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The Nuance
How to Cultivate Patience, the Ancient Virtue We All Need Right Now
The way we live now discourages patience. It’s time to reprioritize this lost virtue.
Two days before the Associated Press declared him the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden tried to settle his nation’s rattled nerves. “[Democracy] sometimes requires a little patience,” he remarked. “Stay calm . . . the process is working.”
For many, it wasn’t working fast enough. Every hour that passed seemed to turn up the tension and frustration of the U.S. electorate. Protests and counterprotests broke out. After just a few days of waiting, America seemed poised to lose its collective shit. Contrast this state of affairs with the 2000 contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, which remained in limbo for five weeks following Election Day. If you can’t imagine today’s America putting up with that kind of delay, experts can’t either.
“Patience is a character strength that our society has definitely neglected,” says Sarah Schnitker, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Baylor University. “Over the past 20 years in particular, as our technology has advanced at a very fast pace, I think it’s changed our expectations about when and how much we should have to wait as well as our general ideas about suffering.”
Much of Schnitker’s research has centered on patience. She says that many of history’s great philosophers, from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, regarded patience as one of humanity’s noblest attributes. Likewise, most of the major Eastern and Western religions — from Judaism and Christianity to Islam and Buddhism — describe patience as a fundamental virtue to be admired and cultivated.
“Patience is a character strength that our society has definitely neglected.”
But since the Industrial Revolution ushered in a new era of speed, production, and consumption, patience…
