Quality care is fundamentally a long-horizon activity.

The "compression of time" effect

Social media platforms are built around immediate feedback loops:

• Instant likes
• Instant outrage
• Instant entertainment
• Instant validation
• Constant novelty

The brain becomes accustomed to very short cycles between effort and reward.

Historically, many worthwhile pursuits required delayed gratification:

• Building a business
• Developing expertise
• Growing leaders
• Raising children
• Writing a novel
• Building institutions

The reward often arrived years after the investment.

Anna Karenina demands patience. TikTok rewards interruption.

That conditioning doesn't stay confined to entertainment. It influences expectations across society.

What happens in organisations?

For much of the 20th century, organisations often operated on longer horizons.

A CEO might say:

"This manager has potential. Let's invest in them for three years."

Today the language is often:

"Why isn't this person delivering after six months?"

or even

"Why isn't this strategy working after one quarter?"

The financial markets amplify this.

Public companies are judged every quarter.

Private equity often operates on relatively short exit timelines.

Executive bonuses are frequently tied to annual results.

The system rewards visible short-term gains more reliably than patient capability building.

The churn phenomenon

People being "churned through employment roles" reflects something many organisational psychologists have observed.

Instead of asking:

"How do we develop this person?"

leaders increasingly ask:

"How quickly can we replace this person?"

People become interchangeable components rather than appreciating that capability takes time to build.

This creates several consequences:

• Less organisational loyalty
• Reduced psychological safety
• More risk aversion
• Less innovation
• Greater burnout

Ironically, the pursuit of short-term performance can reduce long-term performance.

The paradox

The strange thing is that modern business rhetoric constantly talks about:

• Transformation
• Innovation
• Culture
• Leadership

Yet all four require patience.

You cannot transform an organisation in a quarter.

You cannot build culture in six months.

You cannot develop leaders through a two-day workshop.

You cannot innovate if every initiative must produce immediate ROI.

There is a mismatch between the goals organisations claim to pursue and the time horizons they are willing to tolerate.

The aged care connection

Quality care is fundamentally a long-horizon activity.

The best outcomes come from:

• Stable relationships
• Staff development
• Trust
• Knowledge accumulation
• Continuous improvement

None of those produce dramatic quarterly numbers.

An organisation can often improve a financial spreadsheet faster than it can improve the lived experience of an older person.

The danger is that executive thinking can become overly dominated by metrics that move quickly rather than outcomes that matter deeply.

A deeper cultural shift

I suspect the issue is larger than social media alone.

Social media is one symptom of a broader societal move toward what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls social acceleration.

Everything is faster:

• News cycles
• Technology cycles
• Career changes
• Product development
• Political discourse

When everything accelerates, patience begins to look like inefficiency.

But many of the most valuable things in human life remain stubbornly slow:

• Wisdom
• Trust
• Relationships
• Character
• Expertise
• Institutional knowledge

You can't accelerate them without degrading them.

What fascinates me is that some of the most successful organisations of the last century—Toyota, Berkshire Hathaway, Patagonia, Costco, even parts of the best health systems—were built on almost anti-TikTok principles:

• Long-term thinking
• Continuous improvement
• Investment in people
• Tolerance for learning curves
• Compounding gains

They behave more like someone reading Anna Karenina than someone endlessly swiping for the next dopamine hit on Tik Tok.

The irony may be that in an age obsessed with speed, competitive advantage increasingly belongs to organisations willing to be patient.