Delaying Gratification in Today's Culture of Immediacy

In the famous Marshmallow experiment conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s, he attempted to find out the correlation between a person's ability to wait out their temptations for a bigger rewards and their eventual life outcomes. The children were given a marshmallow in front of them and were told to wait for the researchers to come back before they can eat it. If they were able to resist eating the marshmallow after the researchers came back after a period of time, they would received another marshmallow as a reward. As expected, some children were able to wait and some could not.

Over the course of this whole experimentation, Walter Mischel and his team realised that children who were able to resist the temptation of eating the marshmallow in front of them tend to perform better in life when they are older. This is widely termed as "Delayed Gratification", which simply means the ability to reject instant reward in exchange for a larger reward in the future.

In the same vein, the hyperbolic discounting phenomenon also tells us that humans are indeed not very good at predicting the value of a reward in the future.

Credit: Sketchplanations

In today's capitalistic society where our daily lives are pretty much goal-oriented, we spent most of our lives engaging in activities that we cannot call our own. In other words, we simply do not invest enough of our own time to cultivate our own true convictions. Most of us seem to discount so much the value in truly understanding ourselves. Instead, we engross ourselves in the stories and achievements of those successful people in the past and then form our own self-beliefs based on these superficial impressions only to realise in the end that the reality you are trying to live out may not be the one that you wanted all along.

 It is immeasurably more rewarding to be able to truly understand ourselves than just hoping to be right in the face of society even though everything may be uncertain right now. In today's culture of immediacy, it is imperative for us to slow down and take heart that anything that is worth the wait in life is always worth the effort for us to persist.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How You See Yourself Ultimately Decides The Kind of Life You Will Live

Image
Until the moment when we finally find our souls, we are always being influenced by the environment we are in from a very young age. Our thoughts and beliefs are pretty much entirely shaped by our family and society.  However, what the world often says and what the world later does are often against each other. One day, when we feel that we are completely abandoned by the world, we will slowly come to a realisation and enlightenment. That is when our inner selves will grow to be stronger, we learn to ignore the naysayers, we form new perspectives on Life and gain alternative strategies on how to traverse this world we live in. It is at this moment that your inner soul is no longer as ignorant as it used to be; all sorts of Joker , big or small, will be born.  Joker (2019 film) From the Big Bang, to the formation of our solar system, to the existence of Mother Earth, to the creation of various lifeforms, to the evolution of Homo Sapiens, to the birth of your very self.
Read more

Start From The Things Where You Can Do Best, To Make The World A Better Place

Image
To be able to make a contribution to mankind or the society can also be a kind of blessing. Take a step back and look at the Life most of us are going through thus far. In order to minimize inconvenience in our lives and the lives of others, most of us practice self-restraint. That is how the majority of us try to do in order to get us to where we are at various stages of Life. In the face of growing old and moving toward the livelihood of being an old man, the majority of us, at least, can perhaps attempt to shift away from our current standpoint or way of thinking of restraining ourselves towards something that speaks "do-what-you-love-to-do" as the focal point in living. One of the practical way of doing this is to transform that "who-am-I-doing-it-for" or "this-is-for-the-good-of-the-community" that forms the basis of our survival in today's context by adding in the element of "doing-what you-love-to-do". I deeply believe that
Read more

Courageous People Will Make Themselves Look Normal. 5 Signs Of "Courage" Based on Alfred Adler's Psychology Theory

Image
Those who lack courage, will resort to all means possible to look 'special'; those who possess courage, will blend themselves in as being 'normal'. Courage is the feeling in which you experience strength and you are of worth, as well as the belief that you can take on Life's problems. Life's going will never be all rosy and smooth-sailing, it may sometimes be due to work, interpersonal relationships, love relationships, or parent-child relationships; or it may also be due to a series of obstacles you faced along the way. Whenever we encounter difficulties, all of us are given two choices: one is to face it head on, and another is to run away from it. The latter of which is termed is Superiority Complex and Inferiority Complex. Let's take a look the 5 signs of "Courage" as advocated through Alfred Adler's school of thoughts.  The feeling that you are capable and worthy of achievements The crux of the problem is that avoiding problems
Read more