Waiting for Code, Not For Each Other
I waited twelve minutes yesterday for a video to load without feeling frustrated, watching the progress bar inch forward with something approaching meditation. But when Happy paused mid-sentence to find the right word, I felt the familiar internal pressure of impatience after perhaps three seconds. I can sit calmly through buffering, updates, and digital delays, but human pauses make me restless.
This inversion of patience reveals something uncomfortable about how we’ve learned to value efficiency over humanity, predictability over the messy reality of consciousness trying to express itself through language.
Loading screens come with clear expectations. The progress bar tells me exactly where we are in the process, the percentage gives me a sense of time remaining, the spinning wheel assures me that something is happening even if I can’t see the result yet. Human communication offers none of these convenient indicators. When someone is thinking, I don’t know if they need three seconds or thirty, whether they’re searching for a word or reconsidering their entire point.
I’ve become conditioned to trust machines more than people when it comes to the productive use of time. When my computer is processing, I believe it’s working efficiently toward a specific goal. When a person is processing—thinking, feeling, choosing words carefully—I often interpret the pause as inefficiency, as wasted time, as a barrier to getting to whatever information I think I need.
This patience differential extends beyond individual conversations. I’ll wait in digital queues, refresh pages repeatedly, sit through endless software updates without complaint. But in human queues—at the grocery store, the bank, the doctor’s office—I become agitated quickly. The digital waiting feels productive somehow, while human waiting feels like stolen time.
There’s something deeply troubling about this. We’ve extended more grace to algorithms than to consciousness, more understanding to code than to the complex process of human thought and feeling. We’ve trained ourselves to be patient with mechanical processes while becoming increasingly intolerant of the organic, unpredictable rhythms of actual life.
I notice this most clearly with Arash. When he’s struggling to explain something he experienced at school, searching for words to describe a feeling or situation, I can feel my internal impatience building. I want him to get to the point, to communicate more efficiently, to download his thoughts directly into my understanding. But then I catch myself: I’m treating my eleven-year-old son like a malfunctioning app, expecting his consciousness to perform with the reliability of software.
The comparison becomes even more stark when I realize that I’ll wait patiently for a large file to download while simultaneously feeling irritated with an elderly person ahead of me in line who’s taking time to count their money carefully. The file’s progress is predictable, measurable, purposeful. The person’s process is human—involving arthritis, perhaps poor eyesight, maybe anxiety about making a mistake. One deserves my patience; the other receives my judgment.
We’ve unconsciously absorbed the values of our devices: efficiency over empathy, speed over depth, productivity over presence. Machines have taught us that delays are acceptable only if they serve a clear purpose and move toward a defined endpoint. But human delays—the pauses for thought, the moments of uncertainty, the time needed to process emotions—these serve purposes that can’t be quantified or progress-barred.
Happy has noticed this in me, the way I’ve become impatient with natural human rhythms while remaining tolerant of digital ones. “You wait for everything except people,” she observed once, and the accuracy of it stung. I’ve trained myself to be patient with processes but impatient with persons, understanding with systems but intolerant of souls.
The loading screen provides the illusion of control. I know that waiting will eventually lead to completion, that the process has been designed with an endpoint in mind. Human interaction offers no such guarantees. When someone is thinking through a problem, they might reach a conclusion, change their mind entirely, or discover they need more information. The uncertainty makes me uncomfortable in ways that digital uncertainty never does.
There’s also the question of what we think we’re waiting for. Digital loading prepares content for consumption—a video to watch, a page to read, information to absorb. But when we’re impatient with people, what are we waiting for? For them to become more efficient? More predictable? More like the devices we’ve learned to trust?
I think about conversations with my grandfather, how he would take long pauses between sentences, sometimes sitting in silence for what felt like minutes before continuing his thought. I learned to trust that silence, to understand that something important was happening in those quiet moments—not loading or buffering, but the deeper work of connecting experience to wisdom, feeling to language, memory to meaning.
The patience we show loading screens is transactional—we wait because we want something. The patience we could show people is relational—we wait because we respect the complexity of consciousness, because we understand that the best thoughts and feelings can’t be rushed, because we value the person enough to honor their natural rhythms.
Sometimes I deliberately practice human patience now, treating conversations like meditation rather than information exchange. When Arash pauses mid-story, instead of feeling impatient, I try to appreciate that something beautiful is happening: a young mind sorting through experience, choosing words, deciding what matters enough to share. This isn’t inefficiency—it’s the miraculous process of consciousness making sense of itself.
The loading screen patience is passive—we wait while something else does the work. Human patience is active—we participate in the shared creation of understanding, contributing our attention and presence to help thoughts and feelings emerge naturally. One is consumption; the other is collaboration.
I’ve started noticing how differently people respond when they sense they have my full patience versus my impatience. When Happy feels rushed, she speaks less clearly, second-guesses herself, apologizes for taking time to think. When she feels I have all the time in the world for her thoughts, she speaks with greater clarity and depth, trusting the process of her own thinking.
The digital world has trained us to expect instant responses, immediate loading, constant availability. But consciousness doesn’t work on digital time. Feelings need space to emerge, thoughts need time to develop, and relationships need patience to deepen. The most important human communications often happen in the pauses, in the silences, in the spaces between words where understanding actually grows.
Maybe the question isn’t why we’re more patient with loading screens than with people, but what it would mean to extend the same grace to consciousness that we extend to code, the same faith to human processing that we place in digital processing, the same understanding that good things sometimes take time—whether they’re happening in silicon or in souls.
In the end, both forms of waiting serve a purpose: loading screens prepare content for us to consume, but human pauses prepare space for genuine connection to emerge. One fills our devices with information; the other fills our hearts with understanding. One is mechanical; the other is miraculous.
The choice of where to invest our patience isn’t just about managing time—it’s about choosing what kind of world we want to inhabit, what kinds of relationships we want to build, and whether we value efficiency more than empathy, completion more than connection.
Perhaps the most radical act in our impatient age is to wait for people the way we wait for our devices—with faith that something worthwhile is happening, with trust in the process, and with the understanding that the most important things in life can’t be rushed, only received with the patience they deserve.
