#36. Delayed gratification

This essay will take you 5 minutes to read

The ability to do something that doesn’t reward you instantly is called delayed gratification. It became popular in connection with the (in)famous marshmallow experiment, and it is widely considered to be a very valuable trait. Allegedly, just about anything in life, from your income and career success to health and family harmony, depends a lot on whether or not you can do things that don’t lead to immediate results. Which, granted, makes sense. You don’t get any fitter after your first gym visit, any thinner after the first skipped dessert, meaningfully more educated after reading one page of text, etc. So the premise seems obvious enough not to question it: of course, you need to be able to work in favor of long-term results, duh. So let’s question it.

Here’s what bothers me about that concept. How does it work, exactly? I mean, we know that behaviors that aren’t rewarded gradually fade away. That has been shown consistently in studies, since the time of Pavlov himself. You train a dog that a bell signals forthcoming food, and it starts salivating at the sound of the bell, before the food. But you stop feeding it after the bell, and soon enough it stops reacting to the bell. Natural experiments of that sort happen in life all the time. You stop making a detour on your way to work to walk by the bakery when they change the recipe of your favorite bagel. You stop watching a series that goes bad. You stop being friends with people who are no longer fun to hang with. The purpose of our psyche is to extract resources from the world; we did not evolve to pour resources into something that doesn’t give back. It’s only natural that you do things that reward you instantly and don’t do things that don’t. So what gives? How does delayed gratification actually work? Is there some hidden mechanism in our psyche that steps in and overrules the most basic biological imperative of not wasting resources? And if so, how come not everyone has it, and even those who do sometimes fail to use it?

As a professional skeptic, I’m allergic to over-complicated explanations, even more so to vague over-complicated explanations. And delayed gratification barely has even that. It sometimes tries to justify itself by bringing in long post hoc chains of thought about personality traits, and temperament, and cognitive styles. But in reality, it’s just a passive, apathetic phenomenology, trying to pass as objective science. We observe people acting in favor of a delayed reward—we report that humans have that capacity, naming it as close to an empirical description as possible. Good enough for a start, but I want something more than “it is what it is”.

So here’s my understanding of it. I pose that delayed gratification doesn’t exist. That’s right, I’m just denying it out of the gate. On the grounds that there is no known psychological mechanism that would allow a healthy, non-delusional person to keep doing something without getting anything in return. But the phenomenon exists, you’ll say! Surely I can’t deny the reality of it. What about the children waiting for the second marshmallow, what about people following diets, and training regimens, and scrupulously studying, and building careers? Why don’t all people just get high and lie on the floor all the time, if we all need instant gratification for each step, every action, every move we make? Ah, but we are getting it. The immediate gratification, instant reward that is. We just don’t get it from the outside.

There is no pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater than being egosyntonic. Did I just curse? No, egosyntonicity is a psychodynamic term that refers to things aligned with your Ego, as opposed to egodystonic things that are alien, uncomfortable, and not fitting with who you perceive yourself to be. A pastor walking into a strip club feels pleasant, but egodystonic. An Ironman competitor pushing himself through pain is unpleasant but egosyntonic. And here lies the recipe for the secret sauce.

From that perspective, there is no delayed gratification as a separate, ontologically self-sufficient entity, because there is no need for one. Jill doesn’t work her ass off on a boring but promising position because she has some magic property that denies every evolutionary imperative. She does so because that’s who she is. In her mind, her self-perception, her self-image, her Ego, her identity, her personality, her self—however you want to call it-includes a line that goes “a hardworking careerist”. So, Friday evening, at half past seven, thirty minutes past the end of her work day, when she’s faced with a choice of working through one more hundred-column, thousand-line table, or going to a party, and she chooses the former, she didn’t “delay her gratification”. She was immediately rewarded by feeling true to herself. She felt warm and fuzzy, and true, and honest, and sincere, and those feelings trumped the prospect of daikiries and dancing. So did the children, waiting for the marshmallow—they didn’t feel like all of the gratification is in some probabilistic future, that would break what we know about how the psyche works. No, they felt something besides appetite for the marshmallow. We don’t know what it was—maybe they identified with their hard-working parents (the studies did show a significant socio-economic component in the way the kids passed the test), maybe they felt disciplined, maybe—just polite, as they followed the instructions. But whatever it was—that’s what rewarded their waiting, which is why it was possible at all.

And when Jack falls off the wagon of sobriety and starts drinking again,—it’s not because he’s bereft of some fantasy super-power to overcome lack of immediate reward. He did so because, being an alcoholic, he doesn’t see himself being sober as egosyntonic. At best, it doesn’t reward him; at worst, it’s actually egodystonic and actively punishes him. So when all the promises of getting a better life, health, career, relationships, don’t come true in the two hours since he woke up, there’s nothing left to hold him from drinking. There are, however, multiple things pushing him to drink.

So there you have it. No need to multiply entities. You don’t need the concept of “delayed gratification” to explain, or even predict, people’s behavior around long-term tasks. You’ll do much better with far more well-understood concepts like identity and personality. Whether a person is going to do something or not can be understood by finding out how they see themself, and if the task in question is something they associate their self-image with.

Until next week,
Konstantin Kunakh

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