience.
Internet engineers now operate on what has been trimmed down to a "quarter of a second rule." It seems almost inconceivable that we have gotten there, but studies have shown that's how long it now takes for people to start abandoning if it takes longer than 250 milliseconds to load a page or start a video.
Back in pre-internet times, a lot of our entertainment was games, particularly card games such as cribbage and euchre. I don't get out very much anymore to play these games in person, but I still like to play them online.
Numerous players on the site I use (cardgames.io) have screen names such as "Fast_only", "kwikplz", and "play-fast."
Talk about impatient. An average real-life cribbage game takes 20-30 minutes, depending on shuffling and dealing the cards and how socially chatty you and your opponent are.
Online, without those physical and social barriers, it's 5-10 minutes. Inevitably, though, no matter how fast you play, these players are urging you to "Play Ja Ja Ding Dong!" or admonishing you that "It's your turn!" Honestly, I don't know how can play faster than the physical constraints of the game inputting commands via mouse and keyboard, but apparently these cyber-warriors have found a way,
“The promise of technology was that it would make us masters of time. It has, ironically, made us into time’s slaves,” said Harold Schweizer, an English professor at Bucknell University and author of the book On Waiting in which he argues waiting gives people time for thinking, inspiration and regeneration, as well as, adding value to objects and experiences.
Sometimes I think we've lost a lot to the cult of instant gratification.
