The waiting room

How the experience of waiting tells us something quite radical about people and society

Waiting is one of the most ubiquitous yet perhaps most scholarly-neglected experiences of time in contemporary life. It is rarely far from the news, whether waiting for a stock market crash, waiting times for operations in the NHS, or even whether queuing in line is the new ‘cool thing to do’. People will wait for hours to see the queen lying in state, but will not wait but click away if an online ad does not catch our attention in the first few seconds.

It can feel as if much of our lives is characterised by these ‘temporal intervals’ that interrupt our flow and defer action. Despite this, waiting is frequently dismissed as a minor inconvenience rather than as something that offers broader insight into our lives and psychology.

We make the case for rethinking waiting, that it not only tells us something about our patience and resilience (or lack of it): it also tells us something about the world we inhabit. Who is kept waiting, for how long, under what conditions, and with what information? It shows us whose time is treated as valuable, and whose is not.

But there is also something even more profound, more radical and uniquely diagnostic. It viscerally exposes our inner lives: there is emotional and cognitive labour involved in anticipating an uncertain future. But of course, this future is often out of our hands, external conditions shape our waiting, and with that, our inner lives.

Hence, a person waiting for a delayed medical call-back, for example, may cycle through fear, hope, irritation and self-reassurance, yet every feeling is dependent on the tempo of an institution they cannot influence. On this basis, their inner landscape cannot be disentangled from the system that determines their wait. Few other everyday experiences make the link so clearly between internal states and external structures quite so tangibly.

And it is this that makes what seems a very humdrum, everyday activity so potent and valuable. And definitely worth a closer look to better understand why.

Antechambers, hierarchy, and the staging gates of time

The roots of waiting have a long history in early modern Europe. As historian Helmut Puff sets out in his analysis of waiting spaces, the ‘antechamber’ was a key architectural form through which aristocratic courts organised hierarchy and deference. The antechamber was a space positioned just outside the rooms of a monarch or high-ranking official where you waited for admittance. It was not simply or functional area but served to make waiting an expression of social order (and your place within it).

In these courts, access to powerful individuals was determined by which waiting room you occupied and how long you were made to wait, signalling your rank and the level of privilege you enjoyed. As Puff writes,

“waiting in the antechamber was an embodied acknowledgement of hierarchical order”

The architecture was deliberately layered: outer chambers for the lower ranks, inner chambers for those of higher status. Waiting was a visible performance of humility, with swift access signalling favour and political intimacy.

But for our purposes, the most interesting and important point that Puff sets out is what he calls the ‘dual focus’ of waiting in the antechamber: waiting draws us inward (toward self-consciousness, anticipation, emotional intensity) whilst at the same time drawing us outward (toward the social structure and its hierarchies that determine the waiting). Waiting, therefore, means that our attention swings between internal uncertainty and external observation. This dual focus reflects the way in which waiting always has been surprisingly psychologically complex.

A contemporary version of the antechamber could be the television green room. At one level, a functional holding space, it also operates as a carefully managed zone where guests are present but unable to act until summoned. As in courtly settings, Puff suggests that waiting here demands ‘managed comportment’: the ability to take care of how we stand or sit, to keep a calm manner, to make small talk whilst simultaneously being permanently ready for interruption. The green room itself subtly signals hierarchy (with VIPs escorted quickly or given private rooms), but also its very presence is designed for anticipation, putting people into a state where their mood, focus and expectations adjust to the organisation’s pace.

Definitions of waiting

Although waiting has a distinctive quality compared with many other emotional states, the everyday use of the term means it can overlap with delay, boredom, inactivity, anticipation and endurance. Yet research across social sciences suggests that waiting is a distinct condition with its own characteristics.

Sociologist Stefano Gasparini’s classic definition suggests that waiting is:

“an interstitial time that functions both as a gap and as a link between the present and a future that has not yet arrived”

Unpacking this, we can see that waiting is not just an empty pause; waiting is always in relation to the future.By contrast, a delay is an external event, such as the train being late or the server stalling, while waiting itself is the subjective experience that arises due to that delay. This means that waiting involves the expectations, trust, and perceived risk that the future will not arrive as promised.

Waiting also differs from boredom: whereas boredom dulls attention and engagement, waiting is a mix of both under-stimulation alongside anticipation and vigilance, the sense that something may happen at any moment.

And nor is waiting the same as inactivity; this lacks a focus, whilst waiting is saturated with it, being directed toward a ‘not-yet’, which means we then struggle to fully relax into the present, as the future is intruding.

Waiting is usually more short-lived than endurance, which stretches across long periods of difficulty, although repeated or prolonged uncertainty can make waiting feel like endurance in slow motion. And while anticipation is often energising, waiting blends that feeling with dependence on others and a loss of control.

So, despite overlapping conditions, waiting has distinctive qualities; but the one characteristic of most interest to us is its dual exposure of Interiority alongside Social structure. We will now look at each of these in turn.

Our experience of waiting (Interiority)

Most emotional states either lean inward (such as grief or boredom) or outward (such as deadline pressure). But waiting is distinctive because it brings both the self and the system into the same frame of reference. In other words, as Lisa Baraitser suggests in her book ‘Enduring Time’, waiting draws attention to our subjective experience of time.

Waiting heightens our consciousness, producing a period of intensified self-observation in which emotions such as anticipation, vigilance and meaning-making come to the surface. We notice things we would normally ignore such as the sound of a clinic door opening, the shift in a colleague’s tone, the movement of a queue, a status bar that refuses to budge. In this sense, waiting can be activating. It forces us to interpret our situation: Has something gone wrong? Am I being overlooked? Is this delay meaningful? It pushes us to rethink expectations and attend to signals, or to the telling absences of signals, around us.

Yet the very same dynamics can also be depleting. Because waiting suspends our agency while amplifying uncertainty, it easily becomes a space for rumination (“Did I make a mistake?”), self-blame (“Maybe my CV wasn’t good enough”), or threat sensitivity (“What if the test result is bad news?”). We can easily escalate into elaborate internal narratives, each with high degrees of worry or self-doubt.

Context shapes which the way this experience unfolds. In situations like waiting for medical results, or waiting for confirmation of work hours in a precarious job, the delay can foster a kind of readiness. We are in a state of heightened alertness for the moment action becomes possible. But in prolonged, unclear or imposed waits (such as the indefinite timelines of immigration processes), waiting can produce resignation, fatigue and a gradual eroding of a sense of agency.

Waiting, in this sense, can prepare us for movement or quietly deaden our capacity to act. But the difference, it seems, depends less on personal capabilities and more on the reliability, transparency, and fairness of the systems that hold us in a state of suspension.

Psychological research shows the complex set of emotions that waiting induces and how they influence this activating-depleting continuum. For example, waiting is fraught with uncertainty, one of the most challenging of human experiences. This can be uncertainty about timing, outcomes, consequences and others’ intentions, which then triggers hypervigilance and potential threat processing. Yet at the same time, it increases the need for meaning-making - we try to make sense of what is going on, filling time with speculation about what is happening.

Waiting also disrupts attention, because the awaited event might arrive at any moment, which means we cannot fully invest in doing something else. This leads to the fragmentation of attention, reducing cognitive bandwidth and draining memory, planning, and self-control.

Temporal forecasting is also engaged, as we think about multiple possible futures, trying to prepare for the consequences of each. This amplifies stress, especially in cases where outcomes really matter (e.g., health results, job decisions, immigration processes). Emotional regulation strategies such as distraction or resignation also become central to the experience of waiting.

In summary, there is a huge amount of internal activity involved in the act of waiting that it seems we all know about but perhaps we often do not consider.

Exterior: What shapes waiting

Time is not distributed equally, Sarah Sharma argues, when she suggests that late capitalism produces a “temporal inequality”: we have unequal access to the responsiveness and timely service from others. In fact, waiting is a marker of one’s position in social hierarchies because those with economic capital can outsource or bypass waiting; those without must absorb delay.

Studies of government welfare offices show that bureaucratic waiting is a political instrument. Waiting disciplines, exhausts, and renders populations governable - on this basis, delays are more than inefficiencies; they signal who is valued and who is not. We can extend this to asylum and immigration systems, where waiting becomes a condition of suspended life, unable to plan, work, or move on.

‘Temporal injustice’ arises when groups are consistently exposed to more uncertainty than others, experienced not only as wasted time but as reduced agency and eroded dignity. We see this in healthcare disparities, where delays in diagnosis disproportionately affect women and racialised groups; in labour markets, where precarious workers wait for shifts or contracts; and in digital systems that ration access through opaque queues.

As we see, waiting is not simply a neutral interval but a means through which inequality is distributed: the capacity to plan, to hope, and to project oneself into the future is differentially applied to the population.

These two sections have allowed us to see the complexity involved in waiting both from an interior perspective, but also the structures that create this wait. And a famous experiment from psychology helps to nail the essence of this relationship between the inner and outer.

Marshmallows and waiting: The relationship between inner and outer

Walter Mischel’s now-iconic marshmallow experiment was long interpreted as evidence that waiting was simply an internal capacity, a form of self-control possessed by some and lacking in others. A child, left alone with a marshmallow and promised a second one if they wait, was considered to reveal something fundamental about their prospects.

This notion fitted with a preference for psychological explanations, supporting moral claims about who deserves success. Those who can wait are mature and responsible; those who eat the marshmallow, not waiting for a second are impulsive and lack the inner resources needed to wait, and therefore thrive.

But later research changed the story. showing that children’s waiting times depend heavily on environmental reliability. In the experiment, when the researcher broke a promise (“I’ll bring you new crayons” but didn’t), children stopped waiting and ate the marshmallow straight away. This showed that their behaviour is not impulsive but rational, because if the world does not keep its promises, it makes no sense to wait.

We can extend this to see how children from poorer households wait less, not because they lack discipline, but because they do not believe waiting will pay off. Economic instability encourages vigilance, rather than patience. So what looks like a personal failing in fact turns out to reflect the broader conditions of a child’s life.

This shift is important because it speaks to our key point about waiting as a relationship between a person and their environment, not simply a matter of inner willpower. The marshmallow test is a miniature version of an everyday truth: people garner their inner resources to wait but only when they trust that the external world will reward the delay. On this basis, it is one of the few ordinary experiences in which our inner life and social structures come into clear view at the same time.

The legibility of waiting

Herman Puff set out the way that the institutions shaping our lives developed their own material architectures of waiting that allowed us to understand the basis on which we were waiting. So even if it was unfair, at least we understood it.

Following the antechamber, nineteenth- and twentieth-century waiting rooms in railway stations, government offices, hospitals, and welfare agencies each carried a distinct message through their design and organisation. These were never neutral holding areas: they played out relations of power. A crowded clinic corridor or a slow-moving benefits queue signals institutional strain; a first-class lounge or priority lane communicates privilege. Crucially, these arrangements offer shared cues, we can exchange glances with others, the workloads of the staff are visible - all this helps to explanation to individuals how their own waiting fits within a broader context. Waiting is still frustrating, but it is legible: we can understand something about system capacity, fairness, and hierarchy from the room itself.

By contrast, this visible architecture is replaced by algorithmic opacity: systems that mean we wait, but without offering any corresponding cues as to why. We see a spinning wheel, a “pending” notification, or countdowns where the time-based logic is not always easy to understand. This matters earlier forms of waiting allowed us to see our relationship with wider structures, offering some explanation for our complex internal responses. But digital waiting all too often does the opposite, which can lead us to instead amplifying the inner side of the equation while concealing structure as the system continues to generate the emotions of waiting, but the system itself is harder to see.

It seems to us that a good illustration of this is the shift from traditional restaurant service to places that are also servicing digital ordering. Before the rise of online delivery platforms, diners could read the room: they could see how many tables were occupied, which groups had arrived before them, how pressured the staff appeared, and therefore infer something about why they were waiting and how long they might continue to do so. The wait was not necessarily pleasant, but it was something we could make sense of as we could see the activity that provided cues about workload and where we were in the sequence.

But with the introduction of digital delivery systems, this ability to interpret our waiting collapses. A restaurant may appear half-empty of diners, but the kitchen could be overwhelmed with online orders. Those in the restaurant have no access to any information about whether their meal comes next or after a batch of (higher-margin) delivery requests. This lack of external clarity means we are thrown back into an inner space where

Here, too, delay becomes personalised: “Why is my food taking so long?” rather than “What system am I inside?” This small but familiar example underscores the central claim of this section: the more algorithmically mediated the architecture of waiting becomes, the harder it is to locate its causes outside oneself. What used to be legible about the environment becomes murky but the intense emotional experience of waiting remains.

In these circumstances, as we have set out before, paranoid cognition can take hold. If the (more powerful) party is keeping us waiting without us being able to understand why, then we are likely to construe this as neglect and bad faith rather than simply a capacity issue. This is not because we have become inherently more suspicious, but because the system no longer provides signals of trustworthiness. The emotional heft of waiting is intensified not only by the lack of visible cues to understand why, but by the absence of reasons to trust that the system is acting in our interests.

Waiting and the economy

Much of the narrative about the economy is based around patience - for example, the notion of ‘Bidenomics’ was heralded on the importance of patience, to take time for people to feel the effects of an economic recovery. And embattled political leader Keir Starmer calls for patience to fix things, saying how the challenges the current government inherited require solutions that will take the long term to see the rewards.

In both cases, waiting is positioned as a civic virtue: responsible citizens are asked to hold steady, trust the process, and accept delay as evidence of seriousness rather than failure.

The challenge is that this appeal to patience can be at odds with people’s lived experience of economic unreliability. As the marshmallow experiment made clear, waiting is tolerated when we can interpret the environment as credible and responsive, but becomes problematic if promises are deferred without good reason. Added to this is asymmetric waiting. Much has been written about an emerging K-shaped economy, where high-income earners benefit from booming stock markets and property prices while low-income households face financial strain from inflation, high housing costs, and debt.

In this situation, we will scour the environment for meaning (given the way waiting has both inner and outer elements), and it is here that the fair process effect comes in. We are generally OK with unequal outcomes if we if we consider that the procedure that created this is fair. But if this process is seen to be unfair, then we are much more likely to have a negative reaction to an outcome where we have less than others.

This helps explain why economic patience narratives are met with scepticism: people are not rejecting long-term thinking as such; they are responding to environments where waiting is perceived both to be unreliable and procedurally unfair.

Waiting-for-harm or waiting-for-reward?

Much analysis of waiting assumes an orientation toward some form of reward or resolution. But it’s not difficult to make a case that a growing share of waiting is in fact related to anticipated harm. People are waiting for climate breakdown, for redundancies they suspect are coming, for economic conditions to worsen. This is not hopeful waiting, but defensive waiting.

For hopeful waiting (e.g. the economy will improve), the cost of waiting is still paid in advance, but it can feel meaningful because it is experienced as preparation. However, if waiting becomes defensive, then it engages threat anticipation and not goal pursuit, which is much more draining energy rather than preparing action. Prolonged exposure to anticipated stressors contributes to our ‘allostatic load’, the cumulative wear and tear produced by sustained uncertainty.

The role of behavioural science

This analysis of waiting arguably highlights a limitation in much behavioural science: a tendency to explain things mainly in terms of inner capacities - such as self-control, or motivation - rather than as a relational experience shaped by the environments in which waiting occurs.

For decades, the marshmallow experiment was seen as evidence that some people are better at tolerating delay than others, and it is only fairly recently that it has been shown that children’s willingness to wait is not simply an internal matter, but it is an assessment about the reliability of the world.

Waiting highlights this issue as it is one of the few experiences where the inner and outer are engaged at the same moment. Behavioural science all too often treats these domains separately - for example, COM-B identifies motivation ‘inside the person’ and opportunity ‘outside the person.’ But waiting shows us how limited this is, as what might look like low motivation may in fact be the result of repeated encounters with unreliable systems. What looks like impatience may be a reasonable response to delays that are opaque or unjustified.

We exist within a ‘system’ of people and their behaviours that shapes what is acceptable or expected of us - understanding how our response and behaviour is shaped by this is critical for a rounded understanding of people.

Conclusions

Waiting is one of the ordinary places where people learn what kind of world they inhabit: how trustworthy promises are, how responsive institutions can be, and where they sit within hierarchies of attention and care.

It also reminds us that humans do not merely move through time; we experience it, stretching ourselves toward imagined futures, holding past and present in mind at once. Waiting brings this distinctively human temporality into sharp relief.

Seen this way, waiting is a lesson in how power operates, what institutions can reliably deliver, and whose time is treated as valuable. It is therefore a very human, ordinary, and often overlooked trait that offers us considerable insight into the world we inhabit.

Implications for brands

Waiting is a signal of trustworthiness, not just another service metric. How delays are handled shapes perceptions of care and competence.

Unclear or unexplained waiting pushes customers into personalised interpretation (e.g. “I’m not valued”) creating distrust and paranoia.

Reducing wait time does not matter as much as making it understandable: explain what is happening, why, and what comes next.

Brands that rely on customers’ patience without demonstrating reliability risk disengagement, churn, and reputation damage.

Implications for government and public sector

Waiting is the public's frontline experience of state power and legitimacy, not an administrative by-product.

Long or indefinite waits are experienced as judgements about citizens’ worth, not just capacity constraints.

Appeals for patience succeed only when processes are seen as fair and transparent.

Public systems need to consider how waiting is effectively an issue of distributed justice, not just operational efficiency.