Article content continued

What Mr. Manning is calling for is a little more patience, and not just in politics. It’s a virtue that has been dying out in our high-speed culture, eroded by our reliance on the Internet, gnawed away at by our smartphones and tablets and by our busy lives. This shift toward impatience has made it harder to wait in a lengthy coffee shop line, easier to lose our cool and more prone to making mistakes that could have lasting effects.

“It’s legitimate to take this time to slow the pace down,” said the president and CEO of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, which just officially opened its doors in Calgary this week. “You’re not a slacker because you’re doing it.”

This sweeping lack of patience in Western society is coming at a cost, a growing chorus of slowness advocates argue: It not only frays our relationships and wears on our health, it leads to a proliferation of quick fixes to problems in everything from politics to healthcare to sports teams to businesses.

“As a society and as a culture, we’ve lost the art of patience and we’ve been losing it for some time,” Carl Honoré, the Canadian author of the forthcoming book The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed, said in an interview from London, U.K.

“It’s gone so far that the very idea of patience or having to exercise patience is seen as being a bad thing. The waiting, the delay of any kind, is seen as a pejorative.”

Humans are wired to favour the fastest and easiest route to an answer, but our culture’s accelerated preference for speed has been on an uptick since the Industrial Revolution and on overdrive since the advent of the Internet, Mr. Honoré writes.