There’s a concept from psychology known as the availability bias. Essentially, this bias causes us to give more weight to things that are easily accessible in our memory.
For example, I tend to avoid malls because I’ve read so many articles lately about brash robberies at our local mall.
When you ingest a lot of a thing, it colours the way you think about a lot of things.
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A long-standing critique of social media is that it paints a false picture of the world.
People don’t always look that good. Food isn’t always that easy to make. Children don’t always pose that perfectly for pictures.
But if we ingest a lot of this, given the availability bias, it’s easy to see how our own expectations can shift.
This critique isn’t anything new. Many of us who’ve been on social media for a while have caught on to this, and we’re comfortable saying, well that’s just not reality.
I’d like us to turn our attention to a slightly newer version of this now. Another place where the availability bias might be shaping the way we behave, and at least for me I’m learning, not for the better.
First, let me tell you a story about an appliance we bought recently.
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Not too long before writing this sentence, we purchased an almost new washer and dryer from a scratch and dent store.
Two weeks later, the dryer broke. This happened on a Friday.
I called the store and they suggested that I try a few things. None worked. They have one repair person they work with, apparently incredible at his job, but he only works on Saturdays. Unfortunately for us, we were going out of town that Saturday (the day after the dryer broke), so we’d have to wait until the following Saturday for a visit.
We were without a dryer for a little over a week.
The following Saturday, Mr. Incredible-at-his-job came by and tried a few things. None worked. He said he needed to order a new part, but would first check the store to see if they had it. They didn’t. The store was now closed for Thanksgiving, so he’d have to wait until Tuesday to order the part.
We’ve now been without a dryer for over two weeks.
At the time of writing this sentence, the story hasn’t yet found a happy ending. The part still needs to be ordered, delivered, and installed. Hopefully, it works too.
What I’d like you to pay attention to in this story, is how long it’s taking for our problem to be solved.
A dryer isn’t something that breaks down everyday, so it’s not a common problem.
But, I do have other problems that need solving everyday. Let’s now turn to how I solve most of those.
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In the course of writing this post, I got curious about two things.
Both of them involved my relationship with AI. Specifically, ChatGPT—the tool I use the most often.
The first thing I was curious about was how often I use it (and how has that increased over time), and the second was its average response time.
After exporting my entire conversation history (more than three years worth of data), I uploaded it right back to ChatGPT and asked it about these two questions. Here’s what I learned:
First, since I started using the service in September 2023, up until my conversation export inOctober 2026, my daily activity increased by 304%. The average number of messages I send to ChatGPT went from 2.1 messages per day, to 8.4 messages per day.
Second, across more than three years of data (7,000+ conversations), the average time it took ChatGPT to respond to a given thing I asked of it, was 3.21 seconds.
So, to recap. In the past three years:
I’ve experienced the problem of a dryer breaking once, and it’s taking over two weeks to solve. I’ve experienced over 7,000 other problems and shared them with ChatGPT, and they’ve taken an average of 3.21 seconds to solve.
If social media is giving us a false picture of the world, then AI might be giving us a false sense of how long problems take to solve.
AI works on artificial time, and because I use it so often (availability bias), it’s warping my sense of natural time. It might be making me a more impatient person.
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If you ask the average person about how they are currently using AI, I would be willing to bet that somewhere in their response they will marvel at how quickly it does things. This isn’t natural. It’s artificial.
Don’t let AI steal your patience. You’re living on natural time.
