The warm feeling of instant gratification

There’s a famous finding in psychology (hard to replicate though…): give some small children a marshmallow and tell them that they’ll have a second one if they can wait for ten minutes. The ones who wait seem to end up doing better in life.

              It confirms our moral intuitions about instant gratification: giving in to temptation is a vice, holding out virtuous, and virtue brings rewards. Sadly in the modern world, as we see with  Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Putin, Philip Green, Jeff Fairbanks and a host of greedy, immoral colossi bestriding the world (or maybe crushing it under the weight of their greed; they aren’t held up there by their own work), virtue must be its own reward, because real rewards come to those most lacking in virtue.

              Still, instant gratification is a bad thing. Our religions, our culture, our economy… they all tell us to work hard now, forgo pleasure and hope for an impossible reward that will never arrive. We have internalized that message, and it suits powerful people for us to base our lives on accepting their depredations in exchange merely for the promise of the future.

              When it doesn’t suit them, though, they can work very hard to tempt us, and it is those temptations that are the genuinely bad ones. It’s bad to buy some extra sweets at the shop counter; it’s bad to smoke, it’s bad to waste your money on the heaps of pointless junk that advertising says will make your life complete. The things that are good for you: leaving work on time to live your life, having sex with whomever you choose, or government investment in the future, are all things that are frowned on. These are, respectively, lazy, sinful and spendthrift.

              How strange that our approach to instant gratification is the wrong way round. At root, though, there is a point to the idea. Self control is a good thing; without it, you’re not really yourself. The thinking being that is you is just a passenger in a body controlled by the dumb animal that is your instincts and emotions. The times that self-control becomes bad are when it is motivated by a triumph of hope over experience; when it is emotionally driven. Those might be the times it is easiest, but easy and good are rare bedfellows.

              Our culture now accepts, or even encourages, a lot less self-control. As ab example, modern communications have left us addicted to validation and replies; it has become rude to keep quiet. I’ll repeat that: it is rude if you do nothing to another person! Expectations are that at least some of the torrent of messages you must be sending should flow to someone you care about even a little, and that complete silence is a deliberate act. People cannot wait until you next meet. We are becoming a mob of attention-givers, constantly distracted by a cacophony of noise that is hard to ignore completely. Companies compete to be the fastest to deliver; we have next-day delivery on almost anything. Gone are the days of waiting for the right season!

              Online, people hark back to the good old days; to our stoic forbears who put up with hardship. That’s weird. Hardship is, well, hard. It’s not a nice thing. But… but the ability to cope with it is a virtue. That’s what we really should be cultivating, and not by deliberately imposing hardship on each other (like Brexit), but just by trying to improve ourselves.

              We live soft, easy lives. It’s hard to draw a line between unwarranted hardship and unnecessary indulgence. We all draw that line in different places, and gradually have come to accept more and more indulgence as normal. It’s this gradual shading of the one into the other that is our real source of contention: some people look at others and see them as disgustingly self-indulgent, but those people look back and see people trying to impose uptight, restrictive rules and hardships out of spite. Generational warfare is a game of labels: are massive pensions an indulgence, or is that avocado toast? Other people should be able to cope without what we never had/ will never have. Our society’s shopping habits are another obvious example, but there are plenty of others.

One thing that has become so embedded in our lives that we barely think about it any more is central heating. What’s the right temperature to live in? A long time ago, it was whatever the weather outside was, plus a few degrees because of your fire. Now that we can heat, and in some countries, cool, our buildings to whatever temperature we choose, it’s an important question.

We know that death rates increase in temperatures below 14 degrees and above 26; we know that older people need temperatures above 16. We know that people exactly like us survived without modern central heating. To hear some people talk nowadays, you’d think that 16 degrees indoor temperature is a death sentence, but if this were the case, this country would have been uninhabited. We know that your core body temperature is different from the chill you might feel on your skin. We know that your cold receptors in your skin adapt over a few minutes, so that a sauna or bath that feels hot at first soon feels fine… and that a little chill also soon feels fine, if we will only wait and see. But lots of people won’t wait. As soon as they feel a touch of cold they try to change things, rather than trusting their own bodies to function.

Lots of people feel cold outside and rush indoors and turn the thermostat up, as if the heating will respond fast enough to warm them up… and then they adapt to the high temperatures. I’ve seen grown adults change a classroom thermostat as soon as the air conditioning turned on because a little air movement is chillier than the sweltering heat at the peak of the thermostat’s cycle. They don’t understand that heating runs in a range: at the highest temperature the air conditioning will kick in, and cool the room, but only for a short while. They have never waited long enough to discover that not only does your body adapt over 5 minutes or so, but over months and years as well. The instant gratification of fiddling with the heating settings is destroying people’s ability to cope with natural temperatures… and, via climate change, creating a whole load of unnatural temperatures that are far worse.

Why should we turn the heat up? It’s unnecessary. The same is true of counter sweets or vending machines. No person in a country rich enough to have such things actually needs them. No-one is so desperate for calories that a chocolate bar will make all the difference right now. And buying one for 80p when a four-pack from a proper shop can cost as little as £1 is ridiculous. Yet the urge to have something right now drives much of our economy. Without it, industries far away from sweets would also experience far less demand.

From an economic point of view, that’s a disaster. We measure ourselves using GDP, in which more sweets consumed is always good. If it leads to disease, and disease costs money to treat, then that’s good too. True, if disease stops us working, then that’s bad… but if cruel policies are in place that do not support sick people, and they have to work through the pain it causes them, then that’s good for GDP. This is how we rate ourselves.

But what if we had enough self-control not to bother with all these impulse purchases? What if, as with many people’s suicidal thoughts, we pondered things for a few minutes and then found that we didn’t need to go through with it? We’d feel exactly the same: human happiness would not decrease. We might even feel prouder of ourselves, more in control and more human. That’s how human brains work. The theory of economics is that every transaction improves happiness, because if it didn’t people wouldn’t do it. But that ignores entirely the fleeting impulses of our minds; the random walk or quantum field of intention (to borrow analogies from other areas). The waves and tides of emotion we experience sometimes spill our money where we don’t want it, and some people have stormier lives than others.

We can have a society that collects that money from people and creates big swings in emotion, or one that protects them from losing it and helps them calm their inner lives. I used to be happy with the latter, because I didn’t feel affected; I don’t fritter away my money or bounce from mood to mood. I was young and foolish. This society might make me a bit better off than people with less self-control… if we all start at the same place. But it’s the people immoral enough to manipulate other people and ruin their lives who become wealthy, and the wealthy who get to entrench their wealth and power, pass it on and pull up barriers behind them. If, like me, you’re not too moved by advertising but not interested in manipulating other people either, society still isn’t set up for you.

Heating is a great example, not only because the underlying biology so clearly renders much of our behaviour unnecessary in a way that isn’t so clear elsewhere, but also because it’s so well known as a danger to the environment, whereas other examples pollute the environment more indirectly. Heating our buildings (in this country, and cooling them in hotter rich countries) is a major part of national greenhouse gas emissions. It is destroying the planet. As a side-effect, it makes us more reliant on Russia: although our gas mostly comes from Norwegian supplies, because Russia supplies so much of Europe, we’ll be affected too if the rest of the continent needs to start buying Norwegian.

But heating isn’t the only example. This need for instant gratification is a mental laziness. And in that respect, it’s just another way in which people don’t bother getting things right and don’t care about rules. Rules can be hard to follow, so most people break them from time to time when they judge it’s too much hassle. From bad spelling and grammar through to proroguing Parliament, it can be generalised as incompetence that says that 'my laziness is more important than a rule' or 'my desires matter more than principles'. And of course principles are rational: they come from the thinking part of our minds, just like self-control, whereas laziness and instant gratification are not us; they’re the animal part of our brains that grown adults should have learned to control.

There are rules all over life: speed limits that save lives in urban areas, rules about electoral expenditure, rules about false advertising, rules about false accounting, rules about procedure, televising bias… and rules get in the way. That’s the point of them: they stop people doing things that people would otherwise do. But some people, much more than others, think that rules don’t apply to them. Rules are to stop the other person doing too well, but are just petty things not to bother with for these people. It’s a sort of childish narcissism that doesn’t fully recognize the humanity of other people: doesn’t recognize them as genuine equals. People like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who lie and cheat their way through articles, interviews and even shutting down Parliament but scream in outrage when anyone tries to take them on at their level.

These big actions are easy to spot, but they’re no different from all the small rule-breaking that got them that far in the first place. Farage claiming allowances from the EU while railing against MEP greed; Conservatives overspending in key seats in the 2015 general election; Boris… well, lying about everything. All the little rules broken that individually you might dismiss as meaningless add up to a massive advantage. And of course, where rules exist but people have learned to regularly break them, copying the powerful people who first got advantage that way, powerful people can choose to enforce the rules on specific targets to keep them down. It’s unfair even though the rules are being applied.

Some people live their lives in rigid adherence to principles. They’re unbending, awkward and often difficult. They’re often on the autistic spectrum: seduced by principle rather than social acceptance. People dislike them. These people expose our misbehaviour: they won’t be complicit in our collective delusion.  They seem uptight about things that shouldn’t matter. But actually, those things do matter. Every little broken rule is a triumph of the irrational mind that believes Daily Mail propaganda. It’s a symptom of laziness and incompetence that determines the fate of our society, and through environmental damage, the world. Virtue either exists or it doesn't, no matter the size of the issue to which it's applied.

All our battles for the future aren’t so much about left or right, or even liberal and authoritarian. They’re not about religion versus reason. They’re internal battles of our brains: will we, collectively, be rational enough to plan for the future, disbelieve lies, restore democracy, help the needy and save the world from our wantonness? Or will we, individually, let our mental strength wither: buy that shiny object, throw the plastic away, turn the heat up and let the world burn?