1797: [Part 1] How to Be Patient in an Impatient World by Mark Manson on The Skinner Box

It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with WestJet from rolling country side to cobblestone streets. Begin your next chapter. Book your seat at WestJet.com or call your travel agent, WestJet, where your story takes off. This is optimal living daily episode 1797.

How to be patient in an impatient world, part one, by Mark Manson of Mark Manson.net and I'm Justin Molick. Happy Wednesday and happy Veterans Day. Thank you to everyone who has served and welcome to the show where I read to you kind of like bedtime stories, but hopefully not putting you to sleep. Instead, it's meant to help your productivity, mindfulness, happiness and more.

And today I have a bit of a longer post, I'll read the first half today and then finish the recipe tomorrow. So with that, let's get right to it and start optimizing your life. How to be patient in an impatient world, part one by Mark Manson of Mark Manson.net. Every introductory psychology class talks about this thing called the Skinner box.

Sounds like something out of a song movie, but it's actually a famous psychological method from the golden days of research back when pregnant women still drank and torturing rats for science was cool. A Skinner box works like this. A rat or some other unsuspecting small animal is placed in this box, which has a lever and a little feeding bowl. The rat sniffs around the box and not knowing what that was going on on so many levels, it will eventually push the lever by chance.

A sugary little treat is then delivered into the bowl. If you learn anything from Pixar movies, is that rats really love to fucking eat. The Skinner box is no different. The rats quickly figure out that pushing the lever equals getting a delicious snack.

So they keep doing it over and over and over. But then at some point, you stop giving the rat the treat and this is off the rat. It'll hit the lever over and over and over, frantically trying to get the treat. It feels it desperately deserves until finally after exhausting itself, it will give up and resign itself to fate.

That life is the treats arch. Everything is a lie. The rat will then smoke cigarettes and write bad French philosophy about his terrible disappointment with his own existence. The Skinner box demonstrated something fundamental in animal behavior.

If something feels good, we will do it again and again and again, and we eventually grow a sense of entitlement to that pleasurable thing. We deserve to feel that pleasure. We deserve to be rewarded. And when the reward is taken from us, we throw a total hissy fit.

Today, life is full of Skinner boxes. Your phone is a Skinner box. Your television is a Skinner box. Your wife is, okay, I better stop there.

The point is, every day in the modern world, we too get little packets of pleasure delivered to us with a push of a button. And the more packets of pleasure, the more impatient we get when we don't get our desired reward. Next thing you know, we're complaining about Uber drivers taking a wrong turn and too many unwanted emails on Monday morning. And what the piece of guy was supposed to be here eight minutes ago, I'm triggered.

I think the last time I was admonished to shut up and be patient, I was young enough that I pulled my pants all the way down and lifted my shirt to pee. Parents are always wagging their finger at their children to practice patience, to wait a little longer, to delay gratification and focus on long-term consequences instead of short-term rewards. Yet, as adults, we celebrate in patience. I'm so busy, I don't have time for this.

Everyone's doing eight things at the same time and doing all eight things poorly. Why? Because I can't wait, nothing can wait. We need results now.

Patients is a virtue and a virtue of the world is sorely lacking at the moment. Being more patient in our daily lives can do wonders for our mental health, our economic prosperity, and can perhaps make the world seem like slightly less of a hemorrhoid riddled full. Waiting versus waiting patiently. A lot of people miss take patience for the ability to wait for something.

But this isn't quite true. Patience isn't simply being able to wait for a reward. It's our attitude towards waiting. For example, I might be able to wait for the pizza I ordered an hour and a half ago, but I can do so in one of two ways.

Number one, patiently, calmly working on this draft, reading a book and just enjoying my time alone before my large jalapeno pepperoni pie with extra garlic sauce arrives. Number two, impatiently, pacing around my apartment, calling the restaurant again, and showing on my t-shirt to sue my hunger pangs. Obviously, one of these options is better than the other. Better for me, better for the delivery guy, better for my t-shirt.

But the evidence suggests that we're becoming worse at this. We're becoming more impatient. As you can see, modern society has become its own slightly more complicated skinner box. Instead of levers, we push buttons, some real, mini-virtual, others imagined.

And instead of those buttons delivering sugary pellets with which to stuff our golets, they deliver endless streaming entertainment options, digital proxies for social interaction. Same day shipping on yet another new bedroom sets. Oh, and sugary, overstimulating tasty food for a rapacious golets. And it's all literally at our fingertips 24-7.

In the name of convenience, the market continues to promise a world where we no longer have to wait patiently, that whatever we want, we should have it as quickly as possible. These services and devices then act on us as our own little virtual skinner box, making us less patient and more irritable when things don't quite go our way. Hashtag first world problems. The problem with this is that upgrading convenience, psychologically speaking, has diminishing returns.

For instance, discovering Uber was exciting the first three or four times I used it. Now I find myself perpetually annoyed that my car is going to take three minutes longer than I expected, three minutes. This driver must be an idiot. This incredible service that I couldn't have even imagined existing a few years ago is now putting me off on an almost daily basis.

And for what? For three minutes. Examples like this are all around us. Some are just stupid, like more than half of people won't wait more than three seconds for a web page to load before closing it.

Others are horrifying. Road rage, for instance, is on the rise. The point is, the upside of convenience is short-lived. The downside is constant and perpetual.

And when we're optimizing our lives for convenience, we're setting ourselves up for a near constant sense of irritation and entitlement. Sound familiar? Welcome to the 21st century. To be continued.

You just listened to part one of the post titled How to Be Patient in an Impatient World by Mark Manson of Mark Manson.net. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on. Superpower finally takes the guessing out of it. One simple lab test covers over 100 biomarkers and their app gives you a complete picture of your heart, liver, hormones, metabolism, even environmental toxins.

Plus, it used to cost $499 right now. It's just $199. And head to superpower.com and use code old at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. Thank you, Mark.

I'll save my comments for after the article is finished tomorrow in part two. So in the meantime, thank you for being here and listening every day. Have a happy Veterans Day. And thank you again to everyone who has served.

I'll be back tomorrow to finish up this post, where your optimal life awaits.