If you refuse to wait, you refuse to be happy (or a good person)

Lessons taken from a broken nose

In the July when I was 9, I broke my nose by smashing it against a boulder while rock-hopping at the Maine family lake house we visited each summer. I took a jump on a dare, more or less, and it ended badly. Not only was it very painful and not only did my entire face puff up hideously, but – worst of all – it ruined my whole vacation. For two weeks, I couldn’t swim, water ski, or even run. I was just allowed to walk around at measured pace and keep my head as still as possible.

Healing from an injury is a slow affair: you just have to wait till the body heals. There’s no real speeding it up, and there’s way around it - and it’s always been this way. This is why recovering from injury is so hard. You probably know what this is like from your own life.

You also probably know this undeniable fact: humans are terrible about waiting. This why recovery is so grueling for us; there are no shortcuts. By definition, waiting is a delay of some kind of gratification and that is… unpleasant. We like being gratified. Most of all, we just Want The Thing, and we want it Now.

Not only is waiting is hard, it’s gotten way harder over the last century. Text is faster than email is faster than snail mail. A microwave is faster than a stove is faster than cooking over a fire. Amazon Prime is faster than driving to the store is faster than the Sears Roebuck catalog. We’re aware of this. We know that in recent decades, waiting has practically disappeared from our lives.

As a result, we’ve become almost allergic to waiting; it feels unreasonably burdensome. It almost seems like something’s truly wrong if we have to wait. We “solve” by further avoiding waiting, wherever we can.

But here is the key point! Even in 2025, waiting cannot be avoided, and trying to avoid it creates a lot of problems for us. Why? Because the things most worth having in life absolutely require the passage of time to occur before we can obtain them. In any age, for any people.

You see, the basic goods (the six things that are intrinsically good in and for their own sake) have waiting built into them. To gain knowledge, you accrue it gradually; you can’t snap your fingers and know calculus. To gain friendship, you cultivate a relationship over time, amass experiences together, and demonstrate trustworthiness. You don’t snap your fingers and have a lifelong bestie. To cultivate beauty, you usually accrue the beautiful thing slowly (master the piano, practice brushwork, sit and watch the sun drop behind the horizon). To grow a new life, you have to wait nine months (plus however long it takes to get pregnant). The things most worth having don’t AND CAN’T come instantaneously.

The short-term things we enjoy do come instantaneously though, and this is the difficulty. We get confused. The short-term things bring pleasure and come with a dopamine hit; we can easily make our lives about them. They’re pleasant AND - for us moderns - fast. You can immediately get: Instagram, chocolate, Netflix, new purchases, a match on Tinder, most food. And so we often opt for fulfilling our appetites and enjoying pleasure now, because it’s available and easy. And we either pursue basic goods in a shoddy way or ignore them altogether. Pursuing pleasure is so consuming, it makes it easy to ignore the basic goods.

I am here to tell you (and myself) this: accept waiting as a requisite part of the good life. It feels like a necessary evil, but that’s a lie. It’s actually a gift, though not an easy one to receive. A happy life is one that involves a lot of waiting.

This is the fruit that comes from enacting the truths of natural law. When you aim toward the goods and take step to enact them day by day, you will eventually gain things worth having. You will eventually flourish – more than you did before you started. Your “after” will be better than your “before.”

One the other hand when we wait begrudgingly, or refuse to wait at all, we:

• believe the lie that the world owes us everything we want, all at once – and believing lies always damages our hearts. This one also makes us entitled.

• become bitter and disillusioned, feeling that justice is being thwarted in our life

• accept counterfeit versions of the goods, “shortcuts” (Facebook friends instead of real friends, AI output instead of garnered knowledge and wisdom, porn instead of sex)

In short, we do not thrive.

A final point that’s relevant here. The real/original definition of virtue is “a thing that happens in your character over time as you pursue good” (more about that here). If you’re diligent, trustworthy, loyal, compassionate, courageous, temperate – it’s because you’ve pursed goods consistently for a long period of time. You positively cannot snap your fingers and become loyal, or diligent, or brave. It doesn’t work that way. Virtue requires time, so a person of virtue is necessarily one who has waited – and can wait.

This means that people committed to avoiding waiting and who routinely acquire their wants fast a) have fewer truly valuable, happiness-making things in their lives than people who pursue the basic goods and b) are objectively worse people than those who pursue the basic goods. Explains a lot.

Moral of the story, then: hooray for waiting! Let’s make our peace with it and resolve ourselves to accept it willingly, however hard that may be. We want have the things that matter most in life, and we want to be people of virtue, so: wait-ers we will be.