Back before the pandemic, when the GQ staff all worked together in a skyscraper, a favorite in-office activity was discussing how long we had to wait for the building’s elevators. Or, more accurately, griping and grousing about how long we had to wait for the elevators, because waiting is something seemingly everyone finds annoying. Now, these days, it can feel like all we’re doing is waiting: for the election to finally happen, then for election results. Or waiting for a vaccine, and for the pandemic to finally end. Waiting to see what life might look like on the other side of this. It's…not a great feeling. But what if it didn't have to be this bad?
Jason Farman has some answers. A professor at Maryland University and the author of Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World, Farman has spent years studying our relationship to time, and how it has evolved throughout history and across societies.
GQ caught up with him for a conversation about why humans have such a difficult time with waiting, the perils of living in a society that can’t tolerate pauses, and what we can do—and learn from other cultures—to make seemingly interminable waits just a little bit more tolerable.
GQ: Why do we have such a problem with waiting?
Jason Farman: In the United States, we absolutely think of our time as individual—and also as our scarcest resource. When we imagine productive time—time being used wisely, time being used well—waiting is contrary to all of that. If you make me wait, you're limiting my ability to be successful in this life. Other people control our time in a way that makes us feel powerless. We don't feel in control. I think that sense of powerlessness and lack of control really drives our hatred of waiting.
But not all cultures have a problem with waiting. It depends on so many factors: how a society thinks about time, and about collective relationships with one another, whether people think of their time as intertwined or they think of their time as individual.
Of the research you've done into other cultures and how they relate to time and waiting, what have you found most interesting?
I spent quite a bit of time in Japan. How people line up is very different. If you line up for the subway in Japan, it's very orderly. There are lines drawn in front of every door that people queue up behind. That carries over into these moments of national crisis. After the Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima crisis in 2011, as people waited in line for resources like food and water, it was incredibly orderly, there was no chaos. There was no stampeding. It was people honoring the wait as a symbol of their interconnectedness. Waiting was not seen as a negative thing. Waiting was seen as a contribution to society. We're all facing this crisis, and together, we will wait for our resources because you are just as important as I am.
A colleague of mine who studies and works closely with communities in Uganda mentioned to me that people in the community she works with will sometimes gather at the bus stop to head into work about an hour before the bus ever shows up. It's how they reiterated their connectedness: waiting together.
[In the United States] you always have these viral videos on Black Friday of people stampeding through the entrances of Walmart. Culturally, there's these really stark contrasts with our willingness to wait, and how we prioritize self over communities at moments. The experience of time is not universal. Our cultures have such an impact on how we perceive time as human beings. It’s not subjective hours and seconds that pass in a day.
I’m also thinking of how we experienced waiting for the election results, and how our cultural expectations affected that. It felt like we knew it would take a few days, but by the Friday after, we were getting really impatient to hear something.
If [a wait time] can beat expectations, then people leave the experience feeling positive about it. But, if it takes longer [than expected] or there's a lack of feedback, it’s like the buffering icon on your computer that just spins and you don't know when it's going to end. That's what the election was like for most people. I think that was part of why conspiracy theories emerged. We fill the wait time with meaning when it's complex and we don't understand what's happening behind the scenes.
You also have the 24-hour news networks, who have to fill space with news even when nothing new is happening.
It is such an interesting question: How does the media cycle look if pauses are valued? What does Twitter look like with pauses? What does the 24-hour news cycle look like with a moment of pause and reflection? It’s built to eliminate that completely, and that was part of the concern that led me to write my book. What happens to us as individuals and as a society if we eliminate wait times from our lives completely? We want to eliminate them because we imagine them as being the antithesis of productivity and the good life.
I think we are going to have to build in pauses and boredom and daydreaming to get people to imagine new futures. I think we will have to build wait times into our workweek in order to get people to come up with new and inventive ways to solve problems.
Boredom, daydreaming, and waiting activate a part of the brain called the default network, which is often referred to as the imagination network. Have you ever been taking a shower and then all of a sudden you have a revelation? Or sitting in traffic and you solve a problem, or a new idea comes to you? It's really because you're letting yourself daydream and be bored, and those are the moments when our brain makes connections that we couldn't have found if we thought them out. We need these moments of pause in order for our brain to make creative and inventive connections across ideas, but we're not letting the workforce do that in any way. We're just asking people to use their time productively, but we have a very skewed definition of what productivity means.
What are the costs to society when there are no pauses?
I think we're losing the capacity to do nothing. In my own life, I have a very difficult time standing in line without taking my phone out of my pocket and scrolling through Twitter. I feel like I need to be doing something at all times, or I feel a sense of guilt about my use of time. The end result of that is higher stress levels, and an unhealthier population.
There's always something to pay attention to, or something to do, and we feel like we're accomplishing something by checking email or our Twitter feeds when we’re in line to get coffee. If we could get past the desire to occupy every minute of our days, we would actually devote hours to things that we care about rather than just feeling burned out from paying attention to things all day long.
I have that wanting to be connected and paying attention, but I also think, for me, there's this radical fear of being bored.
So many people have this deep-seated fear of boredom. It is an emotional state that we avoid at all costs. Part of that is the existential crises that boredom might evoke within us. Part of us fear that waiting is a reflection of the fact that maybe life is just about time passing. That is one of our deep fears: that waiting represents life in its essence, that life itself is about just having time pass, and occupying ourselves in various ways as we watch the hours go by. I think we ultimately will work to avoid the discomforts of boredom because we don't want to have to face our own mortality. Those deep existential questions emerge when we see time, and waiting makes us see time in ways that fun and productive time doesn't.
Historically, we always have been really bad at waiting, we've just had different frames of references. Letters would take 40 days in the 1790s to go down the East Coast. That was what you expected. So when the letter took 40 days, that was exactly on time, and when it didn't arrive in 40 days, that's when frustration mounted. Looking at those kinds of examples historically, we can see that we're always impatient based on what our expectations are. Those expectations shift based on the moment, on the technologies, and on the speed of life at a moment.
If you were to go back 10 years and chart people's expectations for how long an online video should buffer compared to our current moment, it would be radically different, but I don't think we are on this linear trajectory toward life just getting faster and faster until we fall apart. We can make some adjustments to say this is a healthier and more enjoyable way of living.
What of your work can we bring to this moment to help us while we're on this seemingly interminable wait for coronavirus to end?
The first thing that I encourage people to do is get past our knee-jerk emotional reactions to waiting. Instead, ask who's benefiting from waiting at a particular moment. When we first went into lockdown, and it was just weeks of waiting, I continually came back to this phrase: Waiting is an investment in the social fabric around me. By waiting, I am investing in the people around me and in their wellbeing. The fact that I'm indoors and enduring this waiting is a symbol that I care about their health. I care about trying to stem the spread of this thing.
So, now, when you’re waiting, do you still feel that itch of “I need to check my phone,” or has it disappeared?
It’s a habit, and I've gotten better at that. But I've had to pay attention to it. Tim Wu has this great book, The Attention Merchants, where he talks about when all is said and done, at the end of our lives, we will be what we paid attention to. That's sort of the essence of how life evolves. What we decide to pay attention to determines who we become. I've kept that in mind, like, I need to pay attention to it in order to alter those habits.
So I definitely feel the itch, almost quite literally, of my phone in my pocket when I have to wait, and I am conscious about leaving it there. I have developed practices that help make it a little bit easier to not turn to that as my default reaction. I mean, I could spend the rest of my life answering email. I will always have an email to answer, from here until I die. So in order to not have my life frittered away answering email or doing very mundane tasks, I have to be deliberate about how I walk away from that.
What are some of your other practices?
For my own work, I utilize the Pomodoro Method, which is where you're working for 20 minutes and then you take a five-minute break. I'll write for a very specific amount of time where I just focus on one task. I'm very prone to hopping between browser windows, so if I can say, "Okay, this short period of time I'm doing one thing, and I'm focusing on one thing." I'm happier, I'm more productive, and it helps me make it through the day without just jumping to the next email to answer.
And then just being very mindful of where the technology is, where the screens are, how easily accessible they are. Maybe I'll put it in a bag on the other side of the room or something like that. My happiest days are when the phone is not in my hand. If we can build those kinds of practices in, I think it really helps.
I’ve seen you talk about how time is tied up in sociocultural systems and can be something we can use to better understand some of the injustice and inequity in our society. Can you unpack how time is political in that way?
Waiting often creates disadvantages for particular people. The thing that came to mind for me as I was writing the book was the federal government's response to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. It just took forever for power to be restored. I was like, If this had happened in the DC area, it would not be a month later. When you look at who is being asked to wait, often people are being asked to wait in really unjust ways that reiterate their powerlessness in society. Time is not evenly distributed in society. It often keeps people at a disadvantage.
One of the memes that I remember getting passed around says, "Beyonce has the same 24 hours you do, so what's your excuse?" And that does feel like an accurate portrayal. We all have 24 hours, and your success either depends on how you use those 24 hours. But as you begin to study waiting, you see that people are asked to use their time in radically different ways around the world, and even within our country, that often keep them at a disadvantage. Somebody who, in order to make a living, has to work two jobs that are very far apart—they're spending hours on the bus each day. They're using their time in just such different ways than I am. Their 24 hours looks really different than my 24 hours.
So I think when we see people asked to use their time in ways that keep them disempowered or disenfranchised, we should rightfully be upset and frustrated about those moments of waiting. We should stand up against these wait times, and fight for the people who are being asked to use time in unjust ways.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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