THE COST OF NOW: What Would Happen If We Just… Waited?
I was waiting for something the other day.
Nothing dramatic.
A page loading.
A reply.
A kettle boiling.
I can't even remember.
What I do remember is reaching for my phone.
Automatically.
There wasn't anything I particularly wanted to look at.
No message I was expecting.
No information I needed.
My hand simply interpreted a few empty seconds as a problem.
Apparently we can't just stand there anymore.
There has to be something.
Scroll.
Check.
Read.
Refresh.
Fill.
Move.
Anything rather than allow thirty seconds to remain thirty seconds.
And I started wondering:
What would actually happen if we just waited?
Not forever.
Not when waiting creates danger.
Not when a business is wasting people's time because it can't be bothered to organise itself properly.
Just occasionally.
What if the reply came later?
What if we didn't chase?
What if the answer remained unknown until tomorrow?
What if the parcel took three days?
What if we stopped filling the queue?
What if the child was bored?
What if the difficult problem sat in the back of our mind for a while?
What if every gap didn't need closing?
I'm beginning to think one of the strangest things about modern life is not simply that everything has become faster.
It's that we have started treating waiting itself as evidence that something has failed.
Waiting used to be built into everything
I grew up in a world containing loads of waiting.
Television programmes happened when television programmes happened.
Photographs needed developing.
Catalogues took time.
Letters took time.
Ordering something took time.
Getting hold of somebody took time.
Information took time.
You didn't know where your mate was once they left their house.
You arranged something and then broadly trusted that they would appear.
If they didn't, eventually you discovered why.
None of this was especially virtuous.
Some of it was incredibly inconvenient.
I have no desire to recreate it.
But those systems contained forced gaps.
Things simply could not happen immediately.
So humans had to exist in the period between wanting and receiving.
Technology has removed an extraordinary amount of that.
Good.
But I wonder whether we assumed every gap was pure waste.
Maybe some were doing things we didn't notice because we didn't know they could disappear.
Waiting is not inherently good
Let's kill the romantic version immediately.
Long hospital waits are not spiritually enriching.
Waiting months for essential treatment isn't character building.
Standing outside in the rain because a bus service is terrible isn't valuable friction.
Being left on hold for forty minutes because an organisation is understaffed isn't an invitation to rediscover yourself.
Waiting can waste human life.
It can create anxiety.
It can impose costs disproportionately on people who have the least control over their time.
Research into waiting experiences repeatedly shows that prolonged and uncertain waits can increase dissatisfaction and anxiety. A 2026 systematic review of outpatient waiting found factors including uncertainty, poor communication, environment and the quality of staff interactions all shape how patients experience waiting, not simply the number of minutes involved.
So this is not:
Waiting is good.
It is a narrower question.
Did we make a mistake when we decided that all waiting was bad?
Because there are different kinds of waiting
Waiting for an ambulance when somebody cannot breathe.
Bad.
Waiting three hours because a company missed an appointment.
Bad.
Waiting six weeks to discover whether you've got a serious illness.
Potentially awful.
Waiting until tomorrow for an email that changes nothing tonight.
Different.
Waiting two days for something you don't need urgently.
Different.
Waiting for a holiday you've been looking forward to for six months.
Different.
Waiting twenty minutes before deciding whether you really want to buy something.
Different.
Letting a problem sit overnight before making an important decision.
Different.
Allowing a child to experience ten minutes of boredom without immediately creating entertainment.
Different.
We use the same word.
The experiences are not the same.
Perhaps we hate uncertainty more than time
One of the clearest findings in waiting research is that the objective length of a wait is only part of the experience.
A classic study of more than 1,600 emergency-department patients found that actual waiting time itself did not predict overall satisfaction in that sample, while perceived waiting time, information and interpersonal quality did. People who believed the wait was shorter than expected were more satisfied.
A later literature review of delay announcements across service systems found that giving people information about expected waits can reduce uncertainty and improve satisfaction, while also helping people decide whether they want to join or remain in a queue.
That is interesting.
Because perhaps the unbearable part of waiting isn't always:
This is taking too long.
Sometimes it is:
I don't know when this ends.
We see this everywhere.
“Your parcel will arrive today.”
Not enough.
Now I want the time window.
Then the map.
Then the number of stops.
Then the little van moving towards my house.
Then I notice it has been outside number 42 for eight minutes and apparently I am now personally invested in whatever the fuck is happening at number 42.
We haven't simply shortened waiting.
We've made it increasingly observable.
Trackable.
Legible.
Which reduces uncertainty.
Useful.
But perhaps it also trains us to expect certainty everywhere.
Sometimes not knowing is allowed
That sentence feels strangely rebellious.
You can send someone a message and not know when they'll reply.
You can make a decision and not know immediately whether it was correct.
You can start something and not know where it will lead.
You can wait for test results.
Wait for an opportunity.
Wait for someone's opinion.
Wait for your child to work something out.
Wait before deciding what you think.
Not every unresolved thing requires active intervention.
That's difficult because action creates the sensation of control.
Chase.
Check.
Refresh.
Ask.
Do something.
Waiting requires tolerating the fact that some processes are temporarily outside your control.
I don't think humans particularly enjoy that.
Technology offers increasingly sophisticated ways to escape the feeling.
We keep turning waiting into activity
Look around any queue.
Phones.
Any platform.
Phones.
Waiting room.
Phones.
School pickup.
Phones.
Traffic light.
Sometimes phones, terrifyingly.
Even the tiny pauses inside conversations increasingly get filled.
We are unbelievably good at preventing unoccupied time.
Researchers studying waiting services have known for decades that occupying people changes how waits are experienced. More recent experimental research in 2025 found that actively occupying customers during a wait could increase their sense of flow and improve satisfaction with the wait compared with passive or unoccupied waiting, although longer waits still weakened the effect.
In service design, that's useful.
Make a wait feel shorter.
Great.
But I wonder what happens when we apply the same principle to every gap in human life.
Nobody needs to engineer away my boredom while the kettle boils.
Yet apparently I do.
Boredom has become a design flaw
Children say:
“I'm bored.”
Adults react like something has gone wrong.
Find something to do.
Here's a screen.
Watch this.
Play that.
Let's go somewhere.
What do you mean you're bored?
I grew up bored constantly.
Again, I don't want to turn that into mythology.
Boredom isn't automatically creative.
A 2024 scoping review looked at 27 empirical studies examining boredom and creativity in educational settings.
The findings were all over the place.
Positive relationships.
Negative relationships.
Contradictory results.
No significant relationship.
The researchers explicitly concluded that current evidence does not support the simple claim that boredom reliably causes creativity.
Good.
We should stop repeating “boredom makes you creative” as if science settled it.
It hasn't.
But that doesn't mean boredom is useless.
It means the story is more complicated.
Boredom tells you something
Boredom is information.
This isn't engaging me.
This isn't meaningful enough.
This isn't stimulating enough.
I want something different.
What happens next depends on what options exist.
If the instant option is:
an infinite feed optimised to produce another interesting thing before you've decided what to do,
then boredom disappears quickly.
If that option doesn't exist, perhaps you have to generate the next thing yourself.
Go somewhere.
Build something.
Talk to someone.
Daydream.
Annoy your sibling.
Read.
Invent.
Stop.
Think.
None is guaranteed.
But the environment changes the available responses.
That matters.
My daughters live in a completely different boredom environment from the one I did
This is something I think about a lot.
When I was a kid, boredom often remained boredom long enough that I eventually did something about it.
There simply wasn't an endless external supply of novelty sitting in my pocket.
That didn't make me exceptional.
It made the environment different.
My daughters inhabit a world where entertainment can be produced immediately, indefinitely and specifically for them.
That is astonishing technology.
And we have to teach intentional use inside an environment my parents never had to manage.
One of the things I don't want to accidentally teach them is:
The moment you feel unstimulated, something outside you should fix it.
Sometimes nothing happening can just be nothing happening.
You don't always need rescue.
Waiting can change what we value
There is another fascinating finding here.
Xianchi Dai and Ayelet Fishbach conducted five studies examining what happens when people wait before making a choice between a smaller-sooner and larger-later reward.
Counterintuitively, prior waiting could increase patience.
Participants who had waited before choosing were sometimes more willing to select the larger delayed reward.
The researchers argued that the waiting period could increase the perceived value of what people were waiting for.
This doesn't mean:
“Make people wait and they'll become wonderfully patient.”
One of their studies also found that waiting could increase willingness to pay to expedite a single item.
Context matters.
But it demonstrates something important.
Waiting is not psychologically one-directional.
It doesn't simply produce frustration.
Sometimes the act of waiting changes the value of the thing on the other side.
Anticipation is part of experience
Christmas used to take fucking forever.
As a child, December seemed approximately nine months long.
And part of what made Christmas feel like Christmas was precisely that it hadn't happened yet.
The build-up mattered.
The calendar.
Decorations.
Waiting.
Wondering.
Looking at presents you couldn't open.
Anticipation was part of the event.
Research supports the broader principle.
One series of studies found people could derive more happiness from anticipating experiential purchases than material ones, with waiting for experiences tending to feel more pleasurable and exciting.
A 2025 paper examining consumer anticipation across five studies similarly found that intense anticipation could positively influence later evaluations of an experience.
Earlier experimental work also found that a delay between choosing and consuming certain pleasurable products could increase enjoyment under some conditions.
Waiting can therefore be part of consumption rather than merely a barrier before it.
That's interesting in a world increasingly designed around:
Want.
Click.
Receive.
Instant removes anticipation as efficiently as it removes inconvenience
Sometimes that's excellent.
If I need printer ink for work, I'm not interested in a three-day period of joyful contemplation before it arrives.
Just give me the fucking ink.
But not everything in life is printer ink.
There are things where the gap itself contributes something.
A holiday.
A meal you've booked.
A concert.
Christmas.
Seeing someone you've missed.
A new book.
A long-planned trip.
Waiting can create imagination.
You inhabit the future before it arrives.
Removing all delay can remove that part too.
We tend to count only the minutes saved.
Not the experience lost.
There is also such a thing as incubation
This might be one of the strongest arguments for not demanding instant answers from ourselves.
Have you ever spent ages trying to solve something, got nowhere, walked away and then suddenly had the answer while showering?
That's common enough to have a name in creativity and problem-solving research.
Incubation.
A meta-analysis by Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod reviewed experimental studies in which people stopped working consciously on a problem before returning to it.
They found an overall positive incubation effect, although the benefit differed considerably by problem type and what people did during the break.
Divergent-thinking tasks benefited more strongly than some other problem types, and low-demand activities could sometimes support incubation better than cognitively demanding ones.
Another experiment found that an undemanding task associated with more mind-wandering improved performance on previously encountered creativity problems compared with a demanding task, rest or no break.
That doesn't mean unconscious genius is guaranteed whenever you stop working.
But it does demonstrate a useful truth:
Not working continuously on a problem is not always the same as making no progress.
Modern urgency hates incubation
“Can you give me an answer now?”
Maybe.
I can definitely give you an answer now.
Whether it's the best one is a different matter.
This is particularly relevant to the work I increasingly value.
Writing.
Strategy.
Complex decisions.
Research.
Thinking.
The difficult stuff often improves by not being finished immediately.
You start.
Leave it.
Return.
Notice the argument doesn't work.
Find another angle.
Sleep.
Realise something the following morning.
We have become so used to measuring work by visible activity that incubation looks unproductive.
Nothing appears to be happening.
That's exactly the problem.
Modern systems are suspicious of processes they cannot observe.
There are things time does that effort cannot
Bread rises.
Paint dries.
Concrete cures.
Wine matures.
Children grow.
Muscles recover.
Grief changes.
Trust develops.
Relationships deepen.
Skills consolidate.
Ideas mature.
You can influence these processes.
You cannot simply demand all of them now.
Some things contain time as an ingredient.
Yet modern life trains us to experience duration as an obstacle.
There must be a faster method.
Sometimes there is.
Sometimes “faster” means incomplete.
Asynchronous work is organised waiting
This is another place where waiting can be designed intelligently.
You send me something.
I deal with it later.
I send it back.
You deal with it later.
Nobody interrupts anybody.
Work still moves.
That's asynchronous communication.
We covered earlier in this series how email was built around this possibility and then gradually acquired synchronous social expectations.
Research into communication technologies has described a persistent trade-off between delay and interruption.
Reducing communication delays can make information arrive faster, but the technologies that achieve that can also increase interruptions and disrupt work.
One older workplace email study found employees frequently responded to arriving email within seconds even though email does not technically require an immediate response, creating interruptions that did not need to exist.
The paradox is simple.
You want less waiting.
So you interrupt more.
Then everyone has less uninterrupted time.
Waiting can protect concentration
Suppose you message me at 10:03.
I answer at 11:17.
What happened during those seventy-four minutes?
Perhaps nothing useful.
Perhaps I was wasting time.
Or perhaps I was doing the thing my working day was actually for.
The existence of asynchronous communication allows your message to wait while my attention stays where I put it.
That is not delay as failure.
It is delay as architecture.
A buffer protecting one person's concentration from another person's timeline.
Instant messaging reduces that buffer.
Sometimes appropriately.
Sometimes not.
Research on instant-message interruptions has found effects on completion time for some knowledge-work tasks, while more recent qualitative research shows collaborative groups can sometimes absorb ICT interruptions smoothly depending on context.
Again, the answer isn't:
Interruptions bad.
Waiting good.
It's:
What kind of communication does this actually require?
Synchronous should probably be earned
A meeting means:
Everyone must attend at the same time.
A phone call means:
Stop what you're doing approximately when I decided to call.
Instant messaging often creates a softer version of the same demand.
Asynchronous communication says:
Here is the information.
Deal with it when appropriate.
Each has a place.
We increasingly use the first category because it feels faster.
But faster for whom?
A meeting may resolve my uncertainty immediately while occupying an hour of eight people's time.
A message may wait three hours and consume six total minutes.
Waiting can be extraordinarily efficient when you measure the whole system rather than one person's preferred completion time.
Some friction protects decisions
Think about online shopping.
See.
Tap.
Buy.
It is intentionally frictionless.
Businesses spend fortunes removing the moments where you might reconsider.
Of course they do.
Every abandoned basket is lost revenue.
But from the customer's perspective, a little friction might occasionally be useful.
Do I actually want this?
Will I still want it tomorrow?
Do I already own something that does the same thing?
What would happen if purchasing required a twenty-minute delay?
For essential things, annoying.
For impulse purchases, potentially illuminating.
We've treated friction as though it has zero possible value.
But friction can create a decision point.
It inserts a gap between impulse and action.
Sometimes that's exactly what agency needs.
Agency requires a gap
This may be the philosophical centre of the essay.
Stimulus.
Gap.
Response.
Without the gap, behaviour becomes increasingly automatic.
Notification.
Check.
Message.
Reply.
Desire.
Buy.
Boredom.
Scroll.
Question.
Search.
Problem.
React.
Agency lives partly in the gap where another action remains possible.
That doesn't require a huge meditative pause every time somebody asks where the stapler is.
But the principle matters.
If every desire is satisfied instantly and every signal receives immediate action, when exactly do we choose?
Not every answer improves by being immediate
I learned this partly through writing.
There are pieces I can write in one sitting.
There are others that need to sit.
I might think I've finished.
Then read it tomorrow and realise the entire centre is wrong.
Nothing magical happened overnight.
I gained distance.
The urgency disappeared.
The thing became easier to see.
This is why “sleep on it” has survived despite our obsession with speed.
Sometimes delay changes perspective.
It reduces emotion.
Adds information.
Allows another thought to occur.
Creates space between what initially felt true and what still feels true tomorrow.
That is useful.
There are also things we should not wait for
This is where a philosophy of waiting can become stupid if it isn't careful.
Don't wait to report the serious safety issue.
Don't wait to call the doctor about something concerning because patience sounds enlightened.
Don't wait to tell someone you love them because perhaps anticipation improves the experience.
Don't leave an employee wondering whether they have a job because uncertainty builds character.
Don't make customers wait unnecessarily when you can provide better service easily.
Don't use “deep thinking” as an excuse for indecision.
Waiting can become avoidance.
Procrastination.
Cowardice.
Bad service.
Poor management.
The point is not to glorify delay.
It is to recover the distinction between delay with a purpose and delay because something is broken.
We have removed useful friction alongside useless friction
That's probably inevitable.
Innovation is not surgically precise.
It removes barriers.
Some barriers were pointless.
Others had side effects we only notice afterwards.
Mobile phones removed the difficulty of reaching people.
They also removed natural periods of unreachability.
Streaming removed the need to wait for programmes.
It also removed anticipation and stopping points.
Online shopping removed purchasing friction.
It also shortened the gap between desire and purchase.
Infinite feeds removed boredom.
They also removed natural endings.
Email removed postal delay.
It also multiplied communication.
AI removes production effort.
It may also remove the friction that once forced us to decide whether something was worth producing at all.
Every convenience deserves two questions.
What did we gain?
And:
What was the friction doing before we removed it?
Sometimes the answer is nothing useful.
Fine.
Remove it.
Sometimes perhaps it was protecting something.
Natural stopping points matter
This is one of the strangest changes in digital life.
Things used to end.
Newspaper: finished.
Album: finished.
Television programme: finished.
Shop: closed.
Office: closed.
Friend: not home.
Photographs: you've used the roll.
Now systems increasingly continue until you stop them.
Another episode.
Another video.
Another article.
Another post.
Another recommendation.
Another message.
Another search result.
Another item.
The friction wasn't simply slowing us down.
Sometimes it ended the behaviour.
Once those endings disappear, self-control has to do all the work.
That's a much larger cognitive burden.
Perhaps this is why intentional friction interests me
Not making life deliberately difficult.
Designing tiny places where automatic behaviour has to pass through choice.
Notifications off.
Messages waiting until I look.
Phone outside the room.
No screens at the table.
Not buying immediately.
An overnight pause before a non-urgent decision.
A customer-response standard that says tomorrow is acceptable.
A meeting that gets replaced with a document people can read when ready.
A child being allowed to be bored for a while.
These are not anti-technology behaviours.
They're architecture.
You are putting back a small amount of friction where removing all of it produced an outcome you don't want.
Waiting doesn't have to mean doing nothing
This is another important distinction.
Incubation might involve walking.
Cooking.
Cleaning.
Driving.
Something low-demand.
Anticipation might involve planning.
Asynchronous waiting might mean progressing other work.
A customer waiting for one thing can do something else.
Patience is not paralysis.
The idea isn't to spend large portions of life staring at walls for moral purity.
It is to stop treating one unresolved process as though it deserves continuous mental occupation until it completes.
You've sent the email.
Now leave it.
You've made the request.
Leave it.
You've started thinking about the problem.
Go walk the dog.
Sometimes waiting is not an inactive state.
It's a decision not to interfere yet.
There is wisdom in not chasing everything
A message goes unanswered.
Chase immediately?
Maybe not.
You delegate something.
Check constantly?
Maybe not.
Your child is struggling with something.
Step in instantly?
Maybe not.
A team member makes a decision differently from you.
Correct them immediately?
Maybe not.
A thought makes you uncomfortable.
Distract yourself instantly?
Maybe not.
A silence appears in conversation.
Fill it?
Maybe not.
Some things need enough time to reveal what they are.
Constant intervention prevents that.
Waiting creates information
This is underappreciated.
You don't always know what requires action until you leave it alone briefly.
Some customer problems disappear.
Some conflicts cool down.
Some purchases stop seeming necessary.
Some ideas collapse under their own weakness.
Some apparently urgent tasks become irrelevant.
Some people solve their own problems.
Some questions answer themselves.
Time is diagnostic.
If everything gets immediate intervention, you never learn what would have happened without you.
That's particularly important for fixers.
I know this one.
If I solve everything quickly, I generate no evidence about whether anybody else could have solved it.
My intervention removes the experiment.
Sometimes waiting is how you discover capacity exists elsewhere.
The discomfort is the point
Waiting feels uncomfortable because the loop remains open.
You don't know.
You haven't solved.
You haven't responded.
You haven't consumed.
You haven't moved.
The temptation is to interpret discomfort as instruction.
I feel uncomfortable, therefore I should act.
Not necessarily.
Discomfort may simply be what unresolved reality feels like.
And perhaps patience is partly learning that the feeling itself does not require fixing.
There is no reason to fetishise analogue life
I want to make this explicit because it would be incredibly easy for this essay to wander into nostalgic bullshit.
Older wasn't automatically better.
Slower wasn't automatically better.
People wasted enormous amounts of time doing things technology has rightly removed.
Going to banks.
Queuing.
Travelling unnecessarily.
Waiting for letters.
Finding information.
Manual administration.
We should celebrate those improvements.
The goal isn't to rebuild 1994.
It's to notice that sometimes we solved:
How can we make this faster?
without asking:
What happens to human behaviour when this becomes instant?
Now we know more.
We can choose.
The mature version of technology isn't maximum convenience
Maybe it's selective convenience.
Make the tedious thing instant.
Let the meaningful thing take time.
Automate the repetitive work.
Protect the thinking.
Speed up the transfer.
Don't automatically speed up the judgement.
Remove pointless waiting.
Don't remove every pause.
Use instant communication for genuine immediacy.
Let ordinary communication remain asynchronous.
Make payments instant.
Maybe don't make every purchase impulsive.
Give children access to extraordinary technology.
Also let them experience boredom.
Use AI to eliminate three hours of administrative rubbish.
Then resist filling every recovered minute.
That sounds much more interesting than either:
Technology good.
Or:
Technology bad.
What would happen if you answered tomorrow?
Try the question literally.
That email.
What happens if it waits until tomorrow?
Not:
How will it feel?
What actually happens?
Does a customer lose money?
Does something stop?
Does someone become unable to proceed?
Is there a deadline?
Does a problem materially worsen?
If yes, answer.
If no?
Perhaps tomorrow is fine.
Now apply it elsewhere.
What happens if the parcel comes Friday?
What happens if the decision waits overnight?
What happens if your child is bored for twenty minutes?
What happens if you don't check?
What happens if the meeting becomes an email?
What happens if nobody fills the silence?
We have become extremely familiar with the cost of waiting.
We're less practised at asking about the cost of not waiting.
Not waiting has costs too
Rushed decisions.
Interruptions.
Impulse purchases.
Fragmented attention.
Artificial urgency.
More communication.
More consumption.
Less anticipation.
Fewer natural boundaries.
Less incubation.
Reduced tolerance for uncertainty.
Other people's time being repeatedly claimed.
None of these happens every time we choose immediacy.
But neither is immediacy free.
That's the argument.
We removed friction because friction has costs.
Correct.
Now perhaps we need to recognise that zero friction has costs as well.
The interesting design problem sits between them.
Maybe patience is not passive
We talk about patience as though nothing is happening.
Just wait.
But perhaps patience is an active decision.
I could intervene.
I won't yet.
I could demand certainty.
I'll tolerate not knowing.
I could fill this gap.
I'll leave it open.
I could chase them.
They still have the time we agreed.
I could buy this.
I'll decide tomorrow.
I could answer immediately.
I'll finish what I'm doing.
That's not helplessness.
That's control.
Maybe we've misunderstood patience because modern culture equates action with agency.
Sometimes agency is action.
Sometimes it is deliberately not reacting.
This is where The Man Who Collected Silence keeps returning
The bells were never the whole problem.
There will always be bells.
There will always be requests.
Signals.
Offers.
Messages.
Possibilities.
Something wanting attention.
The important realisation was that a bell could ring without automatically becoming the next action.
This essay is the temporal version of the same idea.
Something can exist without being immediate.
A question can remain unanswered for a while.
A desire can remain unsatisfied.
A problem can sit.
A message can wait.
The gap is not necessarily failure.
Sometimes the gap is where choice lives.
Perhaps friction protected us from ourselves
Not always.
But sometimes.
The shop being closed meant you couldn't buy the thing.
The person being unreachable meant you couldn't interrupt them.
The slow post meant you couldn't expect an immediate reply.
The programme schedule meant television ended.
The film roll meant photographs were scarce.
The physical book had a final page.
The lack of entertainment meant boredom had to go somewhere.
We removed the constraint.
And now increasingly have to recreate its useful function through self-control.
That doesn't mean removal was a mistake.
It means freedom requires more judgement than constraint did.
When something is impossible, no decision is required.
When everything is available, choice becomes continuous.
Waiting can be a form of protection
Protection for thought.
Protection for attention.
Protection for another person's time.
Protection from impulse.
Protection from premature decisions.
Protection for anticipation.
Protection for recovery.
Protection for processes that simply need longer than our impatience would prefer.
Maybe some friction should remain because not every possible acceleration is an improvement.
So what would happen if we just… waited?
Sometimes something bad.
Let's be clear.
The opportunity disappears.
The customer leaves.
The issue worsens.
The deadline passes.
Act.
But sometimes?
Almost nothing.
The email is answered tomorrow.
The parcel arrives Thursday.
Someone solves their own problem.
Your child invents something to do.
The urge to buy passes.
The difficult decision becomes clearer.
The idea improves.
You realise the task wasn't urgent.
Your attention remains where you put it.
You discover that uncertainty is uncomfortable but survivable.
And every now and then, something rather valuable happens in the space where you expected nothing to happen at all.
You think.
You notice.
You anticipate.
You choose.
You change your mind.
You let something develop.
Maybe that is what we lost sight of.
Waiting was never just empty time between one useful thing and another.
Sometimes the waiting was part of the useful thing.
Sources And Further Reading
Xianchi Dai and Ayelet Fishbach, “When Waiting To Choose Increases Patience”, Organizational Behavior And Human Decision Processes (2013).
Across five studies, prior waiting sometimes increased participants' willingness to choose larger later rewards over smaller sooner ones. The authors argued that waiting could increase the perceived value of what participants were waiting for. Importantly, the effects were context-dependent rather than evidence that waiting universally increases patience.
Anke Zeißig et al., “The Association Between Boredom And Creativity In Educational Contexts: A Scoping Review On Research Approaches And Empirical Findings”, Review Of Education (2024).
The review examined 19 publications containing 27 empirical studies and found positive, negative, contradictory and non-significant relationships between boredom and creativity. The authors concluded that the popular idea that boredom reliably increases creativity is not sufficiently supported by current evidence.
Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod, “Does Incubation Enhance Problem Solving? A Meta-Analytic Review”, Psychological Bulletin (2009).
The meta-analysis identified an overall positive incubation effect, with outcomes differing by task type, preparation, length and the cognitive demands of activities performed during the break. Divergent-thinking tasks showed stronger benefits than some other problem categories.
Benjamin Baird et al., “Inspired By Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation”, Psychological Science (2012).
An experiment found that participants completing an undemanding task during an incubation period subsequently improved more on previously encountered divergent-thinking problems than participants given a demanding task, rest or no break.
Amit Kumar, Matthew Killingsworth and Thomas Gilovich, “Waiting For Merlot: Anticipatory Consumption Of Experiential And Material Purchases”, Psychological Science (2014).
Across four studies, people tended to derive more positive anticipation from upcoming experiential purchases than from material purchases, illustrating that waiting can sometimes contribute positively to the overall consumption experience.
Tunyaporn Vichiengior, Claire-Lise Ackermann and Adrian Palmer, “When Waiting Makes Sense: How Consumer Anticipation Affects Later Evaluations”, International Journal Of Research In Marketing (2025).
Across five studies in two cultural contexts, stronger anticipation of pleasant consumption was associated with durable effects on subsequent evaluation, reinforcing the idea that the period before an experience can form part of the experience itself.
Stephen M. Nowlis, Naomi Mandel and Deborah Brown McCabe, “The Effect Of A Delay Between Choice And Consumption On Consumption Enjoyment”, Journal Of Consumer Research (2004).
Three studies found that delayed consumption could increase enjoyment for pleasurable products under particular conditions, with the effect depending partly on anticipation and the vividness of the awaited product.
Rouba Ibrahim, “Sharing Delay Information In Service Systems: A Literature Survey”, Queueing Systems (2018).
A review of the literature on delay announcements found that information about expected waits can reduce uncertainty, improve customer satisfaction and help customers decide whether to enter or remain in congested service systems.
Yizhe Lin and James Agarwal, “Dual Perspectives Of Customer Wait Time Perception: A Conceptual Framework And Meta-Analysis” (2026).
A meta-analysis of 129 studies from 103 articles, containing 672 effect sizes and 38,967 participants, found that subjective perceptions of waiting interact with anxiety, anger, expectations and perceived acceptability. The findings reinforce that waiting is a psychological experience rather than merely objective elapsed time.
Sebastian Böddeker et al., “Keep Them Busy, Keep Them Flowing? The Effects Of Actively Versus Passively Occupied Wait Time”, Journal Of Business Research (2025).
Two experiments found that actively occupying customers during a service wait could increase flow, satisfaction with waiting and intention to return compared with passive waiting, while longer objective waits weakened some of the benefit.
Olga R. Rennecker and Lindsey A. Godwin, “Delays And Interruptions: A Self-Perpetuating Paradox Of Communication Technology Use”, Information And Organization (2005).
The authors distinguish delays, where work cannot proceed because information is unavailable, from interruptions, where ongoing activity is disrupted. Communication technologies can reduce the first while inadvertently increasing the second, creating an important trade-off between immediacy and uninterrupted work.
Thomas Jackson, Ray Dawson and Darren Wilson, “Reducing The Effect Of Email Interruptions On Employees”, International Journal Of Information Management (2003).
Workplace observation showed employees often reacted to email extremely quickly despite email's asynchronous technical design, demonstrating how a communication medium capable of waiting can still become interruptive through behaviour and notification design.
Sanna Tiilikainen, Virpi Tuunainen, Suprateek Sarker and Ilkka Arminen, “Toward A Process-Based, Interpretive Understanding Of How Collaborative Groups Deal With ICT Interruptions”, MIS Quarterly (2024).
This qualitative work complicates simplistic claims about interruption by showing collaborative groups can sometimes manage ICT interruptions smoothly and recover without serious disruption, reinforcing the importance of context rather than treating all interruptions as identical.
Research Gaps
Waiting is not one psychological state.
Waiting for medical results, waiting in a checkout queue, anticipating a holiday, postponing a purchase and allowing an idea to incubate involve very different levels of control, uncertainty, consequence and emotion. Evidence from one category should not be casually generalised to all others.
Boredom should not be sold as a creativity hack.
The 2024 scoping review found highly inconsistent relationships between boredom and creativity. Some experiments found positive effects, others negative or null effects. The stronger claim supported here is simply that automatically eliminating boredom removes one possible condition in which self-generated activity, mind-wandering or other responses might occur.
Incubation effects are real but conditional.
Meta-analytic evidence supports an overall incubation benefit in problem solving, but effects depend on problem type, preparation and what happens during the break. “Stop working and the answer will magically appear” is not justified by the research.
Mind-wandering is not universally beneficial.
The cited creativity experiment involved a particular divergent-thinking paradigm. Mind-wandering can impair performance when sustained attention is required, and its effects depend heavily on task and context.
Anticipation research is largely about pleasurable consumption.
Findings showing that anticipation can add enjoyment to experiences do not mean unpleasant or anxiety-provoking waits gain similar benefits. Waiting for a holiday and waiting for a biopsy result should not be treated as psychologically comparable.
Uncertainty can impose genuine harm.
The argument that some uncertainty should be tolerated is not an argument that organisations should withhold useful information. Research on service and healthcare waiting consistently indicates that clear information about delays can reduce uncertainty and improve experience.
The value of “friction” is highly context-dependent.
A delay that protects reflection in one context may represent inefficiency, exclusion or poor service in another. There is no general scientific threshold separating useful friction from harmful friction.
Asynchronous work involves trade-offs.
Waiting for responses can protect concentration and reduce interruptions, but excessive communication delay can stall collaboration. Research on remote work also shows that increased asynchronous communication can coincide with more siloed collaboration and reduced information sharing across groups.
Natural stopping points and infinite digital feeds need more direct study in this context.
The essay argues that older media and commercial environments contained more externally imposed stopping points and that removing them increases the burden on individual self-control. The claim is conceptually plausible, but stronger causal evidence would be needed before quantifying the effect on attention or wellbeing.
The idea that friction protects agency is philosophical rather than an established psychological construct.
The argument is that small delays can create a space between impulse and response in which choice becomes possible. Research on self-control, impulsivity and choice architecture may support elements of this idea, but “protective friction” is used here as a conceptual framing rather than a validated scientific term.
Childhood comparisons require particular caution.
Growing up with fewer sources of instant entertainment does not prove previous generations had greater creativity, agency or psychological health. The environment was different in many other ways, and generational nostalgia can easily be mistaken for evidence.
Deliberate waiting can become procrastination.
An overnight pause may improve a difficult decision, while repeatedly postponing an uncomfortable decision may simply be avoidance. The same observable delay can serve very different psychological functions.
Waiting can be unequally expensive.
A wealthy professional waiting an extra day for a discretionary purchase has a different experience from an hourly worker losing income while waiting for a delayed appointment or public service. Discussions of patience must distinguish optional waiting from time costs imposed on people with limited resources or control.