”Let’s stop waiting, anyway, I’m not in a hurry to use it now.” “After this year, it will be easy to wait for college”… Should we wait for the branches to be full of fruit, and then enjoy the joy of harvesting; When the buds first bloom, how about quickly picking them off and feasting your eyes? Is it possible to have both?
”Why don’t you wait, anyway, I’m not in a hurry to use it now.” “After this year, it will be easy when you go to college” “Use it first, and buy whatever you want when you make money in the future”… …believe that we’ve all used (be) similar words to restrain our desires that, in their essence, teach us how to delay gratification.
The opposite of delayed gratification is instant gratification or instant gratification, both of which have their own fans.
Is it to wait until the branches are full of fruit, and then enjoy the joy of harvesting; Is it possible to have both?
The Real
Meaning of “Pleasure” Pleasure doesn’t actually conflict with delayed gratification, and present-day happiness doesn’t always come at the expense of long-term happiness. The real antithesis of delayed gratification is the misinterpreted and stigmatized “carnival”.
Consumption phrases such as “Women should be nice to themselves” and “If you don’t spend your money on yourself, your husband will spend your money on other women” are the most common words in life that use “in time”. It is a typical example of misconduct in the name of “Happiness”, and it is also one of the main culprits that eliminates the positive meaning of “Happiness” itself.
Under the long-term influence of this consumerism, we unconsciously equate instant pleasure with instant gratification of material desires or sensory stimuli, and regard it as a stumbling block on the road to achieving long-term goals. But in fact, being in time is teaching people to grasp the moment and cherish the present, rather than recklessly self-indulge and indulge in material and sensual pleasures.
There is a difference between quality and quantity of pleasure Two well-known philosophical schools in
ancient Greece, Epicureans and Stoics, provide us with a window to further explore the dialectical relationship between instant pleasure and delayed gratification.
The Stoics advocated “happiness”, encouraged self-control, opposed indulgence in sensual pleasures, and embraced the idea of ”a life dedicated to reaching our highest potential and serving our highest ideals”, believing that happiness is achieved through a great deal of sacrifice of.
In contrast, the Epicureans advocated “hedonism” and believed that the purpose of life is to pursue happiness. But the Epicureans also emphasized that one should choose happiness carefully. They think: “What we call happiness means no pain in the body and no disturbance in the soul, not the so-called happy life of drinking and seeking pleasure all night long, nor the so-called happy life of enjoying the delicacies of mountains and seas on a luxurious dining table to satisfy the appetite. Happiness. It is a kind of sober reason.”
As Luo Xiang, a professor at the School of Criminal Justice of China University of Political Science and Law and director of the Institute of Criminal Law, said, happiness has a difference in quality and quantity, and the more happiness that reflects the dignity of human nature, the more advanced it is. hapiness.
Even though everyone’s definition of happiness is different, it must be recognized that the way to obtain happiness is of high and low value.
When analysing whether something is worth doing, it can be evaluated from two perspectives: one is the magnitude of the benefits that this event brings at the moment, which can be mental, emotional, or physical or material. , called the “revenue value”; the second is the speed at which the gain decays with time, called the “revenue half-life”. An event with a long half-life has a longer-lasting effect. Things with long half-lives, such as accumulating credible knowledge, training practical skills, and improving aesthetic taste, are the source of high-quality happiness in our usual sense.
Delayed gratification or just-in-time pleasure?
Scholars point out that a good blend of “happiness” and “hedonism” is most likely to lead to a truly happy life. So, how to make happiness more cost-effective by taking advantage of their respective advantages?
Breaking Self-Discipline to Clarify Intrinsic Motivation While we often associate delayed gratification with self-discipline, research has found that self-control, and all the benefits that come with it, may have nothing to do with suppressing impulses at all.
Different from the imagination, when people who have the right to speak “self-discipline” talk about their good habits, they do not use these words to persist and endure. Instead, they prefer to explain their decade-long behavior in terms of addiction and enjoyment.
In their opinion, the long-term practice of “high-quality happiness” is because “I like it” and “I want to”. Therefore, even if there will be challenges in the early days, they will not give up. In the process, they taste a sense of satisfaction that motivates them to continue the action, and a virtuous circle is formed.
Therefore, we should first clarify what kind of person we want to be, and then do what we think should be done. According to the answers obtained, reconstruct your own happiness system.
Correct understanding of pain delayed gratification will inevitably bring pain, but pain has its own value.
The utilitarian ethicist Müller believes: “It is better to be an unhappy person than a happy pig.”
Pleasure and pain are twin flowers, and it is protracted participation and perseverance in these seemingly painful behaviors. , making the feeling of happiness more profound and lasting.
Only true deep engagement can produce pain, and pain in turn makes what we’re doing unique and exclusive.
In low-quality pleasures such as short videos, our role is to sit back and enjoy it, which is equivalent to lying directly in the experience machine. On the contrary, high-quality happiness is the happiness you get from nothing, through your own participation and creation. In the process, the pain we experience is precisely the proof of our existence and practice.
Face up to your own desires and happiness is time-sensitive. Toys that you liked but didn’t get when you were young, even if you can easily get them when you grow up, have lost their original happiness.
Blindly advocating “delayed gratification” will not only lead to rebellious psychology and sunk time costs, but may also lead to frustration, indecision, greed, and difficulty resisting the temptation of painting cakes in the process.
Happiness is not a one-time thing, the feeling of pleasure fades over time, and our definition of happiness is constantly updated. Therefore, we are on the road of chasing joy and happiness all our lives.
Running on this road with no end in sight, sometimes it is inevitable to need worldly happiness that can satisfy us immediately as solace. At this time, we don’t have to be too harsh and suppress our desires.
Eating a piece of cake that I usually don’t dare to eat when I’m sad, staying up all night to catch up on a drama, and squandering the money I’ve saved for a long time on a trip that just goes away… Who said that enjoying the happiness of the moment won’t be us The motivation to start again?