“I haven’t seen a movie or read a novel since I got here.”
A group of us were chatting in the hall of the psychology department, preparing for our weekly departure to the student pub. Sharon (as I’ll call her) had stopped by briefly. She wouldn’t be going, of course. Too busy. She was always too busy. No one was skeptical of her claim. She had never been seen at a social event in the year since our cohort started the program. She said she’d be able to relax once her master’s thesis was defended.
Once that goal was accomplished, leisure continued to recede. She would relax once she had finished collecting her PhD data, once her comprehensive examinations were over, once she defended her dissertation, once she’d completed her year of postdoctoral supervision.
I haven’t seen her in many years, but she’s always been there in the back of my mind. I’ve wondered if she’s still at it. Once I’ve published some articles. Once I’ve gotten a promotion. Once my private practice is running. Once the mortgage is paid off. Once I retire. Then my life will start. Unless something else gets in the way.
The Marshmallow Test is an assessment of a child’s ability to delay gratification. The experimenter presents the child with a marshmallow and announces that she will be back in fifteen minutes. If the marshmallow hasn’t been eaten at that point, the child can have a second one.
Children vary in their ability to sit in front of the marshmallow and not eat it. Some give in immediately, while others squirm in agonies of temptation. It turns out that the simple binary outcome (eaten or not) is nicely predictive of later academic success. Delayers generally do better. It’s easy to see why. Success depends to a great extent on a person’s ability to study when they could be watching television and to work their way through the boring bits of otherwise interesting projects.
Adults sometimes respond to a description of the test with a sigh of ennui. “I don’t like marshmallows anyway, so I don’t see the relevance.” Swap out the marshmallow with the grown-up equivalent, however, and watch the fun. Lift the cover and reveal a plate of chocolate. A line of cocaine. A bottle of scotch. A pornographic video. A television remote. A couch. Suddenly the test isn’t quite so hypothetical. Leave them for fifteen minutes, and only the crumbs remain.
The ability to delay gratification is a double-edged sword, with misery lying seductively on both sides. Too little self-discipline, and we accomplish nothing, wallowing in our consumption. Too much, and we can choke the joy out of our lives. It is only along the narrow flat of the blade that happiness-inducing moderation can be found. This tightrope is easily avoided. If you become especially adept at passing the Marshmallow Test, you may suppress even your better aspirations in favor of conformity to the expectations or wishes of others. You may also become so focused on a single, genuinely held goal (like becoming a respected professional) that your life becomes imbalanced. You may spend no time socializing with friends, enjoying life, or doing any of the things that sustain you for the long haul. Even if you can keep the flame of your passion burning, you may find that you have realized one life goal (such as career success) but missed out on all the others.
You can choose to push most of your goals or pleasures into the future, telling yourself that there will always be time for them later. Relationships, novels, travel, experiences, contributions to the world. Dinner with friends. Playing with the cat. Walking in the forest. Even a night at the pub. It may turn out that the future is shorter than you thought it would be. And when “later” appears, if it ever does, you may have forgotten what your plans were, or what your life was meant to be about. You will no longer know how to have fun, how to lie in a hammock, how to be a friend, how to raise your children. You will only remember how to be working, working, working.
Sharon would have passed the Marshmallow Test with no difficulty. I think I would have too—as a child, I still had uneaten Halloween candy in January. But I had the example of a father who delayed gratification constantly, apparently believing that he would start living his life when he retired—something he died before doing. So in graduate school I went to the pub, I saw movies, I read books, and I had relationships. I lived my life, knowing that the future was an imaginary construct that might not exist.
Don’t use me as your model: I wasn’t trying to be unhappy. That, when it happened, was accidental. Instead, use Sharon. If you have a sense of what you would like your life to be about, set that insight aside. Tell yourself that you have more important things to think about right now—like completing your degree or getting your career established or paying off the mortgage. Right now you have to work hard. You are sacrificing for a distant future. If the present does not seem very enjoyable, that’s all right. The future will be all the rosier for it.
Tell yourself that when you just reach that next hurdle, you’ll be able to sit back, relax, and work on your life’s purpose. There’s plenty of time. You can get to it when your to-do list runs out. Become a supreme delayer of gratification. Push your life endlessly into the future. Forget balance. Hang on to the marshmallow long enough, and it will become inedible.
It’s important to suppress any awareness of the tendency to fix your eyes on a new hurdle when you pass the previous one. Just keep going, task after task, until the sand in the hourglass runs out—or until it has been so long since you considered what you really wanted that you can no longer remember what it was.