I, Phoneless
My phone recently died. In the middle of a normal day, the screen went dark and the Apple Logo appeared. It kept flashing in and out occasionally in a process that helpful people on the Internet told me was a boot loop. Suffice to say, I tried all of the things that they recommended to fix it and none of it worked. So I ordered the new Apple iPhone SE on April 22nd. It didn't come out til the 24th. With the pandemic, shipping would be late. That meant a delivery between May 7th and May 14th. I haven't been without a phone for a while so I decided to give myself a little break from it and see if anything changed.
The first couple of days, I simply checked my email and clicked the Track my Package button a couple of times. However, it soon got to be that whenever I got home I would check my mailbox for that little white package. I knew that it hadn't shipped yet because I checked the status every morning. So why did I check so frequently? Why did my heart skip a beat every time I saw a mailman? And not just this time. Nearly every time I would click on Same Day Delivery, or Amazon Prime's Next Day Delivery I would park myself by my front door like a dog waiting for its human to come home. Is there anything to this near obsessive waiting for packages? I decided to investigate.
I had known that the feeling of waiting for a package you just ordered was not uncommon, but to the point where I could actually study it? I was skeptical. It turns out that there's a couple of different things that lead into this package impatience.
The Prey of the 21st Century
The first thing dates back to human evolution. It was the age of hunting and gathering, fight or flight, the four F's, and humans began to develop behaviors that would keep them moving and keep them alive. It was this sense of the chase that was encouraged in our brains. Not actually running, although we did plenty of that. It was the chase of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
As the centuries passed, our brains became very good at instilling in us a need to go out and search for food. Because you hardly had to encourage us to eat the food once we had it, our brain gave us more dopamine (the pleasure chemical) when we were engaging in a behavior that would get us what we want. Once we had achieved the goal, i.e. finding shelter, getting food, engaging in particular physical activities, our brains would reward us with dopamine, but it would be at a significantly lower dose. We were conditioned to love the journey more than the destination.
In terms of waiting for packages, it is easy to substitute the characters in this metaphor. We are the mighty hunter staring at the vast savanna outside our window. The Amazon delivery truck is the gazelle. While everyone remarks on the value of patience, this is a situation in which our brain instinctively rejects that strategy. There is something out there that we want and our brain continually prompts us to rejoin the hunt until we receive our reward. It hits us with a dose of dopamine every time we click “Track My Package” or open our mailbox expecting our prize.
This also explains the almost immediate disappearance of that feeling when we do eventually get our package. We got what we wanted. Our brain's job is done for the time being. It gives us a pat on the back for a job well done, but that expectant rush of dopamine isn't as potent as we thought it would be. We can rest in a chase completed knowing that sooner or later, both our online shopping habits and our brains will call us back to the hunt.
What's Mine is Mine
A second reason that builds on the first is something called the endowment effect. Overall, the effect says that people will be more likely to hold onto an object that they believe is theirs than they would be to acquire an object that is not. Also known as the mere ownership effect, the only part that directly applies to package psychology is the first half. People want to hold onto objects that they believe is theirs.
When we pay for an object, that sense of ownership passes to us. If we were to buy something at a brick and mortar store, this ownership passes quickly and is almost unnoticeable. You buy something and you have it in your hands to do with as you please. It is a fast and efficient process. However, when you buy something online, you exchange your currency for an object that you cannot immediately hold. According to the endowment effect, we believe that we have ownership of an item and, as such, would like to hold the item in our hands to complete the process.
As you toss in the wait time for a package to be delivered, the dissonance between owning an item and yet not having it grows and does not lead to a sense of completion or wholeness. There is something missing. Our brains hate having something be incomplete. As there is nothing to do but wait, our logical mind sets in for a period of patience while our unconscious mind keeps trying to fit pieces into an incomplete puzzle. No pieces truly fit so our impatience grows and we start checking when exactly that package is supposed to arrive to make us feel complete.
Into the Unknown
The last variable in the equation is simply what kind of waiting package psychology entails. Both the number of people waiting for something and whether the wait time is known or unknown affect the sense of impatience a person feels when waiting for something. When you are waiting on something alone, it feels much longer than it would if you were waiting for something in a group. As waiting for a Fedex truck or the USPS is not exactly a group activity, there is substantial reason to say that because you are waiting alone for something, that wait time feels even longer.
Finally, it is simply that we don't know exactly when our delivery will make it to our residence that affects perceived wait time. According to research, if we do not know how long we are going to have to wait, that extends the amount of time that we feel we have waited. While many of us can remember back to school and staring at the clock trying to make the time go faster, it seems that time would tick by even slower if we did not know when the class was supposed to finish.
Many delivery companies have options to track packages. They have delivery estimation dates. So the time is not unknown, right? Why then, does it still feel so long? One is that simply like my iPhone, it might actually be a long time. Not having a phone for almost a month is a first world problem to be sure, but it still is a problem. Every time I do the pocket check for my wallet and keys and feel the absence of a phone, it is another reminder of how long I have already waited without a phone and how long I still have to wait. Another option is that our brains don't completely trust those package delivery estimations. And for good reason. We have all been burned or blessed by tracking numbers before.
Our brains tend to believe things that we can put firsthand evidence towards. Seeing isn't believing, but a lot of the time its pretty helpful. The more concrete evidence that we have for something, the more trust we can place in it. However, how many times has a package delivery date been wrong? How many times does it arrive late? Or even arrive early? I do not fault the delivery services at all! After all, it is explicitly stated that it is an estimation.
However, to our brain there is always a shred of doubt that perhaps our package is not where they say it is. Whether our package could arrive on time, late, or early does not matter. What matters is that it makes the delivery time unknown. We don't know when our sense of ownership will finally be fulfilled, and that makes the waiting even harder.
It'll Get Here... Eventually
I wish I could tell you that there was also a cure for this package impatience. But, I don't believe we can work against our own brains and thousands of years of evolution. At most, we can just try some strategies. You could follow in the footsteps of my mother and just order enough from Amazon that every day you have at least one delivery. This not only triggers the final hit of dopamine for finally receiving the package, it also distributes that impatience across a wide range of deliveries. When your brain can't focus on any one thing that it is waiting for, it tends to spend less time ruminating on them as a whole.
You could try my roommate's strategy and only order on Amazon when you have been drinking. Most of the time, they don't remember what they have ordered and they don't really bother to check. This bypasses the sense of ownership because even they don't know what they own. They just get to be surprised once every couple of days.
Or you could simply suffer like I do. Turn on Netflix or read a book. Post something on the internet about a mundane psychological topic. Keep checking that mailbox and drool like Pavlov's dogs when you see that delivery truck turn onto your street. Do absolutely whatever you want, but now you know that no matter what you feel during the great hunt for your newest Star Wars themed shower curtain or banana shaped pencil case, you'll feel it all over again the next time you hit that Order Now button. And at least there is a calm in knowing that.
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