Does your frustration spike when a webpage takes more than 5-10 seconds to load? If you have to wait in line behind a customer who's taking more than 20 seconds to place an order? When a red light has you stopped for a minute or more, even if you're not running late?
People aren't being forcibly put into enough situations that make them exercise patience anymore. The age of convenience has made everything that isn't instant feel extremely inconvenient. Even people who grew up in the days of computers taking 5 minutes to boot up and webpages loading in small chunks every ten seconds have lost much of the patience that was built by repeatedly going through experiences that made them wait. There's a reason it's called exercising patience. If you don't use it, you lose it.
Watch a long video without speeding it up or reading comments as you watch it. Sit outside for ten minutes without an electronic device. Play a lengthy board game with people, no phones or tablets or anything allowed. Pick a place you know tends to be busy on a day where you've got some free time and wait in line for however long it takes. Do a Sudoku puzzle start to finish.
Make yourself wait. Make yourself slow down. Make yourself do an activity that isn't fast-paced, that isn't instant gratification. Otherwise, all you'll be doing is hitting red lights a little faster and feeling even more frustrated about it, because red lights, whether literal or figurative, are inevitable.
