> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.drjerrykennard.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Why Your Patience Has Left The Building - URL: https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-your-patience-has-left-the-building/ - Published: 2026-08-07T18:21:21.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-07T18:21:21.000Z - Description: Do you recognise that low-grade fury that arrives sometime around the mid-forties? It focuses on a word, a font, or the way the self-checkout machine now offers unsolicited opinions about your shopping. Let's work out what's going on. - Author: Jerry Kennard - Tags: Understanding Your Mind Let's start with mine, because it's a good one to build the argument around. "Impact" has become a verb, and worse, an adjective, and I would like it stopped. Somewhere in the last ten years, every business meeting or news item in the English-speaking world quietly agreed that nothing merely *affects* anything anymore. It *impacts* it. The new software will *impact* productivity. The weather *impacted* the schedule. My colleague's presentation was, and I promise you this is a genuine quote from a genuine meeting, "hugely impactful." An impact, properly understood, is a collision. Two cars have an impact. A meteor has an impact. A change in the tax code, generally speaking, does not — it has an *effect*, which is a perfectly good, perfectly precise word that has been doing this job since before Shakespeare, and which "impact" has been steadily bullying out of a job, largely because it sounds more dramatic and more expensive, which is precisely what modern corporate language is for. None of this is a hill anyone needs to die on. It is, on any objective assessment, a trivial linguistic drift of exactly the kind that has happened to English continuously for a thousand years, and will continue happening long after everyone currently irritated by it has been quietly filed under "historical eccentricity." And yet there is a disproportionate, physically detectable flare of annoyance that arrives every single time I hear it. Which raises a genuinely interesting question. Why? ## The list, for solidarity's sake Before getting into the psychology, it's worth pausing to build the full charge sheet, because part of what makes this phenomenon so recognisable is that everyone over forty has their own version of it, and comparing notes is one of the more reliably enjoyable conversations available to men of a certain age. There's the vocabulary itself, obviously. *Reach out* instead of *contact*. *Circle back* instead of *follow up*. *Touch base*, which nobody has ever actually done and which sounds vaguely medical. *Deep dive*, applied to things that turn out to be a fifteen-minute chat. *Learnings*, used as a plural noun, as though "lessons" had suddenly stopped working. *Solutioning*, which is not a word, and everyone involved knows it is not a word, and everyone involved uses it anyway. *Ask*, as a noun — "what's the ask here" — which manages the impressive feat of being both grammatically incorrect and somehow more irritating than the correct version would have been. Then there's the "space." Everything is now a space. Not an industry, not a sector, not a field — a space. The wellness space. The fintech space. Presumably, somewhere, an actual physical room has been quietly renamed a space as well, because consistency is important. I once walked along a long corridor and met someone coming the other way; she described it as "a difficult space." And there's the social register — the reflexive "no worries" replacing "you're welcome," which somehow contrives to suggest that your thanks was itself a minor imposition requiring reassurance. The "literally" deployed for emphasis in situations that are, definitionally, not literal. The "vibe" now doing serious analytical work in professional contexts where a proper adjective used to suffice. If any of that produced a small, private nod of recognition, congratulations — you have *midlife irritant syndrome*, which I am inventing here for entertainment purposes but which describes something entirely real. ## It isn't just grumpiness The brain, across your whole life, builds what psychologists call schemas — mental templates for how things work, built up through repeated exposure, that let you process the world efficiently without consciously re-evaluating everything from first principles every time. A schema for "how a supermarket is laid out" means you can do your shopping while thinking about something else entirely. A schema for "what this word means" means you can process a sentence at speaking pace rather than having to pause and translate. Schemas are, cognitively speaking, an enormous efficiency win. They are also, by their nature, resistant to change, because the entire point of building one was to stop having to re-process the same information repeatedly. When something violates an established schema — the aisle has moved, the word now means something different, the app has redesigned itself — the brain has to do something it specifically evolved schemas to avoid doing: pay full, effortful, conscious attention to something it had previously outsourced to autopilot. This produces a measurable and genuinely unpleasant sensation, studied under the heading of processing fluency. Things that are easy for the brain to process — familiar words, expected layouts, predictable patterns — are experienced, independently of their actual content, as more pleasant. Things that disrupt fluency are experienced as aversive, even when the disruption is entirely trivial and carries no practical consequence whatsoever. You are not annoyed that the tea is in a different aisle because the tea being in a different aisle is a genuine problem. You are annoyed because your brain built an efficient shortcut; that shortcut has just failed, and the failure itself registers as unpleasant regardless of the stakes. This effect appears to intensify with age, for a fairly logical reason: the older you are, the more schemas you've built, the more deeply embedded and efficient they've become, and the more of them there are available to be violated on any given Tuesday. A twenty-two-year-old has fewer established templates for "how language works" or "how a supermarket is arranged," so there's simply less to disrupt. A sixty-year-old has several decades of finely tuned, deeply automatic expectation, all of which is available to be quietly ambushed by a rebranding exercise. > *You are not becoming a more irritable person as you age. You are accumulating a larger and more efficient library of expectations, and the world has an increasing number of opportunities to violate them. The irritation isn't a character flaw. It's the maintenance cost of having got genuinely good at understanding how things work.* ## The negativity bias makes it worse Negativity bias — the well-documented tendency for negative experiences and information to register more strongly, and be remembered more vividly, than positive or neutral ones — appears to become somewhat more pronounced with age in certain domains, particularly around unexpected disruption to routine. Combine that with the schema-violation effect above and you get a specific and rather elegant trap: the brain is both more likely to have an established expectation to violate, and more likely to register the violation strongly and remember it, than it was twenty years earlier. This is directly related to territory covered in the article on [is everything irritating after 50](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/is-everything-irritating-at-50/), which examines the broader neurological and hormonal picture behind the shortened fuse many men notice in midlife. The particular irritant of language and interface drift is a subset of that same phenomenon — a nervous system that has, for entirely sensible reasons, become both more efficient and more sensitive to disruption of that efficiency. ## Is any of this a problem? Language change is not new; it is not accelerating in any historically unusual way, and every generation in recorded history has believed, with total sincerity, that the version of the language they learned as young adults was the correct and final one, and that everything since represents decline. Samuel Johnson complained about linguistic corruption in the 1750s. There are recorded medieval complaints about the corrupting influence of French loanwords on proper English. This is not a new phenomenon dressed up in new vocabulary. It's the same phenomenon it has always been, and "impact" as a verb will, with fairly high probability, sound entirely unremarkable to your grandchildren, the way "contact" as a verb — genuinely controversial when it first appeared, incidentally — sounds entirely unremarkable to you. This matters because it's worth distinguishing, honestly, between two things that midlife irritation likes to collapse into one: a specific complaint about clarity (impact genuinely does obscure meaning that effect would have made plain, which is a reasonable point on its own merits) and a general, free-floating discomfort with change itself, which the specific complaint is sometimes doing the job of legitimising. The cognitive distortions article on this site covers a related pattern under the heading of overgeneralisation — the single, genuinely irritating instance ("that word is imprecise") expanding into a broader and less defensible verdict ("everything's getting worse, nothing means anything anymore, standards have collapsed"). One of those is a fair point about vocabulary. The other is closer to a mood being retrofitted with an argument. ## What to actually do with this I'm not, to be entirely clear, suggesting you should suppress the irritation or pretend "impactful" is a word you're delighted to encounter. Some complaints are simply correct, and there is a genuine, defensible case that English has lost something precise every time a specific, efficient word gets replaced by a vaguer, more inflated one purely because the vaguer version sounds more important in a meeting. But there's a useful distinction worth making, practically, between the flash of irritation itself — which is automatic, physiological, and not really within your control — and what you do with it afterwards, which entirely is. **Notice the schema-violation for what it is, rather than what it feels like.** The sharp little jolt of annoyance at the moved tea aisle is not actually a referendum on whether supermarkets are badly run or the world is going to hell. It's a very small, very ordinary bit of cognitive friction. Naming it accurately — "that's just my expectation being disrupted, nothing has actually gone wrong" — tends to drain a surprising amount of the sting out of it, in exactly the way the cognitive distortions article describes. **Let the genuinely good complaints stand on their own merits, separately from the mood.** "Impact obscures more precise meaning" is a defensible, specific, linguistically reasonable position that doesn't need "and everything's declining" bolted onto it to be valid. Keep the good argument. Let the general grumpiness go and stand somewhere else. **Use it as social glue rather than a private grievance.** This is, genuinely, one of the more enjoyable and low-stakes forms of male bonding available — the shared, faintly theatrical outrage at a piece of corporate jargon or a relocated aisle is a version of the side-by-side connection covered in the [pub article](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/a-night-at-the-pub-it-should-be-prescribed/), and it costs nothing and offends nobody. Complaining about "solutioning" with a friend over a pint is not bitterness. It's a perfectly good excuse for a laugh. **And notice, occasionally, which side of this you're actually on.** Every generation that has ever complained about the younger one's vocabulary has, at some point in its own youth, been the younger one whose vocabulary someone else complained about. The words you take entirely for granted — "contact" as a verb, "okay," a hundred others — were once somebody's "impact." This isn't a reason to stop noticing the ones that genuinely grate. It's just worth holding, lightly, alongside the noticing. ## I'm finished (almost) Some complaints are entirely fair on their own terms. Some of the general mood is doing more work than the evidence strictly supports. Both things can be true at once, and telling them apart is, in the end, a more useful use of the irritation than either suppressing it or indulging it wholesale. In the meantime: it had an effect. Not an impact. An effect. I will not be moved on this.