With Instant gratification; How patience is trolled as a skill?
Having any kind of skill is important and its commonly understood among any species as it brings recognition, creativity, understanding and plenty more positive aspects. What is it like to be patient?
According to Oxford dictionary term is explained as “the ability to stay calm and accept a delay or something annoying without complaining” How wonderful it would be if everybody becomes patient? In my opinion, being overtly patient has its losses too, lets keep this for the next time, for now, let us focus on the positive side of it.
How can one gain patience as a skill, to start with:
1. Stop and analyse your thought ( practice thinking before speaking )
2. Do not take instant decisions, do not rush, be it related to life or keeping yourself entertained.
3. Experience day to day things from a third person’s perspective.
4. Be empathetic
5. Having a calm down approach – slow down and smell some roses on the way.
Do you think it is easy to grasp and practice? The simpler it sounds the challenging it gets, however, what is the key to follow such aspects? And make them a part of our life?
The simple answer to that question should be – being mindful about patience and be present in the moment, but how frequently we retain the term patience in our conscious mind?
In our surrounding do we even have a scope to be patient? Aren’t we all running towards the unknown and contributing towards the rat race? Let’s forget the rat race for now, let us focus on ME-TIME. while surfing on the youtube, Facebook, Instagram, the internet or life decisions overall to be keeping a broader perspective.
How often we are patiently observing be it anything ? are not we skipping and moving to next? Do you find it relatable? That’s the story of most of the people around us and surely it is not your fault! Just like using a Nokia 1100 during the age of smartphones – you cannot keep your self out of the league can you really? But what is it bringing us or resulting in? killing our patience level? Surely it is.
As we are looking for instantaneous results/output and most importantly how is it responding to our psychological wellbeing? Let’s dive a little further and discuss,
What is gratification?
“The state of feeling pleasure when something goes well for you or when your desires are satisfied; something that gives you pleasure” that’s what Oxford dictionary defines the term for us.
The keywords to notice here shall be – Pleasure, something goes well, desires, satisfied – can you relate It to yourself aren’t you looking for the mentioned keywords instantly? How do you fill up that dopamine rush? To feel instantly gratified?
Everyone has their own way to reach the pleasure rush. And fortunate enough whatever we desire for is available. I feel more than feeling blessed about it, I feel it is a curse for example – Instant food is leading to obesity, too much screen time leading to a low level of attention span, instant travelling and production of unrequired goods I guess – plastic bags leading – emission of greenhouse gases leading to change in the climate. I can go on and on on this.
The question that I would ask here is – Do we really have to achieve instant gratification?
Well, living in the current day & age we cannot ignore it either so living with it has to be in the lifestyle however having said we can always practice being patient and be aware of our own being and avoiding near hustle-bustle of hasty decisions and creating chaos.
Human beings are not born to multitask, Read more on - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/01/24/170160105/if-you-think-youre-good-at-multitasking-you-probably-arent
Yet, we are amplifying our range to reach the unknown probably achieving the dream life that we all want? It is not wrong to dream big and live a wonderful life but on the cost of what? Will it do any good to us or the coming generations? Most importantly our planet earth?
Before scrolling, your feed senselessly next time – Do stop and think? Is it really required and what is it fetching me? That’s it for this blog post.
I work as a psychologist in Gurgaon/ Life coach – you can read more about me on my quora page - https://www.quora.com/profile/Prashant-Das-11
Any questions you can feel free to ask. You can reach me on my website – www.selbic.org
