“Verily, man was created very impatient; Apprehensive (discontented) when evil touches him; And suppressive (niggardly) when good touches him;” proclaims the Quran (70:19–21), in a tone that implies condemnation, and imputes an element of irrationality to mankind. The view is not limited to the scriptures. Even we, ourselves, may think of impatience as a character flaw, an outcome of our base desires and animal spirits, and as an aspect of our irrational self. As Kierkegaard is believed to have said: “Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.’’ But what if impatience is optimal?

This is the idea I am developing in my some of my current research. The premise of the theory is that, unlike standard models where our impatience is taken to be a fundamental feature of our preferences reflected in our time-discount rate, impatience may not actually be fundamental, and may be an optimal response to our imperfect knowledge of our own welfare, somewhat similar to what Parfit (1976, p 99) argues: “We care less about our further future . . .because we know that less of what we are now — less, say, of our present hopes or plans, loves or ideals — will survive into the further future . . . [if] what matters holds to a lesser degree, it cannot be irrational to care less.” In this sense, impatience is an acknowledgement of the fragility of the mapping between the intangible welfare and its tangible determinants; an attempt to mitigate the risk of reconfiguration of this mapping; and an expression of our epistemic humility.

Our welfare, in both its intangible and tangible representations, can be unknown to us for various reasons. The joy I derive from watching a soccer game may depend on my knowledge of the two teams at the time of the game, number of my friends who choose to watch the game, my ability to discuss the game with my friends, the amount of free time I have to watch the game, neither of which may be precisely known to me; in fact, it may not even be known to me which factors affect the utility of watching a game.

The same holds for any and all activities. The welfare obtained from any of the actions I perform may be affected by a host of factors both within and outside of my control, and knowledge. The welfare of an action can only be known ex-post, after the action has been performed, and even then it may not be known why the realised welfare turned out to be so?

Whatever the underlying reasons for my ignorance about my own welfare, mathematically this ignorance can be modelled in a simple way: there are more than one consumption goods, and my welfare (utility) from consuming each good depends on my consumption of all the other goods, but I do not perfectly know the dependence of my welfare on the composition of my consumption basket. In the above example of a soccer game, my knowledge of the competing teams, number of my friends watching the game, and the amount of free time I have to watch the game constitute these other `consumption goods’ on the which my joy of watching a soccer game depends.

Because no consumption good can ever be consumed in complete isolation from other goods, my knowledge of realised welfare from consuming any good will always be contaminated by the presence of other goods, which may be essential for my welfare, but may remain in the background so that their presence may not even be manifest to me, until that time when they are no longer present.

So difficult is the task of identifying these factors that if I were to conceive of all the factors that would affect my joy of watching a game, I may conclude that I would prefer watching a soccer game on television in the comfort of my homes, over watching the same game sitting inside a noisy stadium with much poorer picture quality. But, often, we are willing to pay a lot more to watch a game in the stadium than watching it on television. The joy of the `experience’ of watching a game in a stadium is both too powerful to resist and too elusive to understand.

Hence, in general, the task of forecasting my joy of watching a soccer game a month from now depends on identifying all those variables that affect my joy, and forecasting these variables until the next month, considerably complicating the task. As a result, I will only have an uncertain estimate, or a guess, of my forecasted welfare, based, perhaps, on the assumption that everything stays more or less as it is today. Now, if I am in possession of a ticket for a soccer game, which allows me to watch a game either today or a month from now, it can be optimal for me to be impatient, if I am unsure of the events a month from now, even if the events do not affect the game at all, i.e. even if the game a month from now is known to be a replay of the game today. Because if the events are unfavourable enough to impair my ability to appreciate the game to its fullest potential, it would be optimal to watch it today, when I know I have the time to watch it without distraction, when I am knowledgeable enough to predict who will win, and when I have my friends over to watch the game with me. It would be optimal to be impatient toward watching the game, to maximise the joy of watching it, and minimise the injustice done to soccer.

According to this theory, impatience is merely an outcome of risk-aversion and uncertainty about future welfare. If I can envision a possibility that my utility from the future consumption of a good may be lower than it is today, I have a justifiable reason to be impatient, and consume more of the good today, when the welfare it brings is known, and leave for tomorrow only that which brings less welfare today. Even if, on average, the utility of future consumption is higher than it is today, I may still discount so long as the utility is sufficiently uncertain and I am sufficiently averse of uncertainty. Only when the future utility is perfectly known and is at least as high as the utility of current consumption, it would be necessarily optimal for me to exhibit patience, and postpone consumption in the future. For example, when I am sick (or in a state of Sartre's existential abandonment), and nothing I consume (or do) now makes me happy, then as long as I expect to recover (or learn to act alone) over time, it is optimal for me to exhibit patience, and postpone my consumption (or actions) in the future. Conversely, if I am confident about a favourable event in the future, say a new year’s celebration (or an escape out of existential abandonment), this, too, justifies postponing current consumption (or actions) until the realisation of the favorable event, when the pleasure derived from this consumption (or action) will be higher.

The theory has some interesting implications. In environments where the determinants of your welfare are stable, even if unknown to you, you would be more patient. As Rae (1834, p 57) notes: “When engaged in safe occupations, and living in healthy countries, men are much more apt to be frugal, than in unhealthy, or hazardous occupations, and in climates pernicious to human life. Sailors and soldiers are prodigals…In the West Indies, New Orleans, the East Indies, the expenditure of the inhabitants is profuse. The same people, coming to reside in the healthy parts of Europe, and not getting into the vortex of extravagant fashion, live economically.” Safe environments provide an assurance that the background will not change drastically, and healthy countries promise that the background will remain friendly to our welfare, even if it changes. The opposite would be true for environments that are hazardous or volatile.

If this ignorance about future welfare is the reason for being impatient, it follows that the impatience may decrease over time, leading to what is called time-inconsistency. That is, you may be more willing to postpone consumption 5 years from now to 6 years from now, than postponing consumption from now to one year from now? Why? Because the ignorance about my future welfare that makes me reluctant to postpone consumption from now, when the welfare is known and hopefully high, to one year from now, befalls my welfare at both times that are 5 and 6 years from now. Assuming that any deterioration in welfare is gradual and incremental, I may still expect my welfare 5 years from now to be higher than my welfare 6 years from, but this difference is marginal compared to the difference of welfare between now and one year from now, making me relatively more patient for matters that lie farther in the future.

Similarly, if, for whatever reason, you derive unexpectedly high pleasure from an activity, your impatience may also go up. As you are unsure of the causes of this unusual pleasure and unsure whether it will last in the future, you may be particularly unwilling to postpone this activity in the future. For example, when you are really into a relationship, you may want it to blossom immediately. As Krauss writes: “People with an anxious attachment style…push their partners to become too intimate too soon because they fear the love object will slip away. When these relationships come to an end, the anxiously attached are driven almost immediately into another one, which they similarly pursue until it reaches its own logical, unhappy conclusion.” Suggesting that a lack of confidence in the depth of one’s relationship and its ability to survive in the future makes one impatient and demand too much from one’s relationships while they still last. A relationship that is the result of a deep and mutual attraction, may make us less clingy and possessive, because we are sure that it will continue to be a source of pleasure, as the pleasure resides not in fickle emotional sentiments, but in our shared fondness, which is rooted too deeply in us to be eradicated by a mere change in circumstances.

It also suggests that we may be simultaneously very impatient about certain matters, while very patient about others, exhibiting varied discount rates across goods. For instance, reading always makes me happy independent of any additional factors, but writing only excites me when I am `in the mood’, or when I need to write to clear my mind. More formally, my welfare from writing depends on factors that lie outside of the act of writing, while my welfare from reading is self-contained. So I am very reluctant, almost unable, to postpone writing when I feel like writing, but willing to postpone reading, even if I enjoy reading far more than writing.

Viewed through this lens, impatience is not the absence of patience; impatience is merely the mirror image of patience; impatience is the outcome of the same optimisation as patience. One does not train oneself to be patient, instead of being impatient. One may only train oneself to be knowledgeable about the determinants of one’s welfare, and train oneself to accurately forecast the trajectory of these determinants. If the forecasted trajectory promises a higher welfare with certitude, one should be patient, if it does not, one should be impatient. One does not choose between patience or impatience. One may only choose the `complexity’ of one’s lifestyle, by selecting the determinants of welfare in one’s lifestyle. A more elaborate and complex lifestyle may lead to a higher welfare when all the determinants of welfare are in place, but may also make welfare difficult to predict and control. A lifestyle that is simple and austere may make it easier to assemble the necessary ingredients of welfare, because the ingredients are few and known, leaving welfare stable over time and under one’s control, but may limit the upside of our welfare by depriving one of the pleasures obtained from synergies between a multitude of consumption goods in an elaborate lifestyle.

So connatural are the concepts of patience and impatience, and so inevitable is the optimality of impatience that even the Quran (2:148) could not maintain an unqualified condemnation of impatience, and had to concede: “Hasten towards all that is good.”