Are You Lazy or Impatient?

When you go to a fast food restaurant (assuming you’re not too high class for that kind of thing) would you rather sit in your car going through the drive-through for 12 minutes or go inside and be out with your food in 6 minutes?

I’ve been thinking about the bad qualities that we have and how they compare to each other. We often look at our good qualities and see how they compare with each other. Example: “am I better looking or funnier?” Or “Am I a better with old people or young people?”

We also compare good with bad. Example: “I wonder if they took my criticism as helpful or rude?”

But it seems like we don’t compare the bad things very often. Maybe because it’s unnecessary, but it seems to me like it could be an interesting study to find what kind of qualities we really care about most.

In the example I gave above with the drive-through, you’d have to put yourself in a category. So if you said you would rather go in and get your food, would you fit in the “more impatient category? If you went through the drive-through, would you be considered more lazy than impatient?

Well, not necessarily. There are of course a ton of other factors that might go into your decision making. Maybe you have a friend working inside so you want to go inside to say hi to them instead of only going through the drive-through. Everything has exceptions to the rules.

However, even this I think helps us to get to the deeper roots of why we do things and the things we care about.

For myself, I would be the kind of person that would want to go in and say hi to my friend working. For several of my sisters, they would honestly probably pay extra just to not see the person I went out of my way to see.

You start to see little priorities behind each person’s decisions and it’s not just what’s on the surface. You might see that scenario and say that I went to see them because I care about people and my sisters wouldn’t because they’re selfish and don’t like people. Could that be right? Well, yeah. It could be. But it could be totally off too.

Maybe I went to see the person because I wanted to show off that I don’t work in a fast food restaurant. That I have a more cushy job. Maybe my sisters didn’t go in because they didn’t want to distract the person from their work or they wanted to spend the time they set aside for the people they’re already with.

So many variables.

I’ve diverged from the title of this post a lot. But it just goes to show how interesting understanding the thoughts and actions of people can be.

Try it out sometime. Pick two bad qualities and see which one you would rather do. Pick actual situations that you find yourself in. Analyze your actions. I think we’ll start to discover interesting things about ourselves when we do this.