Impatience With Our Own Lives

Elif Shafak writes, “human beings exhibit a profound impatience with the milestones of their existence.” The words struck me immediately, not because they were new, but because they were painfully familiar. We live lives measured in moments we can’t wait to leave behind — rushing through what should be the very chapters that make us who we are.

We rush past childhood longing to be grown.
We rush past adolescence, eager to claim adulthood.
We hurry through young adulthood, anxious to “settle down,” to earn, to succeed, to arrive.
Even in the middle of life, we chase the next milestone: promotion, recognition, wealth, recognition again.
And when we reach the later years, we wish away the in-between, mourning what we should have noticed along the way.

Milestones are meant to be markers, not destinations. They are pauses in the flow of life, signposts meant to help us orient ourselves, not finish lines to sprint toward. Yet we have cultivated a culture in which patience is undervalued and anticipation is overrated. We treat every moment as if it is disposable, merely a stepping stone toward what we consider the “real” life waiting just beyond the horizon.

This impatience shapes not only our own experience, but how we perceive others.
We expect children to behave older than they are.
We expect teenagers to act wiser than they feel.
We expect adults to be fulfilled even when the work is hard, the relationships messy, and the life unpolished.
We measure ourselves by what we have achieved, not by what we have lived.

December makes this tendency impossible to ignore. A year ends, and we measure ourselves against accomplishments, against resolutions made and broken. Calendars become verdicts; the new year looms as a promise we feel we must fulfill immediately. The slow, unremarkable, everyday passage of time — the ordinary moments in which life quietly unfolds — becomes invisible. Our impatience blinds us to the very substance of existence.

And yet, these ordinary moments are where life truly resides.
In the quiet morning ritual, the walk taken without purpose, the conversation that doesn’t solve anything, the laughter that comes unbidden, the grief that sits with you without apology — these are the milestones we rarely acknowledge, and the impatience we carry robs us of them.

Perhaps it is this awareness that invites reflection. Perhaps we need to slow down not only for pleasure, but for survival. To learn that impatience is not inevitable, but cultivated — a habit reinforced by deadlines, comparisons, and the cultural imperative to arrive. To remember that life is not merely the sum of marked achievements, but the accumulation of lived experiences, messy and imperfect and fleeting.

December, with its rush of endings and beginnings, presents the perfect mirror. It shows how deeply we have learned to look ahead and seldom around. It reminds us that the desire to “get there” is universal, but that getting there too fast often means missing the here, the now, the lived.

So perhaps the greatest gift of impatience is the reminder it offers: to pause, to breathe, to inhabit each chapter fully before moving on. To treat milestones not as finish lines, but as gentle nudges, whispers asking us to notice, to feel, to exist.

We cannot slow down time itself, but we can reclaim how we move within it.
We can learn to attend to life, not just chase it.
We can learn to be patient with the unfolding of our own existence.

And in doing so, we might finally find that life was never about the milestones themselves — but the moments we rush past in our pursuit of them.