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Eating a pint of ice cream instead of improving a difficult relationship with your partner is easy. So is scrolling social media instead of completing a cardio workout at the gym. Simple and accessible delights seem like lures that drag you away from a better life, rather than tools to help you achieve a more meaningful one. Seeking gratification, we have been told, feels good in the moment but worse in the long run.
But gratification is good—even though it gets a bad rap. People find the enjoyment that gratification offers suspicious, because it became associated with indulgence. And, yes, people sometimes do pursue pleasures such as food, alcohol, drugs, porn, social media, shopping, and gambling to their detriment. Those temptations offer an easy rise that can distract pleasure-seekers from engaging in more spiritually fulfilling long-term pursuits.
Indulgences distract us from our goals—or even become sources of harm or destruction—when they are selfish pursuits undertaken only to please ourselves. But gratification can be pointed toward the world—the sensory enchantment of everyday life. The world is full of ordinary stuff with which you might yet commune. Doing so is easy, and free. Simple pleasures are readily available and can overturn the bland monotony of our overly optimized, anodyne world. The more you allow yourself to accept the weird, wonderful gifts that life constantly offers, the more their offerings will feel desirable, even transformative.
Gratification is considered dangerous because it is “instant,” offering immediate pleasure at the cost of future benefit. We have been indoctrinated into the cult of “delayed” gratification. Psychologists and economists have spent decades demoting gratification to a sin. They were wrong to do so, and the time has come to reclaim a gratifying life as a virtuous one.
The story begins with marshmallows. Beginning in the late 1960s, a group of researchers conducted a series of experiments on children at a local preschool. In a typical study, a researcher would invite a preschool-age child to visit a “surprise room,” a prospect that could have sounded delightful rather than creepy to children of that age and of that era. The surprise room was plain, with two chairs and a table. A tin was placed at the center of the table, and some toys sat on the floor near one of the chairs. The researcher would then show the child the toys and explain how they worked, promising that the child would get to play with them later.
[Read: Self-control is just empathy with your future self]
Then the man would offer the tot a small treat—a marshmallow, all white and plush. He’d declare that he was going to leave the room but that the child could make him come back whenever they wanted—although the child would then have to settle for a lesser snack, such as a pretzel.
After the child understood the process, the experimenter would reveal what was under the tin: more and bigger treats, sometimes bigger pretzels and animal crackers. In one test, the researcher announced his intention to leave again, but this time the child had a choice: eat the smaller treat and make the researcher come back, or summon him to return. If the kid waited, he or she would be rewarded with a treat. The man didn’t tell the children how long they had to wait, but he planned to return in about 15 minutes—a long time for someone of any age to just sit there in front of a marshmallow. No matter the child’s choice, the pair would still get to play with the toys afterward.
The researchers were Stanford psychologists carrying out an experiment on impulse control devised by Walter Mischel. Their experiment, which became widely known as the marshmallow test, came to represent the levers one might pull to encourage delayed gratification and to quell its presumably dangerous opposite, immediate gratification.
That Mischel would hatch the marshmallow test shows just how skeptical our culture is of gratification—and was even more than half a century ago. The psychological and cognitive principle that humans are hardwired to want things, and socially enculturated to desire them immediately, had connected gratification with indulgence long before Mischel set out to measure temptation.
Decades earlier, Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, had developed a theory of the “pleasure principle”: Our basic human drives, which Freud called the id, seek immediate gratification for needs such as hunger, thirst, sex, diversion. And conversely, they seek to avoid the pain that comes with failing to fulfill those needs.
As psychoanalysis gave way to behavioral science, the pleasure principle evolved into the concept of immediate or instant gratification. Because it is animalic and wild, the instinctual desire to gain immediate reward must be tamed and controlled. For Freud, a “reality principle,” related to rational action and social norms, steps in to control the pleasure principle. And in behavioral psychology, “delayed gratification” offers a similar restraint. When children in the marshmallow test wait 15 minutes to reap the reward of greater treats, they demonstrate their capacity to resist their immediate urges. This act of resistance is considered intrinsically valuable because it is presumed always to result in a reward. Gratification was considered a basic instinct, so to resist it was thought to demonstrate the discipline to instead pursue “more substantial future gains,” as one of the studies put it.
The marshmallow tests were enormously influential. The experiment was run many times in several variations, and Mischel and others returned to it in longitudinal studies to see how the children who had held out for two marshmallows at age 3 fared at age 13 or 30. Over time, researchers claimed that those who could adopt delayed gratification at a young age were more adept, competent, and successful across a dizzying array of metrics, including SAT scores and body mass index. A purported reason? They knew how to control their impulses to delay the gratification of an immediate pleasure. That control, the theory went, allows someone to plan and execute in the more meaningful long term.
Just one problem: The marshmallow test seems to demonstrate exactly nothing about an individual’s success, short- or long-term. More recent studies, carried out amid a larger crisis to replicate research results in the behavioral sciences, have cast doubt on the findings of Mischel and his successors. It seems that the desire for a quick and simple answer—the supposed sin of instant gratification—came for the instant-gratification researchers.
The studies that cemented the conclusions about SAT scores and the like were small and had been carried out with children recruited from Stanford’s campus preschool, meaning that they came from educated, wealthy families who already had many other advantages beyond having delayed consuming candy a decade or more earlier. Kids in more precarious situations, such as those accustomed to food insecurity, poverty, or the rarity of a surprise treat, might indulge gratification not on account of psychological defectiveness, but because of learned caution: If someone offers you something, grab it before they take it away again!
[Read: Why rich kids are so good at the marshmallow test]
But even among privileged children, researchers have found no evidence that being able to resist the marshmallow has had any impact on their lives. By 2020, a group of researchers that included some of Mischel’s former graduate students published a new study on the marshmallow test. The team surveyed 113 participants who had taken part in the Stanford studies. Well into middle age by then, the former preschoolers’ lives were established, their successes and failures reasonably certain.
Studying this group anew, the scientists found no evidence that long-term success on a set of “capital formation” factors—including education, income, net worth, lack of debt, and forward-looking behavior patterns—could be predicted by the participants’ performance on the marshmallow test. As the researchers themselves put it, “Preschool delay of gratification does not have predictive power for our mid-life capital formation variables.” Walter Mischel, who died before the study was published, was one of the authors.
In addition to psychologists, economists have concerned themselves with immediate gratification, which they also tend to frame as a problem of self-control. In a widely cited paper on the topic, Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin argued that people who pursue immediate gratification are expressing “time-inconsistent” preferences. That is, the person who chooses a gratifying activity in the present moment is correct in relation to their current desires, but wrong about their future ones. The researchers’ examples of those immediate desires include activities such as smoking, overeating, and going to the movies instead of completing a report for work. Economists tend to think that people always maximize utility, seeking the greatest happiness. To them, gratification may offer a boost to that utility in the moment, but one that will only seem foolish later on.
Self-control and planning are important skills for reasoning beings. But gratification does not always—or even usually—involve a choice between the present and the future. The psychologists, economists, and happiness advocates have saddled the rest of us with an impoverished and incomplete picture of gratification and its distinctive delights.
For one part, it is both preposterous and oppressive to imagine that even the passing or idle moments of one’s life must be optimized for long-term goals. The very idea that a preschool-age child would need to maximize their ability to resist the treats an adult has dangled in front of them should offend you. The notion that you waste any moment not spent optimizing your life is scandalous.
For another, the received idea of instant gratification is far too narrow. It splits the world into either productive work or dangerous indulgence. But in between maximizing profit and succumbing to addiction, you find a universe of other encounters. Most of them are innocuous, momentary, and meaningful. The happiness scientists and pop psychologists seem to think that gratification is something that gets used up when it is encountered—usually through consumption, as in the case of literally ingesting a marshmallow (or downing a Manhattan, or drawing tar and nicotine from a cigarette, or just scrolling Instagram).
This is wrong. Gratification can arise from pleasures of the flesh such as eating, using substances, and having sex. But it also—and far more often—takes place when you connect your senses to a thing in the world, and when you do so fully and consciously.
Gratification is not the pleasure that you indulge now at the expense of what you might do in the long run, but the pleasure you can encounter only if you do so right as it happens, or else it will pass you by forever. It is always immediate and never deferred. You can’t put off the unique pleasure of eating (or squashing, or melting) a marshmallow, because to indulge in that pleasure is a quick and easy act that takes place in the present. You can forgo, miss out on, or ignore gratification. But delaying it is impossible.
To do so is to pursue a pleasure of a different kind. The marshmallow-test researchers tempted children with a treat if they could just wait for it. But eating two marshmallows later instead of one right now is more a test of satisfaction than of gratification: The delight comes from waiting out 15 minutes of boredom in anticipation of the adult’s return, eating the two marshmallows, and playing with the toys as promised.
Lost in all the hand-wringing by positive psychologists and happiness consultants is any consideration of what a 3-year-old subjected to the marshmallow test could easily tell you about actual marshmallows: They are delightful, and in so many ways. Marshmallows are pleasant to eat, for starters—but not just to eat; also to hold, and to behold.
The mere existence of a marshmallow is a miracle. I can’t believe the researchers would have forgotten. A cloud of spun sugar, weightless, textured like leather but soft like petals. It floats on cocoa. It squishes monstrously. You can draw a face on it with chocolate sauce. Perhaps the least interesting thing about marshmallows is their suitability for longitudinal studies of personal achievement.
The marshmallow-test publications speak about the treats offered to the kids abstractly—a marshmallow, a small pretzel—when the specifics matter. By 1967, when the tests began, mass-produced marshmallows were available in both large and mini sizes, and the small ones were at times used in the studies. Does a single mini marshmallow even count as a treat? Maybe the kids were just being polite, trying to meet the unhinged expectations of the strange men who lured them from the comfort of preschool into the curious guiles of their “surprise room.”
And that’s just one aspect of the gratifying gastronomical features of marshmallows. I’m not saying I dislike the things, but to me, the sweetness is so strong and the flavor so one-note thatI find myself more inspired by their unique texture and supple form. If you have some in the pantry, go get one right now and put it in your mouth for a moment without eating it. Feel its malleability between your teeth, how its squashy fragility—marshy like the plant from which it was originally harvested—gives a bit before bouncing back.
This squishy honor of a marshmallow doesn’t even require devouring it—the indicator that psychologists took as the signal of its depleted future life. Just hold one between your fingers and compress it a bit. Then crush it entirely, witnessing its slightly drier exterior crack like dust-bowl cropland before it explodes into an oozy splatter. Were the children subjected to the marshmallow test allowed to pursue such gratifying delights, or would merely touching the treats have demonstrated their surrender to short-termism, causing the psychologist who gazed at them through a peephole to return, disappointed?
If ever you have encountered a marshmallow, the sight of one might call to mind these and other properties, memories of encounters you might have looked past or perhaps even felt ridiculous admitting you had enjoyed, let alone revealing to someone else. Once, many years ago, I saw a strange, experimental short film at a festival. The film showed a bowl of soup, and then a hand dumping oyster crackers into it (something of the pottage equivalent of marshmallows in hot chocolate). The camera kept rolling until the oyster crackers had evaporated into the soup. But the film was structured to cut from soup to soup—first split pea, then ham and bean, and eventually tomato—such that the crackers took less and less time to melt. When the screening finally reached tomato, and the crackers vanished nearly instantly, the crowd erupted in cheers and applause, so gratified to see the outcome that their prior, but unsurfaced, experience with soups had made comprehensible and then delightful.
All of us have probably experienced the urge to pull away from something we ought to do for the sake of long-term satisfaction or happiness—finishing a work project to realize part of a career plan, checking in on your parents in another city, hitting the gym to forestall the inevitable decay of mortality.
While I’ve been writing this, I’ve stopped numerous times to retrieve a refreshment from the kitchen, to swap out a lampshade for a new one delivered to my door, and, yes, to scroll my phone in search of diversion. But that doesn’t mean that artificially sugared sodas, retail consumption, or social media are depraved, worthless activities akin to the cardinal sin of sloth or the tragic spiral of heroin addiction. Instead, pleasures are always braided. We pursue happiness, satisfaction, and gratification all at once, in different ways.
[Arthur Brooks: Postpone your pleasures]
Our tactile and sensory life has been de-emphasized in favor of ideas, symbols, accomplishments, and abstractions. But why not revel in sensation? For one thing, these activities take up so little time—just a few minutes, or even a few moments. For another, these moments often take place in circumstances when no other options are possible. What is a woman, delighting in the sensation of her fingers contacting her car’s steering wheel, meant to do “instead” of encountering that object she absolutely must be touching to operate her vehicle? It costs her nothing and demands no trade-offs. If anything, the momentary delight helps make up for a source of unhappiness: her long and arduous commute. Much of the time, opportunities for gratification simply arrive at your feet. They do so constantly. Done right, you can’t help but take advantage of them.
Think of gratification the way you think of humor. Like laughter, gratification is involuntary. Have you ever tried to suppress a big, guttural laugh upon hearing a funny joke or catching an unexpected sight? Your whole body rebels against the effort. You cannot bottle up laughter, or gratification, in the hopes of optimizing its usage later. The same features that make the psychologists and economists worry that pleasure is a low and basic response of the animal brain also make gratification a thing that happens when things happen to you—provided you are open enough to witness them.
Gratification offers a way to express the mismatch between your body and the rich, dense universe of things that are outside your body, but that it nevertheless encounters. It is the good feeling you get from resolving the absurdity of the sensory world. There you are, touching an escalator handrail, which bobbles slightly in its track. There you are, having crushed an oak gall underfoot on the way to the mailbox. There you are, your fingers zippering across the sleeves of garments hung close together on a boutique rack.
For happiness theory, pleasure is acceptable only when it gets promoted to higher meaning. But the connections and the communion available to us, as human beings, are not limited to interacting with other human beings. You won’t develop the kind of relationships with steering wheels, coffee cups, and oak galls that you can develop with your children, your neighbors, or your community. But why should that stop you from forging the most, and the best, connections with all of the other objects you might encounter? Pursue more relationships, of a different kind, for the purpose of another type of contentment. Happiness and satisfaction are hard, but gratification is easy.
This essay is adapted from Ian Bogost’s forthcoming book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.
