I always feel like a nuance in this stuff nobody talks about is the largely unspoken degree of (un)willingness to do a thing, and the consequences of indulging that unwillingness in a context, all impacting the interpretation of “soon”.
We’re not a society that’s good at giving people hard no’s.
If you don’t want to do a thing you’ve been asked (leave a fun get-together, tidy up your stuff, go put away the groceries, get ready for work, etc), “soon” or even “now” will mean “however long the Unwanted Request can be postponed”. Which can be anywhere between 30 seconds and forever, depending on context. The ideal outcome for “thing you don’t want to do” on this axis is you Just Not Doing It.
The context that curtails the unwillingness is how acceptable it is to not do the thing. What are the consequences? If you don’t get ready for work you get fired. If you don’t put the groceries in the fridge the food will spoil. In a lot of situations where a parent demands something, the immediate consequence of not obeying is some form of punishment (even if only because now your parent is annoyed and/or angry at you).
The lesson a child typically learns is not really “soon is NOW or bad things happen” -because they will typically also experience the “When are we leaving? Soon! *proceeds to pour another cup of coffee*” situation from their parents. There’s no consequences to their “soon” being an hour later at earliest because you as a kid cannot create significant consequences for them not obeying your wishes. (There’s also downstream calculations here -a kid can get annoying, but typically there’s an upper boundary to how annoying they can get, and they ramp up fast when bored/upset. Meaning, 15 minutes wait and 2 hours wait will have roughly the same “cost”, so the adult is losing nothing by postponing more.)
“Soon” is as long as an unwanted request can be postponed in the face of consequences. It is a function of how much agency someone has in the situation.
