This is optimal living daily episode 1797. How to be patient in an impatient world

Part 1 by Mark Manson of Mark Manson.net Every introductory psychology class talks about this thing called the Skinner Box.

Sounds like something out of a saw movie but it's actually a famous psychological method from the golden days of research back when pregnant women still drank and torturing rats for science was cool.

A Skinner Box works like this. A rat or some other unsuspecting small animal is placed in this box which has a lever and a little feeding bowl.

The rats sniff around the box and not knowing what the f is going on on so many levels. It will eventually push the lever by chance.

A sugary little treat is then delivered into the bowl. If you learn anything from Pixar movies, it's that rats really love to fing eat.

The Skinner Box is no different. The rats quickly figure out that pushing the lever equals getting a delicious snack so they keep doing it over and over and over.

But then at some point you stop giving the rat the treat and this is off the rat.

You'll hit the lever over and over and over frantically trying to get the treat. It feels it desperately deserves until finally after exhausting itself it will give up and resign itself to fate.

That's life is the treats are everything is a lie. The rat will then smoke cigarettes and write bad French philosophy about his terrible disappointment with his own existence.

The Skinner Box demonstrated something fundamental and animal behavior. If something feels good we will do it again and again and again and we eventually grow a sense of entitlement to that pleasurable thing.

We deserve to feel that pleasure. We deserve to be rewarded. And when the reward is taken from us we throw a total hissy fit.

Today life is full of Skinner boxes. Your phone is a Skinner box. Your television is a Skinner box. Your wife is a okay I better stop there.

The point is every day in the modern world we too get little packets of pleasure delivered to us with a push of a button.

And the more packets of pleasure the more impatient we get when we don't get our desired reward.

Next thing you know we're complaining about Uber drivers taking a wrong turn and too many unwanted emails on Monday morning and what the pizza guy was supposed to be here eight minutes ago. I'm triggered.

I think the last time I was in Monish to shut up and be patient I was young enough that I pulled my pants all the way down and lifted my shirt to pee.

Parents are always wagging their finger at their children to practice patience to wait a little longer to delay gratification and focus on long term consequences instead of short term rewards.

Yet as adults we celebrate in patience. I'm so thing busy I don't have time for this.

Everyone's doing eight things at the same time and doing all eight things poorly. Why? Because it can't wait nothing can wait.

We need results now. Patients is a virtue and the virtue of the world is sorely lacking at the moment.

Being more patient in our daily lives can do wonders for our mental health, our economic prosperity and can perhaps make the world seem like slightly less of a hemorrhoid riddled full.

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