Benjamin Franklin once said, "He who can have patience can have what he wants." But is patience really necessary in today's society? In recent years, the youngest among us have grown up without the need for patience. We now live in a hyperconnected world: we can process data, download a song, search for virtually unlimited information in a vast database, send a message, or even order a pizza, all with the click of a button. We are constantly thirsty for better, faster, and simpler technology to help us keep up with our lives. But what effect does this have on patience in society as a whole? Perhaps man's endless thirst for instant gratification has steadily fueled the improvement of technologies over the years and, therefore, caused our patience and attention span to decline. Computer hardware has seen one of the biggest leaps in the last twenty years. We are constantly producing faster, more powerful, and more reliable computer processors with no plateau of improvement in sight. The recent 2013 Intel i7-4770k can process information almost eight times faster than the 2008 Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 according to cpubenchmark .netto. Recent solid-state drives have also surpassed traditional hard drives by replacing the spinning platter with solid data bricks, much like a glorified flash drive. For example, the average boot time of Windows 7 on the Samsung Spinpoint F3 HDD boot time is approximately forty-two seconds. The Crucial M4 SSD's average Windows 7 boot time is nearly halved in comparison, coming in at around twenty-two seconds. To some accustomed to the new, faster SSD, older HDD drives may seem like they take forever to boot. Dana Levin, a student at Drexel University College of Medicine, comments on...... middle of paper... ....ne Kathryn Zickuhr. “How Teens Research in the Digital World.” Internet desk. Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, November 1, 2012. Web. December 11, 2013. Paul, Annie M. "Why 'Googling It' Isn't Enough." MindShift. MindShift, November 9, 2012. Web. December 11, 2013. .Muther, Christopher. “Instant gratification makes us perpetually impatient.” BostonGlobe.com. Boston Globe, February 2, 2013. Web. December 10, 2013. “Comparison of Windows Boot Time between SSD and HDD.” YouTube. YouTube, April 24, 2012. Web. December 11. 2013. .