Patience: The Lost Virtue of a Generation?

A couple of days ago, I was chatting with a primary school teacher in South Africa who was sharing his frustration with students' general attitude today. Coming from a time when the student-teacher relationship was clearly—oppressively—hierarchical, he was shocked by one of his student's unwillingness to focus in class and put away his phone after he called him out.

A situation that could have resumed in seconds, if only the student simply put away their device, escalated to a visit from the school’s principal, who, unfortunately, was not ultimately entitled to confiscate the phone. In the next class, the student was on his phone again.

The teacher’s major concern is that kids are losing their ability to focus, read, be patient, and do hard things. He shared a disheartening statistic that only 19% of grade four students in South Africa today read for meaning.

This got us thinking about the role of social media in shortening the attention spans of younger generations and, perhaps more significantly, our patience spans and ability to choose delayed gratification over instant pleasure. Dopamine hits, activated by the content algorithmically targeted to us, become a habit, a daily necessity. And when we are called to choose between watching one more TikTok video or returning to that long book / boring work task / teacher speaking, we choose the former.

Regarding patience, I don't know about you, but I've witnessed our generation's impatience, my own included, especially in the professional realm. We (in our privileged corners of the world, at least) grow up in a culture marked by an obsession with therapy and self-improvement. We are told that we are special and that we deserve things and that it is our right to fight for our dreams. And often, we come to the working place with this inflated ego—this sense of entitlement—when, a lot of the time, we don't yet deserve the recognition and validation we seek.

Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of positives to self-belief and the pursuit of personal development. We are already asking ourselves important questions about what we want to do and who we want to be, questions that perhaps our parents and grandparents only posed much later in life. We are challenging organizations to attend to their work culture, think of brand values, improve salaries and conditions, and be better for the environment.

And I also don't ignore the pressure of our hyperconnected world. A world where we are now competing at the global level. A world where education, degrees, certifications, skills, and knowledge are more accessible than ever. A world in which it is increasingly harder to stand out! Perhaps we are impatient because there is no time to be wasted.

And yet, I hear the stories of my predecessors, the struggles they endured, from years spent working hard to get that first big promotion, or to build a solid clientele, or to hone their craft, and can't help but think about how we are being unreasonable with our demands and timelines. We want mastery and recognition now. Rushing our way to adding fancy, qualitative, inflated adjectives to our bio descriptions. Aiming to become experts in our field yesterday, to start a podcast teaching others how we "made it" tomorrow. We ignore life's timing. Sometimes—most times—there are no shortcuts to maturation.

So, dear reader, the living question for this month is: how do we escape the instant-gratification traps in our day-to-day, and unlike that student, put away our phones, to make space for more patience and character-building practices that will support us in the long run?

Warmly,
Carlota

---

Listen

To explore the question above, I sat with the best-selling author Rebecca Seal. Together we explore the journey that hides beneath the word best-selling to remind us that, more often than not, we can't bypass our way to crafting our ideal professional reality.

Rebecca is the author of "⁠Solo: How to Work Alone and Not Lose Your Mind⁠" and over ⁠a dozen cookbooks. She's also the host of the ⁠Solo Collective Podcast⁠ , which I highly recommend to anyone working alone. As a freelance writer, she has written articles on food, drink, and lifestyle for numerous prestigious publications including The Guardian, The Observer, and The Financial Times.

A spoiler for the ladies, when inquired about what words Rebecca would share with her younger self, she told me - 'Try and figure out getting to a place where you are not always thinking about how you look because I think that was probably the most preoccupying and disabling thing that I had going on and continue to wrestle with now…'

---

Youth Shoutout

As I try to make the Waking Youth project more representative of the youth around the world, this month's shoutout goes to Nhlanhla Ndlovu, the founder of Hustlenomics - a start-up founded in 2015 innovating in the affordable housing industry.

Born and raised in Soweto, a township in South Africa, for a great deal of his life, Nhlanhla shared a living space with twelve family members. Tired of his conditions and lacking financial resources to contract builders, he moved to an informal and unsafe shack in his backyard, like many of his neighbors. Eventually, however, he joined forces with friends, skilled in plumbing and carpentry, to replace the shack with a quality and durable structure.

This newly formed team started assisting with small-scale affordable housing projects in Soweto—the idea for Hustlenomics was born. Today, with a bold business model and an innovative interlocking brick technology (that you can learn more about on their website), they provide both an income and a more affordable and sustainable housing option to families in Soweto and across townships in South Africa.