A considerable number of problems in America today, IMHO, stem directly or indirectly from an inability to delay gratification.
The Covid pandemic is a prime example - if U.S. society had simply locked down hard, masked up, distanced, isolated and endured a month or two of temporary hardship a year ago, we’d be in a far better situation today. But by stubborn refusal to do so, we dug ourselves into a far deeper and worse hole.
The same applies for many (although not all) Americans saddled with credit-card debt - often due to a “buy now pay later” mindset. More indirectly, it also applies to climate change; by enduring some misery now we could avoid much worse planetary suffering half a century later (although America, of course, can’t reverse climate change all on its own.)
An entire host of problems that we currently face either wouldn’t exist, or could be tackled much better, if there were a “endure now but enjoy later” mentality. This could either be blamed on the political system (a democracy, by its very nature, discourages delayed gratification because voters can punish such a party or candidate in the short term and only allows 4-years-at-a-time thinking,) or on parenting - it seems that parents who lack delayed-gratification ability then raise kids who also lack the ability to delay gratification.
There is no “one stitch in time saves nine” mentality in America.
Nonsense. There is less of it than you or I might prefer. There’s also less IQ, less jogging, and more TwitFace.
That phrase is a proverb from (WAG) 400 years ago precisely because people 400 years ago needed to be reminded of its wisdom. Said another way, they weren’t doing it then either.
For darn sure a problem unique to the last 150ish years is mass market advertising. That pervasive and baleful presence is interested only in increasing their sales, not making the customers happier or healthier. And certainly not in making society happier or healthier.
Just a few weeks ago, I went to a store to buy a part for my electric water heater, and instead decided to buy a new, hybrid model. There is a very generous state rebate program going on. The checkout person, whom I’d guess to be in her mid twenties, seem puzzled by my choice to pay full retail (around $1100) and fill out a form to mail in, to receive a rebate check for $750, instead of taking the instant discount.
Assuming she explained it to me correctly, It took me all of two seconds to decide waiting four to six weeks for a paper check from the State of Maine in the amount of $750 is a much better financial decision than just taking the instant $500 off the price. I got the impression from her reaction that most people opt for the instant $500 off option.
Maybe it’s because delayed gratification is an ‘aspect of whiteness’ that anti-racists are trying to abolish?
More seriously, it is not always beneficial to delay gratification. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. You can be responsible, save up and buy a house, and then lose it because of a recession. So I think it depends a lot on how confident people are in the future, how stable their environment is, how much they trust the government not to screw up.
Two of your examples also rely on people all working together to make the sacrifice worthwhile, and that depends on how much you can trust your fellow citizens, ie social cohesion, which tends to be lower in a large and diverse country like the US.
This is, more or less, covered by the Vimes’ Boots Theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
If you can afford to let someone keep $750 of your money for 4 to 6 weeks then the $250 is a nice bonus.
If you can’t, then saving $500 right now and forgoing the extra $250 is your only choice.
It’s got nothing to do with delayed gratification.
The meaning of the Stanford marshmallow experiment has been substantially revisited in recent years. You will read things saying it has been debunked and that isn’t really the case as I read it.
The original take was that the results of the marshmallow predicted long term life outcomes and that remains kinda true, but the original assumption that the results came from the kid’s innate ability seems to have proven inaccurate. It turns out that once you control for socioeconomic background, the correlation between the long term life outcomes and the results of the experiment doesn’t manifest.
So it would seem that actually the test is more of a gauge of the kid’s socioeconomic background (which tends to influence long term outcomes) rather than anything innate.
I guess most of my immediate thoughts have already been mentioned above. Delayed gratification is a, perhaps even the, hallmark of the middle class. It works as an economic strategy in a growing economy and/or with a good social safety net (including extended family). It doesn’t make a lot of sense in an economy where wages are stagnant or sinking in relation to such things as housing, and/or where unavoidable debts (medical, schooling) are so enormous that they can never be repaid. Like now.
The intensity and sophistication of consumer-capitalism has exploded in my lifetime, nothing compared to it has ever been seen on earth. Hard to blame people for being sucked into that maelstrom when virtually no one ever escapes without enormous effort (and resources! – ‘opting out’ is really only an option for a few).
And one more point – agrarian cultures defer gratification as a matter of necessity. Harvests and dearths are part of life. Waiting for things to come to fruition, using up the last bits and then going without, saving diligently for the few things one can afford to buy because much of your economy is not monetary – those attributes of rural life, which the majority of people lived just two generations ago, are basically lost to us. My grandmother (dairy farmer) once told me that her family lived, not on money, but on ‘lack of expense’. They made almost everything from what they grew or traded locally for. What they couldn’t acquire that way they mostly did without.
You can’t expect people to act and think as if they live in a culture they’ve never even experienced.
That’s an unwarranted conclusion. If there is an innate component that affects long term life outcomes, there will be a substantial correlation between the kids’ abilities and the parents’ abilities. Parents bad at delayed gratification => worse long term life outcomes => lower socioeconomic status => lower socioeconomic background for their kids. To distinguish between these possibilities you’d need to look at adopted children.
I think that, combined with pervasive technology, has created this mentality of “instant gratification” that is much worse than in years past. It makes everything very superficial and transactional.
There is IMHO definitely a perception, particularly among young people who grew up with social media, that they should have everything RIGHT NOW!!
Some of it is convenience, like ordering food or pretty much anything off Amazon. But I kind of feel like there is often value in just getting out of the house. Sure, I could order whatever I need from Target. But it’s also nice to spend some family time taking the kids and just checking out all the stuff while walking around the store.
American Capitalism has also exacerbated this effect IMHO. There is definitely this mentality of “I don’t want to make money over a long period of time, I want to make a shit-load of money RIGHT NOW”.
Yes. I think it’s a bit like the obesity epidemic, in that some people are more susceptible than others, but it’s the environment that has changed and created overall different results vs the past.
The OP states “in America” but I wonder how it varies by county, and how it can be measured.
I’m reminded of our Ukrainian exchange student, for whom the notion of not eating the entire cake now was mind-exploding. I don’t know anything about her childhood, but I can see different life experiences reinforcing the desire to fill your belly as much as possible now, because there may be nothing tomorrow.
What makes you think there’s a genetic component to this? The conclusion that requires the fewest assumptions is that rich kids have learned that they can rely on the first marshmallow remaining and the second marshmallow showing up; while poor kids have learned that not only is the second marshmallow not guaranteed, but that the first marshmallow doesn’t always remain either.
You get the behavior you reward, and poor kids spend childhood learning that “maybe later” means “no fucking way”.
I brought it up because it’s something that I often see neglected. When researchers look for a possible genetic contribution they know they need to account for and/or rule out environmental affects, but the converse is rarely considered.
Unfortunately the paper is paywalled, but this article suggests people were drawing all kinds of unwarranted inferences from the original study anyway:
