Almost every major upgrade in human history has been an attempt to reduce the gap between wanting something and having it. We built the internet out of a desire for immediacy; waiting weeks for a letter to cross the ocean felt like agonizing torture.

However, this creates a psychological loop that never ends. Technology actively feeds the very impatience that nurtured it. Consider the evolution of the web. When dial-up internet first arrived, I remember being thrilled to watch a single webpage slowly render over two minutes. A few years later, those two minutes felt like an eternity. Today, if a website takes more than three seconds to load, I click away in frustration.

Our thresholds for waiting are constantly disappearing. Yesterday’s miracle now feels like today’s annoyance. We discovered our demand for instant food delivery only after the apps existed. Now, a thirty-minute wait for a meal feels like a crisis.