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On curation, patience, and the things we stopped discovering
Ask anyone that I hang out with and they’ll tell you I’m incredibly impatient.
Whether it’s dreading waiting in line, skipping a song after my favorite part, or burning my mouth because I didn’t wait for my food to cool down. Zero patience.
Gone are the days of burning CDs.
No more building the perfect playlists on an iPod to listen to over and over again.
How many people even channel surf anymore?
Now everything is curated.
Recommended.
The intentional discovery we used to engage in is now subconscious.
It was never this bad…
Or was it?
We can blame social media and “the algorithm”, but maybe those things aren’t creating the impatience, they’re just exposing it.
What if technology has just removed the friction that forced patience on us.
Did we make the playlists because we enjoyed it?
Or was there just no other way.
Did we enjoy waiting months for a movie to exit the theaters and show up at Blockbuster or Redbox?
Or was there just no other way?
Maybe being impatient is part of the human experience and some of us just have learned the skill of patience. Or maybe patience is an amalgamation of other virtues, a Frankenstein’s monster of learned behaviors.
Lucky Charms
In the 1970s at Stanford, Walter Mischel began a series of experiments on delayed gratification using marshmallows, starting with just 32 children. The follow-up studies that made headlines tracked an even smaller subset. Yet somehow, this became one of the most cited findings in psychology.
You may have seen copycats of this online: a child is offered one marshmallow now, or two if they can wait 15 minutes. According to Mischel’s follow up studies, children who waited longer had better test scores and even healthier bodies. Patience influences your destiny.
However, a 2018 study of around 900 children (and a more diverse group of children than the initial studies) showed that patience was not what allowed children to wait longer for candy.
In this study, they found an increase in academic success and good behavior later on in life from children who waited just 20 seconds.
So it was not just patience.
What they did find, however, was the importance of the children’s socioeconomic background.
Kids from more affluent and educated homes were trusting that the researchers would actually come back and provide them with more candy than initially provided.
They trusted that the adults would actually provide the better rewards.
Patience is not a personality trait, rather, it is a response to your environment.
Kids from unstable homes learned that promises don’t always get kept. So they ate the marshmallow.
If we can give up patience, can we also give up the ability to choose?
Accept Cookies?
Every click or touch you make on a webpage is tracked. Every product you lingered on for two seconds too long is tracked.
Handed to an algorithm that now knows you better than you know yourself.
That algorithm is what fills your Netflix homepage and your Spotify feed. It’s not showing you new things. It’s showing you a reflection of your own past behavior, slightly rearranged.
Spotify even has a playlist called “Discover Weekly.”
But real discovery was stumbling onto a song you’d never have chosen. Flipping channels and landing on a movie you’d never have rented.
The algorithm eliminated this stumbling by design. It only shows you more of what you already responded to, a feedback loop dressed up as a recommendation.
The European Union noticed this was happening and included laws in the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requiring websites to tell you if they’re tracking you.
That’s why every website you visit now greets you with a cookie banner. A legal requirement, born from genuine concern about your privacy, that you have clicked “Accept All” on approximately ten thousand times without reading.
We were given the right to know yet we waived it immediately.
But maybe we’re tired of making decisions. We’ve made decisions all day.
Deciding what to wear for the day.
How much effort to put into chores, work, school, friends, children, significant others.
Ourselves.
How much easier is it to turn on a device and have the decisions made for you.
Maybe you’re starving but can’t eat your food without something to watch. So you pick the show that you’ve watched 100 times because it is the first thing provided to you.
Are we impatient? Or are we just tired?
Maybe we really just don’t care.
I Can’t Decide, You Pick.
I don’t think the algorithm is the villain here.
It didn’t make us impatient, it just noticed we already were.
It didn’t take away our ability to choose. It offered us a way out of choosing, and we took it.
Enthusiastically.
Every single day.
The marshmallow test told us patience is shaped by our environment. The environments we built are optimized for instant delivery and frictionless consumption. So why act surprised when patience starts feeling like an inconvenience?
We clicked “Accept All.”
We scrolled until something caught our eye.
So the algorithm learned. Because every time we couldn’t wait, every time we let it decide, we were teaching it exactly what kind of person we are. We told it we don’t want to discover.
Maybe the more uncomfortable question isn’t what the algorithm is doing to us.
Maybe it’s what we’ve been telling it all along.
But in the meantime, send me any recommendations you have for meal prep.
I’m getting tired of making the same thing.