The StoWicks Conversations
by
Carolyn and Seth Wicks
Seth: Who here loves waiting on the phone for a real human after you've just yelled at the AI agent for 5 minutes trying to get to said human? You're waiting, and waiting, and waiting...and then the music loops for a fourth time and you feel like you're in a simulation. Oh, and you're still waiting. And that 10 minute wait feels like an eternity. Fun times!
Now what about this scenario: You walk into Chipotle at prime lunch time and there's a decent-sized line. Eh, all good, this was expected. You size up the line and figure it might be 10 minutes to actually get your food, but again, this was expected at noon. THAT 10 minutes goes by much faster and is much more pleasant. But why? Why does an identical amount of time feel so different?โ
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Carolyn: So what's happening is people don't necessarily hate the waiting, they hate the not knowing how long. There's a famous story from David Maister, who spent years studying the psychology of waiting: a hotel kept getting complaints about slow elevators, so instead of fixing the elevators, they put mirrors in the waiting area. Complaints dropped, not because the wait got shorter, but because people had something to do with their eyes. Turns out unoccupied time just feels longer than occupied time, whether or not it actually is.
That's the Chipotle line versus being on hold. The line has a mirror, (basically) you can see it moving, you know roughly what you're in for. The hold music has nothing. No progress bar, no "you're 4th in queue," just a loop and your own imagination filling in the worst-case scenario. I hit this at work constantly: waiting on someone else's inputs or approval with zero indication of when it's coming turns a five-minute task into two days of low-grade checking my inbox (I put a deadline in the email, they just don't always see it ๐). Same wait, same outcome either way, but the not-knowing is what wears you down.
Seth: We talk about Stoicism a lot in this newsletter (hence the name), and one of the main lessons of the philosophy is that the obstacle is the way. I'm sure everyone and their mom has heard this phrase a million times, but what does it actually mean? How can this be translated into something actionable? I mean, it's not easy to be on hold for 10 minutes and think, "Yes, I'm going to turn this into fuel for XYZ!". Sure, you might reframe this 10% of the time, but this is a mental battle we lose more often than we win.
The good news is you don't have to win it, because the wait is doing something for you whether or not you manage the reframe. Your brain doesn't wait for permission to start problem-solving in the background. It just does, the second you stop actively focusing on something else. So while Stoicism tells you to choose optimism on purpose, you actually get a version of it by default.
Carolyn: In the 1920s, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that waiters could rattle off unpaid orders from memory, table after table, but the second a bill was paid, the details vanished, like the brain had deleted the file. Later research has actually complicated her original finding, but one piece has held up: your brain doesn't let go of something incomplete. It keeps circling back, whether you want it to or not.
Do you ever feel like you're working on something and then all of a sudden you get interrupted right in the middle of it? You'd probably expect to lose your train of thought completely. Instead, some part of your brain keeps working it in the background, and you'll be in the Chipotle line when the problem you were stuck on just arrives, fully formed. The interruption didn't erase the problem. It just moved it to the back of your brain, at least below the surface.
Seth: I do want to help my conscious mind though, so what's the plan? Well, we need different responses for the different wait times (unknown vs known). For the unknown time, give yourself an anchor task. For me, I have 2 apps that I consistently rotate between - Babbel and Sudoku. Both are extremely low-stakes actions that I can stop immediately when my wait is over. I'm still working my brain a little, but only enough to not go crazy with the unknown wait.
For the known wait time, I try to let myself go idle on purpose. Now, this might sound a little psycho, but it's actually extremely pleasant after you do it a few times. I feel like almost everyone reading this newsletter is programmed to immediately look at your phone the whole time, but I would challenge you to try just sitting idle with your own thoughts.
Carolyn: So that's the move: notice which kind of wait you're in, and stop spending your attention fighting it. Unknown wait, give yourself something small to do with your hands or your brain. Known wait, let yourself go idle and see what happens. You can't always control how long something takes. You can always control where your attention goes while it does.
The Chipotle line, the hold music, the interrupted thought, none of it was ever really the obstacle. It was just where your attention landed for a few minutes. Might as well decide what to do with it on purpose.
Seth: For the unknown waits, see if you can spend a little less time on social media this week and give your brain something it can actually use. A language app, puzzle, crossword, etc.
Carolyn: And if you've got your own "the interruption was the point" story, a weird place a good idea showed up, or a wait that turned out better than the thing it delayed, hit reply and tell us. We read every one.
Both: If you know someone who's currently stuck on hold, in a line, or waiting on a reply that hasn't come yet (so, everyone), forward this their way. Might make the wait a little more interesting.
See you next week,
Carolyn & Seth
โThe StoWicks
Quote of the Week:
"Patience is not simply the ability to wait โ it's how we behave while we're waiting."
Joyce Meyer
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