According to MIT Professor Richard Larsen who studies such things, Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours a year waiting. Yes, I said “waiting.” A 2022 consumer survey, “The State of Waiting In Line” (on waitwhile.com) identified waiting in retail check-out lines as the most common situation, but lines in restaurants, pharmacies and grocery stores are also close contenders for the biggest time wasters. As you know from your own experience, all this idle waiting breeds feelings of boredom, apathy, annoyance, frustration and anger.

     At the risk of aggravating you further, let me itemize the many ways in which you wait in line: at retail stores, grocery stores, banks, restaurants and fast-food establishments, pharmacies, gas stations, movie theaters and ticket booths, airport security, and let’s not forget the proverbial post office. I’m sure you can think of more. There is the waiting for your name to be called in a waiting room: at medical offices, in legal, professional and municipal offices, at beauty salons and spas, at the DMV, and even when reporting for jury duty.

     Those who commute by car know well the waiting involved in traffic: time spent at stop signs and traffic lights, railroad crossings, construction lane closures, traffic jams and gridlock, waiting in the “zipper” feed, traffic accidents, even at curbside pick-up! And then, of course there is the ever-present waiting on-hold: on the phone or for return calls, for airline reservations, to make appointments, to solve a billing problem, or just to get information. And let’s not overlook the interminable generalized waiting for meetings to begin, test results to be completed, late friends to arrive, packages to come, or service people to show up. It’s exasperating! If you divide that 37 billion hours by the total population, it all comes out to about 113 hours per person per year, depending on your age, your particular work and commuter patterns, and where you live. 

     And if all that aggravation isn’t bad enough, that isn’t all there is. These common situations test our patience all the time, but by far the most troubling and trying to me are situations that I call “anticipatory waiting.” Examples include everything from simply waiting for the local weather to change to waiting for some grand improvement in social, economic, or political conditions in the world. You might be waiting for your personal luck to change, or for a difficult personal period like the Covid pandemic to end, or even for something wonderful to happen such as a job promotion or a lottery win. The waits in these situations seem interminable because there is no immediate resolution in sight, and often not even a satisfying or recognizable end result if you finally reach one. These are the “be-careful-what-you-wish-for” waits that cannot be tallied in hours or days, but only in sleepless nights, upset stomachs, and existential angst. In effect, you find yourself  Waiting for Godot.

     For those who might not recognize the reference, Waiting for Godot is a play in two acts written by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and first performed at the Théatre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. Originally described by critics as a “play in which nothing happens,” it has become the iconic theatrical work of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd. While rooted in the foundational philosophy of existentialism, the origins of this literary movement hue more to the absurdist ideology of Søren Kierkegard, which proposed that the inherent meaning of existence in the universe may exist, but humans are not capable of finding it. Thus we are doomed to the absurdities of life without intrinsic purpose. Heavy stuff, indeed.

     At first, Beckett’s play got a rocky reception because audiences simply didn’t understand a drama without a narrative arc and a clear beginning, middle, and end in the conventional sense.When Godot first opened in the United States in Miami in 1956, it was promoted as a comedy (the subtitle of the play is “A Tragicomedy”), but the audience of mostly Florida vacationers walked out by the droves. It was reported that the taxis which brought theatre-goers were waiting outside for their patrons to exit before the second act even began. 

     But, of course, the lack of a clear resolution and a final ending was the whole point: who is Godot, why are the characters waiting for him when they are repeatedly told that he will not come (until maybe tomorrow), and why is everyday the same over and over again? What is the point of endless banter and discussion? What is the point of existence itself?  The philosophical questions and the whole enigma of who/what Godot represents has become the stuff of infinite inquiry and endless academic literary dissertations (including my own). And Beckett, himself, offered no help insistently refusing to better clarify scenes and characters, much less identify who Godot was supposed to be. “If I knew, I would have said so in the text,” he often quipped  when asked.

     Eventually, in the turbulence and chaos of the 1960s and ‘70s, Waiting for Godot found receptive audiences and brought Beckett fame and success along with other Theatre of the Absurd playwrights such as Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Edward Albee. Absurdism explores a complex reality in which we create the value of existence by affirming and living in the present, not by merely talking about it with some abstract expectation for the future; that philosophy resonated with a new generation of people who were angry and disillusioned with the status quo and out of patience with old cultural norms and institutional values. 

     Obviously it still resonates. Today, seventy years later,  Waiting for Godot continues to be staged and performed in theaters around the world. The latest New York production opens off Broadway in Brooklyn at the Palonsky Shakespeare Center next month. In our own days of such chaos, uncertainty, and disillusion, are not we all here still Waiting for Godot?