Rather than living constantly on the verge of throwing a fit, and risking taking it out on overwhelmed servers, struggling shop owners or late-arriving delivery people, we’d do ourselves a favor by consciously lowering expectations.

I don’t know about where you live, but in Ann Arbor the luxury of blithely tapping on a phone and summoning a restaurant delivery that arrives in 45 minutes is over. There’s a shortage of food-delivery drivers nationwide. The sanity-preserving move is to assume an hour and half for delivery, and then a mere hour and 10 minutes is a pleasant surprise.

“I understand people are getting frustrated, but it’s time for people to take a chill pill,” says Lisa McDonald, owner of TeaHaus, an Ann Arbor shop selling tea and gifts. “I’m just not going to have the things that I usually have. Maybe they aren’t going to get the purple mug, but the blue one is pretty, too.”

The other day I found myself carrying home a loaf of bread in my bare hands because the bakery had run out of bags. Back when we didn’t know how good we had it — circa 2019 — I might have been annoyed by the inconvenience. Now I was just glad the bakery was still in business.