For the past few weeks, I’ve intended to write shorter posts. But every week, I look at my list of ideas, searching for one that will be easy to write about briefly, and I end up waffling for most of the week. Then I finally feel enough pressure to just pick something. I start writing and realize that the eventual conclusion I come to won’t make sense without a bunch of assumptions. And by the time I’ve explicitly stated those, I’ve already written more than I planned to, and there are more exciting conclusions I’ve noticed, or there are more assumptions that need stating. By the time I’m finished, I’ve somehow spent both more time than I meant to and not as much time as I feel like I needed. And the end result is an essay which is longer than I planned, and not long enough to cover the material.

In a way, this is very exciting to me. I’ve never felt, after finishing an essay, that I needed to write more to really cover everything I wanted to say. In fact, most of the time, in school, I would only aim to write like two thirds or three quarters of the minimum word count.

All that’s to say that, I’m pretty confident that I’m writing about a pretty simple idea here, so hopefully this is that shorter post that I’ve been looking for. So if it seems like I’m arguing against a position that no one holds, that may be why. Because it’s easier to win that way.

Delayed Gratification

In common understanding, delaying gratification refers to forgoing reward now in favor of more later. The most well know result is the Marshmallow Test. Kids who could keep themselves from eating one marshmallow for fifteen minutes were given another one. Kids who earned two marshmallows were shown to have all sorts of better outcomes later in life compared to kids who didn’t.

This generally comports with intuition. Those who invest (or can afford to invest) money rather than spending it, eventually end up with more in total. Delaying gratification results in more of it. But the tricky thing is, when you iterate, the future becomes the present, and delayed gratification becomes instant gratification. If more is always better, why not wait another fifteen minutes and double your marshmallows again? Why not continue reinvesting your returns indefinitely? This may sound ridiculous to a human, but if you were a rational, profit-maximizing agent, this is probably what you would do.

Hopefully, at this point, you’re thinking something like, But money is just a means to an end. I value going on vacations and eating out and buying board games. If I don’t spend it, it becomes nothing more than a high score for my bank account. Exactly.

To use a different example, imagine you were trying to quit smoking. You would get some instant gratification from a cigarette right now, but you would get even more gratification later if you didn’t. But that’s not because you’ll be able to smoke way more later. It’s because you’ll be healthier. Similarly, those kids weren’t so much more successful because they waited and ate a whole bagful of marshmallows. Instead they were able to completely forgo a certain type of gratification in favor of good grades or income or however they measured “success” in that study.

Again, I think this is a pretty uncontroversial take. But I think it’s pretty easy to think about delayed gratification as a certain thing and miss that it’s up to you do decide what your long-term goal looks like and what that future gratification will look like. What things are fine to enjoy now and which things you should forgo in favor of a longer term goal?