By Laurie Carey, CEO & Chief AI Officer, Nebula Academy

Every wave of technology has let us do more, faster, from anywhere — and quietly trained the patience out of us. AI is the most powerful accelerant yet.

I want to talk about patience. Or really, about how little of it we have left, and how every leap in technology has taken a little more of it from us without our noticing.

Think about driving. If you've ever sat behind the wheel of a Tesla with your hands resting in your lap while the car does the work, you know the feeling — and you also know exactly what happens the second the driver ahead of you doesn't move as fast as you expect them to. Our roads keep getting faster. Our cars keep getting smarter. And somewhere in all that acceleration, our tolerance for anyone moving slower than we are keeps shrinking. The faster we're able to go, the less willing we are to wait.

It isn't just driving. Think about the last time you renewed something with the government from your couch instead of standing in a line that wrapped around a building. Remember when that was the only option — taking a day off work, sitting in a fluorescent-lit room, waiting for your number to be called? When that burden lifted, it lifted for good. We don't go back. COVID poured fuel on all of it: we moved life online to keep one another safe, and in the process we got a taste of friction-free living that we will never willingly surrender.

Here's the pattern I keep turning over. Every one of those advances was a gift. And every one of them quietly cost us the same thing — our patience. We built a world optimized for speed and convenience, and along the way we became a little less willing to wait for the slow driver, the long line, the process that takes a few days, and — most worrying of all — for each other.

Because that's where this lands. People are the slowest variable in any system. When everything else around us speeds up, the humans start to feel like the bottleneck. And a society that has lost its patience for waiting is, eventually, a society that loses its patience for people.

Now AI has walked into the room, and it isn't a new story. It's the same story, moving faster than anything before it.

Every previous wave made things quicker. AI does that too, but it adds a second dimension that I think is the real game-changer: not just faster, but anywhere, anytime, with almost no friction left at all. The last little pockets of waiting that used to be built into a day — the pause while something processed, the gap before a person got back to you, the simple fact that work happened at a desk — are being engineered out of existence.

I'll be honest, because honesty is the only useful posture here. As I write this, I have work running that I'm steering from my phone, and I'm about to walk out the door to get my nails done while I keep it all moving. Answering questions, nudging things forward, clearing blockers — from a salon chair. It's remarkable that I can. But notice what it does to my expectations: once I've experienced work that continues anywhere, anytime, instantly, my baseline for how fast everything should move resets upward. And the moment my baseline resets, my patience for anything slower drops to match it.

That's the quiet cost. Each new capability doesn't just make us faster — it raises the floor on what we're willing to tolerate. We don't experience the speed as a bonus for long. We absorb it, normalize it, and start resenting whatever can't keep up. The wait that felt reasonable last year feels intolerable today. And AI is resetting that floor faster than any technology we've ever lived through.

So when we feel that flash of irritation — at the colleague who hasn't replied, the line that won't move, the answer that takes a beat too long — it's worth asking where it's really coming from. More and more, it isn't the world that got slower. It's that we got faster, and forgot how to wait.

Here's the part I refuse to accept: that this is simply who we are now.

Patience isn't a personality trait you're born with or without. It's a muscle. And like any muscle, it weakens when it isn't used — which is exactly what a friction-free, instant, from-anywhere world does to it. If we never have to wait, we lose the capacity to wait. The good news is the reverse is also true: it can be rebuilt, deliberately, with practice.

That's what recalibrating forward looks like in this moment. Not rejecting the technology — the speed is real and I'm grateful for it. But choosing, on purpose, to leave a little friction in. To let the line take the time it takes. To give a person the grace I'd give a machine. To wait without reaching for the thing that erases the wait. Resilience is a reflex, not a reflection, and so is patience. We get to decide whether we keep that reflex alive, or let the next upgrade quietly take it.

The technology will keep getting faster, and reaching further, and asking less of us. That part isn't in question. The only real question is whether we'll let it train the patience out of us completely — or whether we'll be the ones who remember that some things, and some people, are worth the wait.

So here's my small act of resistance for today: go get your nails done. Leave the phone in your bag. Let it wait.

Laurie Carey is the CEO and Chief AI Officer of Nebula Academy, founder of We Connect The Dots, and author of Resilience Is a Muscle. She speaks and writes at the intersection of AI strategy and human resilience.

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