Photo via Flickr/denialpolez
Photo via Flickr/denialpolez

We have enough annoyances in this age of convenience, but now we officially have one more to contend with: Internet rage.

That’s right. There’s an official term for feeling angry/impatient/frustrated at your Internet connection/speed/what-have-you.

According to Huffington Post, this is a real thing now, like road rage.

As author Chelsea Wald writes on the very cool science-minded site Nautilus: “Slow drivers, slow Internet, slow grocery lines — they all drive us crazy. Even the opening of this article may be going on a little too long for you. So I’ll get to the point. Slow things drive us crazy because the fast pace of society has warped our sense of timing. Things that our great-great-grandparents would have found miraculously efficient now drive us around the bend. Patience is a virtue that’s been vanquished in the Twitter age.”

Wald continues to point out that we expect “web pages load in a quarter of a second, when we had no problem with two seconds in 2009 and four seconds in 2006.”

“The link between time and emotion is a complex one,” James Moore, a neuroscientist at Goldsmiths, University of London, says in Nautilus. “A lot is dependent on expectation—if we expect something to take time then we can accept it. Frustration is often a consequence of expectations being violated.”

Needless to say, our jacked-up culture is messing with our minds. Mindfulness and meditation help, of course.

It’s quite an interesting look at how our expectations of speed are detrimental to our everyday well being. And a good reminder that that spinning Apple Wheel of Death isn’t the end of the world.

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