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 queue for hours to see the queen lying in state, but will 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. But despite this, waiting is frequently dismissed as a minor inconvenience rather than something that offers us a wider insight into our lives and our psychology.
We make the case for rethinking waiting, that it not only tells us something about our patience and resilience (or lack of it): but how 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 how institutions distribute respect and attention, whose time is treated as valuable, and whose is not.
But there is also something even deeper and perhaps more radical and uniquely diagnostic. It exposes our interiority: the emotional and cognitive labour of anticipating an uncertain future, and how this aligns with social structure: the external conditions that shape this. Few other everyday experiences make the link between internal states and external architectures so visible. And it is this that makes what seems a very humdrum and everyday activity such a potent and valuable activity.
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 by which aristocratic courts organised hierarchy, ritualised access, and staged deference. The antechamber, a waiting space positioned just outside the rooms of a monarch or high-ranking official, was not merely a threshold or functional area; it was the means to arrange waiting as 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 simultaneously drawing us outward (toward the social structure and its hierarchies). Waiting thus means that our attention swings between internal uncertainty and external observation. This dual focus reflects the way in which waiting always has been and continues to be surprisingly psychologically complex.
A contemporary version of the antechamber could be the television green room. At one level, a functional holding space, the green room also operates as a carefully managed zone of suspension: 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, keep a calm demeanour, 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 it means waiting always involves directedness toward an expected event, even if the details of the event are uncertain or its timing is not clear. This means it is not an empty pause but a relation to the future.
While a delay is an external event, such as the train being late or the server stalling, waiting itself is the subjective experience that arises due to that delay. The way it is shaped is through expectations, trust, and the 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’, meaning it is difficult 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 there being overlapping conditions, it does have distinctive qualities but one 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 (Interior)
Most emotional states either lean inward (grief, boredom) or outward (such as deadline pressure). But waiting is distinctive because it forces both the self and the system into the same frame of reference. In other words, as Lisa Baraitser suggests, waiting draws attention to both our subjective experience of time and the external forces shaping it.
Because what might seem from the outside like irritability or passivity is, internally, a much more complex state. Waiting heightens our consciousness, a period of intensified self-observation in which emotions such as anticipation, vigilance and meaning-making come to the surface. In this sense, waiting can be activating, forcing us to make meaning of our situation, re-think our expectations, and be sensitive to the signals (or silences) around us. Yet the very same dynamics can also be depleting. Because waiting suspends our agency while increasing uncertainty, it can become a place of rumination, self-blame and threat sensitivity.
In some contexts, such as medical results or precarious work, waiting can foster readiness for action; in others, especially in prolonged or unclear situations, it can create a sense of resignation and fatigue. Waiting can therefore both prepare us for movement but also deaden our capacity to act.
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 aversive human experiences. This can be uncertainty about timing, outcomes, consequences and others’ intentions, triggering hypervigilance and anticipatory threat processing, yet at the same it increases the need for meaning-making. Individuals seek to make sense, filling time with inference and speculation.
Waiting also disrupts attention, because the awaited event could arrive at any moment, so we cannot fully invest in doing something else. This results in fragmentation of attention whilst reducing our cognitive bandwidth. This means that waiting is a mental tax: a drain on working memory, planning and inhibitory control.
Waiting also engages temporal forecasting systems. Individuals simulate multiple possible futures, attempting to prepare for the emotional consequences of each. This forecasting is costly. It amplifies stress reactivity, especially in contexts where outcomes matter (e.g., health results, job decisions, immigration processes). Emotional regulation strategies such as distraction or resignation become central to the experience of waiting. And crucially, the ability to regulate emotion during waiting is unequally distributed across individuals and contexts, shaped by social support, material security and perceived control.
Exterior: What shapes waiting
Time is not distributed equally, Sarah Sharma argues that late capitalism produces this “temporal inequality”: unequal access to speed, responsiveness, and timely service. Waiting becomes a marker of one’s position in social hierarchies. Those with economic capital can outsource or bypass waiting; those without must absorb delay.
Javier Auyero’s ethnography of welfare offices shows that bureaucratic waiting is a political instrument. Waiting disciplines, exhausts, and renders populations governable. Delays are not simply inefficiencies; they are features. They distribute uncertainty, shape expectations, and signal who is valued and who is not.
Rebecca Rotter extends this to asylum and immigration systems, where waiting becomes a condition of suspended life. Individuals exist in temporal limbo, unable to plan, work, or move on. Waiting becomes a chronic mode of existence.
Temporal injustice arises when groups are systematically exposed to more uncertainty and liminality. Temporal injustice is experienced not only as wasted time but as diminished agency, eroded dignity, and restricted futurity. This is evident in healthcare disparities, where diagnostic delays disproportionately affect women and racialised groups; in labour markets, where precarious workers wait for shifts or contracts; and in digital infrastructures that ration access through opaque queues.
The idea of temporal injustice helps to crystallise this. It is not only that some people have more free time than others, or can move through life more quickly. It is that some groups are systematically exposed to greater uncertainty, greater delay, and greater liminality than others. Their lives are punctuated by extended waits for decisions, services or recognition, with little control over duration or outcome. In such contexts, waiting is not a neutral interval but a mechanism through which inequality is reproduced: the capacity to plan, to hope, and to project oneself into the future is differentially distributed.
Marshmallows
One of the most recognisable studies about waiting in the psychology literature is the marshmallow experiment. Walter Mischel’s now-iconic marshmallow experiment was long interpreted as evidence that waiting is 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 if they can wait, reveals something fundamental about their prospects. Or so the story went.
This tidy narrative fit beautifully with a cultural preference for psychological explanations. It aligned with broader moral claims about who deserves success. Those who can defer gratification are mature, disciplined, responsible; those who succumb early are impulsive, undisciplined, lacking the inner resources needed to thrive. Waiting becomes a virtue, impatience a personal fault.
But subsequent research changed the story. Celeste Kidd showed that children’s waiting times depend heavily on environmental reliability. If the researcher has already broken a promise in the session (“I’ll bring you new crayons” but doesn’t), children stop waiting. They eat the marshmallow straight away. Their behaviour is not impulsive; it is rational. If the world does not keep its promises, it makes little sense to treat the future as more valuable than the present.
Tyler Watts added socioeconomic texture: children from poorer households waited less, not because they lacked discipline, but because they lacked reasons to believe that waiting would pay off. Instability teaches vigilance, not patience. The “self-control” interpretation collapses under this evidence. What looked like a personal deficit turns out to reflect the broader conditions of a child’s life.
This shift is important because it reframes waiting as a relationship between a person and their environment. Waiting is not simply a matter of willpower; it is a judgment about reliability, safety, and predictability. The marshmallow test becomes a miniature version of an everyday truth: people wait when they trust that the world will honour the delay. They do not wait, even though they have been repeatedly shown that it won’t.
This principle generalises far beyond childhood. Adults, too, calibrate their willingness to wait based on the stability of the systems they rely on. If the GP surgery never calls back, or the immigration portal routinely glitches, or the job application never receives a response, impatience is not a psychological weakness. It is an assessment of structural unreliability. Waiting is a behaviour built on experience.
This marshmallow reframing is a useful gateway into the larger argument of this chapter: waiting is a diagnostic of the world we inhabit. It reveals trust, inequality, institutional capacity, and the emotional textures of everyday life. And 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 marshmallow studies also expose a broader limitation in much behaviour-change work: a tendency to privilege proximal psychological mechanisms over the distal conditions that shape them. We often explain outcomes in terms of risk perception, self-control or motivation, partly because these are more measurable and feel more “actionable” than structural factors. But the marshmallow findings show that what appears to be a failure of self-control may instead be a rational adaptation to unreliable contexts. In the same way, what we code as hesitancy, apathy or impatience in other domains may be better understood as responses to environments that repeatedly fail to honour their own timelines. Waiting, on this view, becomes a relationship to institutional reliability rather than a simple trait of the individual.
This has uncomfortable implications for standard behaviour-change models. Frameworks such as COM-B distinguish neatly between internal states (“capability” and “motivation”) and external “opportunities” for action. Yet waiting reveals how entangled these dimensions are: people’s “motivation” to comply, attend, persist or return is continually shaped by their lived experience of how systems handle time. A person who has learned that appointments are cancelled, emails go unanswered, or processes stall indefinitely may present as “unmotivated”, but their reluctance often reflects well-founded expectations about how the system will behave. Waiting shows us that what we treat as an inner deficit can, in fact, be a rational reading of temporal opportunity.
The architecture of waiting
Before the rise of digital systems, modern institutions developed their own material architectures of waiting that, like the antechamber, made social order legible. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century waiting rooms in railway stations, municipal offices, hospitals, and welfare agencies each carried a distinct temporal script through their design, rhythms, and social organisation. These were not neutral holding areas: they actively staged relations of power, scarcity, and citizenship. A crowded clinic corridor or a slow-moving benefits queue signalled institutional strain; a first-class lounge or priority window communicated privilege; the arrangement of chairs, signage, and sightlines shaped how people interpreted delay and their place within it. Crucially, such spaces provided shared cues, glances exchanged with others, visible workloads, overheard explanations, that helped individuals situate their own waiting within a broader social field. Waiting was still frustrating, but it was epistemically legible: people could read something about system capacity, fairness, and hierarchy from the room itself.
By contrast, the visible architecture of the antechamber or the welfare office is replaced by what Kitchin (2017) terms algorithmic opacity: systems that produce outcomes (including delay) without offering any corresponding interpretive cues. We encounter a spinning wheel, a static “pending” notification, or countdowns whose time-based logic is less easy to understand. This matters as while earlier forms of waiting made our relationship with wider structures visible, offering some explanation for our internal response, digital waiting does the opposite, instead amplifying interiority while concealing structure.
Deprived of shared spaces to calibrate with others, visible hierarchies to gain some understanding (even if we did not like it), individuals have little choice but to turn their interpretive effort inward, as we do not have the (previously available) social and material cues that help situate those feelings within broader institutional patterns. The result is a form of misrecognition: the system continues to generate the emotions of waiting, but the system itself is harder to see.
A useful everyday illustration is the shift from traditional restaurant service to environments saturated with 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 interpretable. It unfolded within a visible architecture of activity that provided cues about fairness, workload and sequence.
With the introduction of digital delivery systems, this interpretive capacity collapses. A restaurant may appear half-empty while the kitchen is overwhelmed with a stream of invisible online orders. Diners have no access to the algorithmic prioritisation decisions determining whether their meal comes next or after a batch of high-margin delivery requests. The wait may lengthen, but its cause becomes opaque. What looks like inattentiveness or inefficiency may, in fact, be the outcome of digital queueing logics that the customer cannot see and the staff cannot disclose. 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 socially legible becomes epistemically murky. The emotional experience remains, but the structural cues that once helped situate it are stripped away.
Waiting in different contexts
Waiting does not take a single form; its meaning and psychological weight depend heavily on the setting in which it unfolds. The same temporal structure of delayed action and uncertain timing acquires different emotional and social significance in different institutional contexts. This variability is crucial for understanding waiting as a behavioural and structural phenomenon. By contrasting two sharply different domains, organisational life and care, we can see how waiting becomes a diagnostic tool for reading systems, hierarchies and the distribution of attention.
In organisational settings, waiting tends to be embedded in coordination structures: workflows, approval chains, communication rhythms and technological dependencies. These forms of delay signal where decision-making is congested, what input is required, and how temporal priorities are allocated. As Catherine Bailey and Roy Suddaby argue, organisational waiting reveals “the latent architecture of power,” making visible the bottlenecks and asymmetries that formal process maps often obscure. In this context, waiting teaches employees how the organisation really works: whose time is protected, whose can be expended, and where authority actually lies. It is a behavioural cue about institutional reliability and internal hierarchy, a kind of workplace epistemology
Waiting in care settings involves a fundamentally different temporal logic. Here, delay is inseparable from vulnerability, bodily unpredictability and emotional risk. Lisa Baraitser shows that care-time is defined by suspension: a mode in which the future cannot be accelerated and the rhythms of institutions are experienced against the more fragile rhythms of bodies. Unlike organisational delays, which often frustrate efficiency, care delays reshape existential orientation, expanding the present, narrowing the future and heightening awareness of one’s dependency on opaque procedures and overburdened systems (Riley, 2012). Rotter’s work on asylum processes similarly describes waiting as “temporal precarity,” a condition that erodes agency and compresses hope. In these contexts, waiting does not merely interrupt work; it absorbs life.
Comparing these two domains is not a stylistic choice but an analytic one. Each demonstrates, in a different way, the chapter’s central claim: waiting exposes the relationship between interior experience and external structure. In organisations, this relationship is revealed through coordination rhythms, workflow delays and temporal hierarchies. In care, it is revealed through bodily vulnerability, institutional pacing and existential uncertainty. What unites these divergent settings is that waiting forces individuals to navigate systems whose logic becomes visible only when time falters.
This comparison also shows why waiting should not be trivialised as inefficiency or personal impatience. In both domains, waiting is a form of learning — about reliability, about hierarchy, about whose needs can shape the tempo of collective life. It offers a behavioural-science lens on trust, motivation and perceived control, and a sociological lens on inequality and institutional design. By examining waiting where it is procedural (organisations) and where it is existential (care), we can better understand how contemporary temporal architectures shape not only behaviour but identity, hope and the capacity to act.
Conclusions
If we treat waiting only as inefficiency, we miss its diagnostic and reflexive force. 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.
The experience of waiting is distributed unequally, but its meaning is always relational. It tells us something about ourselves, but equally, and often more importantly, it tells us something about the systems we are embedded in.
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 becomes a quiet lesson. It teaches people how power operates, what institutions can reliably deliver, and whose time is treated as valuable. It is also one of the few domains in which a stubbornly human intelligence persists: the capacity to endure ambiguity, interpret silence, and attune one’s own tempo to that of others rather than that of the machine.