Patience is a bad translation. Not slightly off. Bad enough that it reverses the instruction.
In English, patience is something you do by not doing. You sit still. You wait it out. You do not complain.
Sabr is not that. The root means to bind, to restrain, to hold firm. It describes load. It is the word for what a rope does under tension, not for what a person does in a corridor.
Which changes what the last line of Surah Al-Asr is asking. Believe, do righteous deeds, enjoin one another to truth, enjoin one another to sabr. Read it as patience and it sounds like an instruction to be stoical about difficulty. Read it correctly and it is an instruction to hold a position while something pulls against you.
The surah does not end where you would expect. If it were a book about personal development it would stop at the second condition. Believe, and act well.
It does not stop there. It adds two more, and the two it adds are the ones with a price.
The first two are between you and God. Nobody sees them.
The last two are between you and everybody else. Tawasaw is not a private verb. It is mutual and it is spoken, and that is where the cost enters, because the content of the message is not welcome.
Say, out loud, to an actual person: your capital is melting, none of this is yours, you will lose every bit of it, and the only live question is what you did with it on the way through.
People do not thank you. And the response is not usually argument, which would at least be engagement. It is a small adjustment of the face, a pause, and then a change of subject.
This is why the surah pairs the two conditions rather than listing them separately. Truth without sabr is a grenade: you say the thing once, loudly, to the wrong person at the wrong moment, feel righteous, and are never asked again. Sabr without truth is just silence with good manners.
Sometimes the life is the argument. Not always. Sometimes you have to say it plainly, and when you do, the surah promises nothing whatsoever about the reception. It does not say speak truth and be heard. It says speak truth and hold firm. Those are two separate instructions, and the second one exists because the first one will not go well.