Instant gratification vs Delayed gratification

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

This is a part of my post in my Sandbox thread, but I think it deserves a thread on its own and am interesting in hearing other people’s opinions on the matter.

Instant gratification or long term, genuine happiness derived from a virtuous life.

The animalistic, instinctive in us, chooses the former, not having the capability to think of the future and comprehend virtues, or not possessing the necessary willpower for the latter.
The animalistic is stronger in some people than the others and it’s a force to be reckoned with and overcome. The more of the animalistic you overcome the more of a human you become. You can notice that every relevant person who has actually contributed something of practical relevance to the civilization, evolution of mankind didn’t spend their days feeding, fucking and fighting but dedicated their lives to intellectual work.

Of course, not everybody has the same mental capabilities. Most of us couldn’t accomplish what the greatest geniuses have even if we did dedicate the entirety of our life to that particular area of study. I’m very much aware of the fact that I’m not the next Einstein, Tesla or whomever, but if you ask some other people, they will resort to transparent excuses, such as:

“Well, I’m just not that interested in those things”(possible, then again, one of the contributing factors to why you’re not interested is that you lack the necessary intelligence),
or even
“I could do it if I wanted to, I just… don’t” (so you do other, equally relevant things (everything is equal), like eat, masturbate, watch TV, shit, and sleep, not always in the same order)
Coming to terms with reality shouldn’t discourage people, it’s merely a necessary step in intellectual development - to know your own limits. Everybody has them. To a small extent you can break away from them and set new ones somewhat higher, but that again is not the same with all people, IQ and creative potential is for the most part predetermined.

If everybody strived to be as good as they can be (emphasize the human over the animalistic), we’d make progress much faster as a species, but it’s easier to descend (become animalistic) than to ascend. It’s also crucial to realize that some people are just too fucking degenerate to ever do anything even slightly intellectually relevant and can do nothing but slow us down if their intellectual degeneration is accepted as desirable and virtuous.
Instead of discouraging degeneracy, our culture is praising it because if you elevate a retard to a position of fame the other retards and average people (who the majority consist of) gain hope that they, too, have a chance of becoming famous.

This is how you intellectually numb the general population and make them more easily controllable - lower the standards so that everybody is convinced they are the greatest thing that has ever happened to humanity, that the world revolves around them, and almost everybody is therefore satisfied and feels no need to improve themselves. Add to that religion - the poorer you are, the more you will be rewarded… when you die. And the rich person who is exploiting you, they will be punished for their wickedness and material wealth… when they die.

Life after death, death being the end of life translates to life after the end of life. What the religious won’t buy just to escape reality.

2

I’m not sure the virtuous have good lives, though if everyone were virtuous we’d all have great lives. Virtue is like intelligence in the analogy you’re using here… it is rare. So people raise the unvirtuous to raise their own profiles, and lower the virtuous to raise their own profiles. I could secure a sexual resource for life tomorrow if I wanted to, but I know better because I understand the long term effects, so I find myself lonely. This isn’t new for men living in a species engaged in run-away sexual selection.

3

For a more rewarding life; to avoid that chocolate; Overeating; the extra-relationship sex; the extra cookie; the booze; the drugs : Say “no” to your inner CHIMP.

He will complain, and squeel, but just say no!

4

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mWc1Y2dpmY[/youtube]

The marshmallow experiment is a famous test of this concept conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford University and discussed by Daniel Goleman in his popular work.
In the 1960s, a group of four-year olds were given a marshmallow and promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Some children could wait and others could not.
The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence, and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable (determined via surveys of their parents and teachers), and scored an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mWc1Y2dpmY
…

Intellectual capacity may not be a sure sign of the ability to modulate delayed gratification. Some do not have the necessary impulse control in showing off their intellectual abilities and the pleasure they get from the admiration of others.

I believe the competencies of delayed gratification is modulated by certain inhibiting neural circuits programmed in one’s brain for the purpose. Therefore to facilitate cultivated and controlled progress, each person should made the attempt to improve the competency of the delayed gratification neural circuits.
Btw, Buddhism and other Eastern religions are very purposeful and deliberate in doing it.

5

Completely invalid test procedure, not actually confirming anything at all. In general psychologists are really great at performing completely invalid experiments that will yield the proper inference.

If you put a cat in that situation, I am pretty certain that he would score much higher than all of them.
• How much of a temptation was each of them experiencing at that moment?
• When did they eat last?
• What has been their experience with marshmallows?
• How much of a threat was perceived by each child when it was inferred that they should wait for a reward?
• Did any of the children have inductive reflex to performance anxiety (self-defeating behavior due to confused punishment issues)?
.
.

That is true, but you live in a chemically/medically controlled environment and you are NOT the controller.

Behavior is controlled by the Perception of Hope and Threat, PHT, on all levels and regardless of the cause.

6

Instant or delayed the word “gratification” already betrays neediness. What happens here, as usual, is the transference of unabsorbed force from one place to another. No absorption ever occurs. They merely replace one form of neediness with another, the socially unacceptable kind (instant) with socially acceptable (delayed.) They replace direct neediness with indirect neediness, need for a food with need for no need for a food. I call it “needy indifference”.

7

It’s interesting to note that delayed gratification is coming salvation repackaged whereas instant gratification its consequence (in fact, it is the coming salvation that may have come too early . . .)

8

Why am I not surprised that you managed to connect it to sexual stratification, somehow :smiley:

You don’t need to completely avoid chocolate and alcohol, but if you consume them, do so within reason. Not only is it healthier not to excessively eat and drink, but if you eat chocolate/drink in smaller amounts and not every day, on the rare occasions that you do you’ll derive more pleasure from it due to having a greater desire. If you overeat on something or overdrink, your organism will begin adapting to it and becoming numb, progressively denying you more and more pleasure and requiring bigger and bigger amounts and more frequently to cause satisfaction, eventually it becomes difficult to conceive your life without it. In other words, you’ll become ADDICTED.

It certainly isn’t a sure sign but generally, yeah, I’d say intelligent people are less inclined to succumb to instant gratification. As I said, to be frank, not everybody has the capability to be the next genius anyway, so no big loss in case of most people. Showing off intellectual abilities is perfectly acceptable and should be encouraged if those are actual intellectual capacities and not degeneracy in “disguise”, but in today’s society if you are more intelligent than others, you are labeled a “geek” or a “nerd”, words which have negative connotations.

Humans are needy, social animals, it would be unrealistic do deny it. We share many other traits with animals - we need to eat, shit, fuck, sleep etc. However, we have many traits which separate us from animals as well, traits which are exclusive to humans or at least present in humans to a larger degree compared to animals. Just because we are animals doesn’t mean we should behave like other animals - we are precisely the ones who should be dictating what is the appropriate, civilized, most evolved behavior. In terms of intelligence, humans are at the top of the animal hierarchy. Reason, cooperation, morality, symbolic language etc. all separate us from animals, and it is because of those traits that we managed to climb to the top of the food chain and become the most developed organisms on earth. In order to preserve that place in the hierarchy we must suppress the animalistic to enable nurturing the human. The most primal desires of all lifeforms are self-preservation and self-extension upon the world, exerting one’s will through action and biological offspring.

9

When I say needy I do not mean having needs. When I say needy I mean having exaggerated needs.

Needy means having needs one does not need (we call them artificial needs) and the reason people have such needs is in order to deny their genuine needs that have become too difficult to understand, accept and fulfill.

Need is a lack. Life is a process of completing this never-to-be-completed lack. In order for a man to complete his lack he must first understand it. This means possessing self-knowledge. Self-knowledge requires self-control. If self-control is lacking, one is doomed to misunderstand one’s lack, by under-estimating it (denying one’s needs) or by over-estimating it (exaggerating one’s needs.) Any subsequent attempt to fill a lack which misinterprets the real lack simply creates deeper lack.

You can notice, for example, that modern people are disconnected from their genuine needs. One no longer acts out of need, but out of “reason”, “morality”, “necessity” or some other cold pattern of behavior that has nothing to do with one’s needs but that is nonetheless mistaken for need. Money is such a “need”. Its allure is promise of completion: if you have a lot of money you can do anything. But what happens in reality? Reality is that noone needs money. It is not a genuine need. What is genuine need? Hunger is. Physical activity is. Thinking is. But money? No, money isn’t. Money exaggerates one’s needs. It does so the moment one places money before one’s needs as it does as one works to attain it. So what happens? One willfully ingests what one does not lack, thereby creating deeper lack, hoping one will be able to deal with negative consequences as soon as one acquires money. But this never happens. The result? Self-knowledge becoming increasingly worse. One has money, but no needs to satisfy. Or rather, one has money but no longer knows what one needs. The lack becomes too difficult to understand, let alone to complete with mere money. This leads to all sorts of ridiculous excesses, and with it, to even deeper self-misunderstanding.

Now, what does this have to do with gratification, delayed or instant? Well, my point is that both instant and delayed gratification are a consequence of neediness: they both lead men astray, into deeper self-misunderstanding.

Delayed gratification teaches people how to disconnect from their needs using denial. A foreign/artificial need is introduced and used to deny genuine needs. I already mentioned money – money is such a need. Possibility of additional marshmallow is another. Genuine self-control seeks to find a middle point between all of the impulses that define the moment. Delayed gratification, however, does not, since it is biased in favor of the external. Take marshmallow experiment, for example. Success is not defined as the middle point between the impulses, but as resistance to eat the marshmallow. One’s needs not assessed all. Does one even need a marshmallow? Let alone two marshmallows? It is automatically assumed that resistance is better than no resistance. Though this may be the case in certain situations, in many others it isn’t. Resistance may, and often does, mean lack of self-control. If one ingests something one does not need at the time, such as marshmallow or a command to wait for another marshmallow, then this means that the person has no control over themselves. Yet the experimenters will claim otherwise. Genuine self-control, being a middle point between the impulses of the moment, can manifest itself in different ways, all depending on one’s state of lack, which is for the most part private. A man of self-control may eat the marshmallow immediately, may wait for another, may not eat any, or he may simply get up and leave the experiment. Delayed gratification is not self-control, certainly not dynamic self-control. It is hatred of what one is, of one’s difficult-to-understand lack. It is a desire to replace one’s own lack with another lack that can be satisfied. It is a desire to be told what one should do because understanding oneself has become too difficult.

Instant gratification, on the other hand, teaches people how to disconnect from their needs using exaggeration. No foreign needs are introduced and used to deny genuine needs, but genuine needs are exaggerated in order to deny other genuine needs. This is a consequence of the inability to gather all of one’s needs in one place and relate them to each other such that one can obtain a complete picture of one’s lack, and with it, determine the limit for every need. Consequences are the same as those of delayed gratification: one ends up ingesting what one does not lack, thereby creating deeper lack.

Lack of self-control is often said to be animalistic, but why is that so? Are animals naturally hedonistic and/or masochistic? Aren’t hedonism and masochism human inventions?

10

You seem to have missed the point, due to instant gratification perhaps.

The marshmallow is not the significant element in the experiment. It could be anything the participants has the most inclination for at the time of the experiment.

The additional inducements are merely an assessment to detect the presence of an active and potential general neural inhibitor circuit that enable one to modulate the triggered surges of one’s general impulses.

Those children who could resist the marshmallow temptation indicate they have an existing [at time of the experiment] and potential general inhibitors circuit which will keep improving or can be improved as they grow older.
Such children will be in a better position to keep to their study with the knowledge of the potential benefit of education to themselves rather than being led by their impulses to play computer games all the time, chat, play truant, and other acts that are negative to the progress of their education.
This ability to resist and delay to gratification of temptations and emotions is extended to all [if not most] aspects of their life.

Those who failed the marshmallow test indicate they have a weak or damaged general neural inhibitor circuit. On average [with exceptions] it was determined these children were less ‘successful’ than those who passed the marshmallow tests.

The marshmallow test experiment was not claimed to be definitive but it raised and highlighted a hypothesis of the existence of a general neural inhibitor circuit [GNIC].
IMO, this GNIC is one element that differentiate between humans [+ a few higher animals] and other animals.
With the latest knowledge of neuroscience and its advanced technologies, scientists will soon be able to trace the GNIC more specifically and find ways to improve its efficiency which may made humans, more human.

11

You have ignored pretty much everything I said, and simply went for restating what I already know, and all of that due to instant gratification perhaps.

Less successful at what? At obeying society?

12

There is a distinction there. Seeking instant gratification may be a form of hedonism and/or neediness but delaying gratification is a part of human need, nothing negative about it. It’s also a sign of maturity being able to delay one’s gratification.

Not necessarily though the former may. The latter may lead one into a deeper self-awareness, that is, having the capacity and willingness to delay gratification. Are you a nihilist?

13

I am not sure we’re speaking of the same kind of delayed gratification. There is a bad kind of delayed gratification (what is generally called “delayed gratification”, what I also call “static self-control”) and then there is a good kind (what I call “genuine self-control” or “dynamic self-control”.) This should have been obvious from my post.

14

The difference between instant and delayed gratification is narrowing, this is analysis ex post facto. The point was made, that this means that the inherent qualification of what a reasonable delay could mean is changing, in accordance to the interpretation of it. The interpretation of the meaning of this lapse, is embedded in the interpretation. There are those who,at one extreme
Call for,mor rather called for total denial of interpretations of needs? This was especially evident
In times when total denial in toto was seen as a requisite for the development of wisdom acquired by reason. With the nihilization of practical reason, the
Interpretation of delayed gratification came under assault. So the backward reasoning is reaffirmed and reduced to the basic plane of imminence, where different interpretations are schematic ex accordingly! As such, propositions in themselves are not self contradictory, and gauged on a scale of abbreviated symbolic referents. These abbrevions serve as reminders of the original lack of need to make a difference between the two types of gratification, whereby the justification for a timely denial did not exist. The reductive nature of temporal signification, is a product not a starting point for evaluation, of the changing idea of what such a difference can make within the embedded propositional value ontology.

In essence, what worked in the past on the level of denial may not work today, because off effected inter penetration of rates of temporal change within the interpretation it’s self.

15

I’ve taught regular middle/high school students and talented & gifted students and it’s so apparent to me how much more focused the latter group can be during lecture and classwork. I mean I taught 13 year old kids a college equivalent intro to logic course (ending with first order predicate logic) in the space of three weeks and watched them grasp the concepts more competently than half the students in my university logic classes. It leads me to believe that control of attention is a key factor for advancement and success. Attention can be broken down into several areas, but for now we’ll just refer broadly to attention abilities. If you break intelligence down into IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence), attention probably figures importantly for both.

So take the idea of delaying gratification - this only works when you have the ability to refocus your attention away from something you immediately want. If an immediate desire is all you can focus on, then the force of that preoccupation will naturally result in choosing a more instant gratification. It seems to me that better control of attention would lead to higher performance and self-discipline. I think this is why you can have ADD/ADHD kids of above-average intelligence who under-perform.

[size=85]The same means in the fight against a craving — castration, extirpation — is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate, to be able to impose moderation on themselves; by those who are so constituted that they require […] some kind of definitive declaration of hostility, a cleft between themselves and the passion. Radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate; the weakness of the will — or, to speak more definitely, the inability not to respond to a stimulus — is itself merely another form of degeneration.

The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its “cure,” is castratism. It never asks: “How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?” It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life. ~N.[/size]

This is one of my favorite quotations and I think it relates here. With self-discipline, you don’t need to swear off your desires or resort to abstinence because you have the ability to effectively moderate when to indulge and when not to. And self-discipline requires attention control.

16

Linear development, or step-by-step development, is a development where one retains control over what one ingests, ingesting only that which one truly lacks, refusing to ingest anything one does not really lack, at least not yet, thus retaining one’s connection to the past (building upon it instead of against it.) The universe being non-linear, constantly fragmenting organisms, forcing them into making mistakes by skipping intermediate steps, by crossing their limits, ingesting something they do not really lack, must be resisted through self-control/delayed gratification. One needs to endure one’s incompleteness, to delay one’s completion, because in order to properly complete oneself one must understand one’s lack and be certain of the value of what one ingests. This state of incompleteness, of growing incompleteness, is experienced as suffering, and through feelings of desperation, it motivates people to start ingesting anything and everything, hoping that what they ingest will be a miracle filling for their lack (this is what is meant by the word “submissiveness”.) One delays one’s gratification/completion in order to learn what one truly lacks and how to acquire it without further deepening this lack.

Modern schools, by being too linear, promote non-linear development. They teach kids how to disconnect from their past, how to confuse what they lack (their genuine needs) with what they do not lack (artificial needs imposed by society.) Here, one delays one’s gratification/completion in order to misunderstand what one lacks, in order to do what is merely expected from him to do. The process ceases to be important, and the only thing that remains important is the end, the symptoms, the appearance of knowledge. Whether one acquires this knowledge through linear development (by understanding, by relating everything back to one’s past/genetic heritage) or through non-linear development (by memorizing, by exaggerating, by imitating, by ignoring one’s past/genetic heritage) is not important at all.

In effect, one loses the right to be what one really is, to be honest. One can no longer be anything “negative”. One is not allowed to be wrong, to be stupid, to be weak, to be angry, to be hateful and so on and so forth. Everyone is forced to become pretentious.

17

Restating? My main point was directed at the Generic Neural Inhibitor Circuit [GNIC]. These are the relevant brakes that are necessary to modulate the various impulses especially the primordial ones. You did not mention these elements at all.

Note ‘successful’ is qualified to what is stated in that particular marshmallow experiment, presumably success in career, contributed to society positively while on the other hand, the opposite were relatively less successful in those aspects.

With a more efficient GNIC one will be able to delay ‘gratification’ is all aspects of one’s life.
Humans has a basic pain and/or pleasure module.
All human activities are linked to the pleasure and pain circuit in varying degrees from mild to strong. Generally whatever facilitate survival and procreation is linked to the pleasure circuit and if otherwise to the pain circuit to avoid threats to survival.

With animals the pleasure and pain circuit are activate by instincts and are spontaneous. However with humans there is a big issue as wrong, loose and inefficient connections do happen, e.g. sadists get pleasure from torture and inflicting pains on others. In humans the connections can be very complex and diversified. As such humans cannot afford to act too spontaneously and impulsively in response to the pleasure [gratifying] circuit. This is why humans need a GNIC to modulate so as to delay or cut off the gratification if necessary.

This GNIC thus enable one to forego short terms gains [pleasure] for long term goals.
For example, if a person is lost in the middle of large ocean with only limited rations. In this case one has to have an efficient GNIC to practice delayed gratification to extend one’s duration of survival and greater chance of being rescued.

There are many examples of human wreckage when there is no efficient GNIC to delay or to cut off gratification, e.g.

  1. Big lottery winners becoming bankrupt in a short time after winning the lottery.
  2. People who will spend and incur debts and not saving for the rainy days.
  3. Date rapists who cannot control their urges and lusts
  4. Murderers
  5. Sadists
  6. Response to immediate basic emotions, anger-rage, blind love, etc. Note completion of these response are accompanied by a degree of ‘gratification’ arising from the basic connection to the ‘pleasure’ circuit.
18

So it seems to be, we have gone full circle if this issue would be tangential to the bigger moral issue of
how to change this process of seeming devolution across the board. And particularly come dab across the Kantian Categorical Imperative. it makes sense,
devolution with a cognitive relapse. However, the
two processes, albeit the praxis and the process ,in this case seem to run in opposite directions. It is nothing new, relaxation of moral standards began
with the outcome of the Scopes trial, the publication
of Joyce’s ‘Ullysses’ , the social liberation movements which began in the nineteen sixtees, and worldwide energy exchange between military economic capital and Freud’s economy of the ID.

for the capital of Freud’s ID.

How can morality be re transferred, how can
Transvaluation be reversed, these and many other
questions haunt the fact, that it may take generations or even hundreds of years of philosophical psychology connected with politically aggressive conflict to achieve.

even minimal changes in behavior. My point is, that,
physical science points to the present trend and people move around more,working harder, in a
system of pressure, whereby they are not likely to forgo their moments of pleasure for intellectual improvement, where the vast majority of people, are
lucky enough to view an hour or two of TV, before

hitting the sack. For intellectually attuned people, it’s a different story, they can live by their on VO,
they may reverse the hands of the clock to en era
more in tune with how they would like to structure their life, but veritable reality is marching on, and there is more not less time to partake in hedonistic
activities.

So back to Kant, again, and the validity of testing
whether the arguments herein ,are reducible
categorically to the notion of that take on morality. The logical propriety of the argument can derive the principle, but the acid test is, like always, is it a workable test ? Or put into other words, the question
of whether gratification of instinctual drives is counter productive, reduces to the question that Nietzsche posed, vs, that it is above and beyond the scope of
human intelligence to traverse the problem. So the
answer is that the ‘ought’ is not reducible from the ‘is’. The arguments forming the reduction became invalid, the moment Kant’s was not universally

adopted.

The esoteric answer may lie somewhere else, but, try
to justify that position, most running aground with it.

This is not the answer to be sought, Or desired to be sure, and it blows the air out of the argument, but in
this instance, it can be seen that VO does not meet minimum standards of the test of equivalency between praxis and process. Some argue that on a
utilitarian basis, it is more harmful to suppress
instinct, even at the cost of destabilizing focus. Incidentally, or even co incidentally, the new psychoanalysis promotes de centering the Imago, as
a cure for the lack of insight as a result of diminishing
selective focus.

19

This diminishing the IMAGO is a counterbalanced to hyper real exaggeration and idealization of the object
Of the directed focus.

20

Not sure of your point.

My point if related to Kantian will be in the following;
The development of GNIC thus enable one to forego short terms gains [pleasure] for long term goals within the following perspective.

  1. Categorical Imperative - Formulation of Pure Moral Principles [theoretical]
  2. Set up long term goals in alignment with 1- Applied Ethics
  3. Develop and efficient GNIC to achieve long terms goal.

Note the average human instant gratification to burn coal, oil, gas, waste resources. If can be ethical in delaying and modulating gratifications collectively, the threat of global warming to humanity will be lessened.