While waiting to cross a road yesterday, I watched a cyclist do a perfectly legal and correct right-hand turn. The bike stayed to the outside of the lane but even there he caused the car behind him to pause for a moment before it could turn. The car then took its turn, the driver planting his foot a fraction more heavily than necessary, scowling and grumbling at the cyclist as he did so.
This small and otherwise insignificant incident captured, for me, one of the pre-eminent challenges of our so-called developed society as we move into a new decade.
Too often – far too often – we allow small delays to stress us out. Too often we become anxious over a three minute supermarket queue, impatient while waiting for the lift or frustrated when a webpage takes too long to load.
Most dangerously, we increasingly lapse into Jekyll and Hyde moments if held up even briefly whilst driving our cars.
According to insurance company AAMI’s 2009 Crash Index Survey, Australian drivers are five times more likely (than they were in 1996) to pursue a driver who they think has done something stupid. They (we) are four times as likely to tail-gate an annoying driver and increasingly believe that taking such action is the right thing to do. And they are much more likely (no stats here – just my own experience) to abuse a cyclist who holds them up for a few moments.
All of this stress, frustration and rage occurs, presumably, because someone is deemed to have stolen time from us. There can be no other reasonable explanation. Somewhere along the way we have grown to consider every second of our busy lives as ours and ours alone, and every moment taken from us is viewed as a straight out theft.
Over time, we’ve worked ourselves into a communal lather.
Give it some thought, if you can pause for a moment, and you’ll realise that all of this makes no sense. Mostly we are talking about minutes, if not seconds, ‘wasted’. We waste much more of our own time – at least I do – procrastinating, reading unimportant news and watching rubbish on television. And in any case, getting angry doesn’t bring the time back. If anything it takes time away from us at the other end: excessive stress is often linked to reduced life expectancy.
Chilling out a bit, having a smile to ourselves when something holds us up, and basically slowing down – just a tad. Maybe we could develop these habits as we enter the new decade. Try it for a while and you’ll find yourself wondering what everyone else’s fuss is all about.
P.S. If this idea interests you, I highly recommend you read the chapter ‘Consolation for Frustration’ in Alain de Botton‘s excellent book The Consolations of Philosophy.
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I've been work- ing in business, one way or another, for the last 20 years, and writing for the last ten. My main interest now is to get messages across - yours and mine - in a readable and approachable fashion. 
