The Elimination of Waiting (A Thought Experiment)

Suppose we accept the following line of thought:
1. Waiting is always undesirable. (No one likes to wait; time is precious, etc.)
2. If x is undesirable, then x ought to be minimized.
3. Therefore, waiting ought to be minimized.

Were this right, then a "perfect" world would be one in which we never had to wait--a world in which waiting has been not simply minimized, but eliminated.

What would life look like if we never had to wait for anything? Pushing this hypothetical to its metaphysical limits, time as we experience it would almost cease to exist. Every desire would be instantly fulfilled, every pain immediately alleviated. (Any frustrations of our goals would have to be instantly alleviated, otherwise we would have to wait to get over our disappointment.) Every experienced moment would be filled to capacity. What about effort and achievement? If we eliminated all waiting, these things would have to happen instantaneously--anything that requires effort and time requires some modicum of patience between the setting of the goal and its realization. Thus, to eliminate waiting, we would have to eliminate, it seems, the need for effort. But if achievement is something special, something we recognize as the fruit of a sustained, attentive, meritorious effort, then in order to eliminate waiting, we would have to also eliminate achievement. I could go on, but the point should be clear already--the ideal of eliminating waiting, taken to its logical, if extreme, conclusion, would entail the elimination of anything much resembling human life.

This suggests that we should re-evaluate waiting and re-consider the facile assumption that less waiting is always better, even in those cases where it is possible to shorten our wait.

(As an alternative, one might suggest that waiting is not always undesirable; what we need is an optimum state of waiting, but prima facie that seems a bit like a silly way of putting the alternative point.)

On Waiting

"Stories allow us to pretend that there is a cure for waiting." Harold Schweizer, On Waiting, p. 52

I recently finished Schweizer's book, which I have ultimately decided that I enjoyed, although there were times when I was finding it a bit...I don't know...strained in its language, in something like the way that "analytic philosophers" are annoyed by the style of some "continental philosophers." (I suppose the complaint is that there's not enough substance, if any, behind what looks only like wordplay.) But I pushed through and it's a neat little book. Schweizer attends to the experience of waiting, and among other things to the idea that waiting is integral to a kind of deepening of experience and understanding (of self and other)--that waiting is integral to the attention necessary to appreciate and draw out the significance in art and literature, and that it is in waiting, in the stillness of waiting, that we come into contact with ourselves as temporal beings.

The line I quoted above is one that stuck with me as I read. Stories come to an end. There is--traditionally--some kind of resolution: our waiting and our wading through the story has been served. This helps me understand the frustration some people have with stories and films that have abrupt and somewhat unresolved endings. (My wife hates movies like this.) One's expectations (for resolution) have been frustrated--one is "left hanging" with nowhere to go, or at least the filmmaker has refused to take you there. I tend to approach such films by thinking that if I am disappointed by the ending, then perhaps I have misunderstood what the story was that I was being told. Of course, endings can be disappointing simply because the film wasn't well-made, but there's a kind of jumping to that conclusion that itself might show a lack of reasonable patience (or attention, etc.). Of course, depending on what you're looking for in movie night, you might not be interested in the exercise (cf. my wife)--maybe you prefer instead the respite of that illusion to which Schweizer alludes above.