Culture of Impatience

A Man who is a master of patience is a master of everything – George Savile

Pile of bulky items belonging to Samat Kidam left at the lift landing of Marsiling rental flat was set ablaze because Samat ignored residents' complaints and refused to removed them. Fight outside Tan tock Seng Hospital. One swings golf club and the other trade punches. Singapore PR Amy Cheong got terminated from her job at NTUC after posting seditious remarks on her Facebook wall.

In the past 6 months, we have witnessed so many events that demonstrated how impatient Singaporeans have become. Violence have been use to solve heated arguments or disagreements. Verbal abuse have been used as self-defence. Many of which led to ugly and messy settlements. Many regretted their actions. And the impact is greatly felt not just to the families and close friends, but also Singaporeans in general.

Culture is the expression of a population that successfully manages generational change through a series of techniques except we live in a fast-paced environment; the modern human is impatient. How many times have we been frustrated when the bus or MRT was delayed? How many times do we honk at the cars in front when they were 3 seconds late after the light turned green? How many times we snared at the person who was hogging the ATM machine? Now we tell our microwave oven to hurry up, and we can’t function until our handphone recharges. 

We are not destined to be the impatient society. But until we lend more patience to the understanding of our most complex problems and to the nurturing of the civil relationships that allow us to act with consensus on them, we may stay the captives of our current frustration. 

Technology didn’t create impatience. Instead, impatience created new technologies. Indeed, one of the byproducts of an increasingly democratized society in which more and more people have the vote and other opportunities to voice their concerns is a sense of entitlement, and one of the things to which we believe we are entitled is action so that we won’t be wasting our time. So much of our technology — from smartphones to Ipads — is a response to our desire for instant gratification in a society that encourages us to feel that way. We want what we want and we want it now.

No one waits anymore, except maybe at Starbucks. We have instant messaging, instant digital images, instant news, and literally thousands of other apps that put the entire world on demand. But what has largely gone unnoticed is that speed has also changed our political psychology. It isn’t just that folks register instant opinions or receive instant information or form instant groups of like-minded individuals or make instant contributions. There is a deeper impact with potentially a much greater consequence — namely, that we have become profoundly impatient with the pace of political change.

The point isn’t that our system of government isn’t nimble enough for an age of rapid response, though that is unfortunately true. The point is that there is a major disconnect between a new political psychology of instant gratification and the stubborn intransigence of life, between an increasingly impatient society and a government that can’t deliver results quickly enough.

In the short run, this has erupted in understandable frustration and anger and a desire to turn out the party in power. In the long run, it may lead to something much more dramatic because when the popular culture promises what the political culture cannot produce, the temptation is to try to change the political culture into the popular culture. We want a hero who gives us instant results — an Iron Man. And there is likely to be a good deal of turbulence unless we find one — not the turbulence of populism or Tea Baggerism or left-wing disappointment, but the turbulence that comes from our newfound impatience.

Singaporeans can withhold judgments, step back from posting updates on Facebook or Twitter that generate more heat than light, and seek to find common ground instead of battleground.  At the initial level, we will have to address the fundamentalism and intolerance from the society if we want to move forward as human being.