With our daughter having quite restrictive food allergies since she was born, we have always been careful with not only what she has eaten, but also the way way she has eaten. We have been lucky that she hasn't been food shy even though she has reacted to some foods and has always had a healthy appetite. We also haven't used food as a reward of any kind and since she pretty much only eats decent food, there is no such thing as dessert, meaning that there is no particular order to what she eats.
However, we have talked about food a fair bit and about how it works at a basic level in terms of vitamins and minerals to help growth - which I think most parents do (mine did) but it feels like a punishment or a threat. Eat this or you will be ill. I also have mentioned time to time different eating "strategies" where some people eat what they like the most first and then what they like the least, last. While I haven't intentionally given a preference, I wanted to see what would happen over time, while hoping that she will choose to delay gratification as she started to mature.
I have struggled a lot with my own impulse control (especially around food) and have hoped that Smallsteps will take after my wife, but she definitely has more my body type and appetite. While food is one thing, they say that one of the biggest indicators of success in life is being able to delay gratification, as it allows for more of the "principle" of resources to be used to grow at a faster rate than continually "spending" them on small wins.
This of course applies to financial circumstances and conditions, but it is also for skill development and learning growth. There is a reason that the saying, patience is a virtue rings true and should be well developed and applied (with wisdom) as much as possible as there is an opportunity cost for all movement - for example, spending time on one thing takes time away from all others and if we let our desires have their way, we will spend a lot of time doing things that offer very little value but feel good, at the potential expense of having the resources to do things that feel good when we have built value with our time.
On Thursday, my daughter turns four and tonight something interesting happened (in my eyes) as for the first time, she actively chose to eat her grapes last, rather than first or mostly first. Normally she would eat the grapes (what she likes the most) first, and then the savory (tonight it was ham and a kind of pie thing) last. I say actively because she mentioned it to me, saying that she wanted to eat them last because she likes them the most. We haven't talked for months about food order as far as I remember, but it might have become something at the daycare too.
What I wonder is, if a person was raided in a hermatically sealed environment alone and without external culture, preference and habit introduced, would they make the same move - or would they keep eating what they like first?
I would suggest that it might be that people might build a natural preference to finish with the better tasting foods in the same way that a person will likely learn that drinking orange juice after brushing teeth is not ideal for flavor. Since the flavor of the last thing eaten is most likely going to linger the longest, people might choose through experience, to enjoy what they want for longer by eating it last.
I think there might be a relationship to the mechanism of pain, where studies showed that if the pain of a medical procedure is followed by a prolonged period of less pain, it is deemed less uncomfortable than if the procedure is painful and finished faster - but in reverse. Unlike pain, people want to extend good feeling experiences and they can do this by delaying their gratification, as even though there is the risk (someone might steal the food or investment capital is lost) the "payoff" is larger if one is able to save instead of spend.
While with food, the payoff is a longer enjoyment of flavor (ending on a high note), with investments the payoff is a larger gain that can be spent on a more valuable item. There are many examples of where delaying gratification is advantageous and can lead to a more "intense" outcome than the quick path to satisfaction and I think those who have developed good impulse control are able to apply it to many parts of their life, which will likely then have some kind of compounding effect on their total life experience.
I believe that the inability to delay gratification leads to all kinds of personal and social dysfunctions as people are encouraged by consumerism to satisfy their preferences without most of the upper stop limits (resource availability) that were in place in the past - meaning there is no lower limit on the degradation people can do to body or experience. For example, here is a list of the world's heaviest people and I can't imagine many people in history being able to get close to the bottom of that list at 444 kilos (979 lb), let alone the top at 635 kg (1,400 lb).
I think that this kind of dysfunction exemplified in food, also applies to tall kinds of activities that make consumption a past-time that uses resources without generating value. Like eating uses food energy to generate body mass, something like Netflix uses time energy to generate some feeling of entertainment satisfaction, even if it no longer tastes as good as it once did. Gaming is the same, so is Tinder.
Many use Tinder and similar for consumption of relationships (quantity over quality) and therefore it is akin to eating a lot of junk food, it tastes good in the short term, but it doesn't satisfy for long before hungry again. While feeling like it is social and connective, since little depth of relationship is formed, it is actually antisocial as it favors disposable relationships - it is dehumanizing through productization of people. This cycle can start off quite fun, but the dysfunction is seen long term with the inability to build or hold relationships of substance.
It is similar to eating chocolate bars that taste good daily, then looking in the mirror five years later - is the good feeling still present? The problem is, the next chocolate bar still tastes good in the short term, even though it adds to the problem. Being able to delay that chocolate bar gives not only the space to burn off some calories instead of feeding more, it gives the resources to slow down and perhaps consider alternative ways to use resources - time, money, skills, energy - in a more fulfilling way.
Instant gratification makes a fast ans dirty decision based on intuition or desire and will generally choose the default of "feels good" over "is good for you". I think that the space to choose differently is one of the greatest values of delaying gratification and if used consistently, could lead to some very different paths being taken and therefore, very different outcomes in life across the board.
I believe that the problem is that we are encouraged to use the resources at our disposal poorly and at an expense to us, while generating the real value for those who own the products we consume. Not only are we bleeding our generative values, we seem to be increasingly dissatisfied and depressed in life, even though we are effectively living on average with the most resources we have ever had. Many know this problem, but don't seem to see the expression of it in themselves, even though they identify it in others.
This is the problem perhaps, as even though it might be leveraging the same physical systems, the subject focus is individual and appears different - one might eat excess food, another too much gaming, someone else continually upgrades gadgets or loses themselves in books - it can all feel good, but the opportunity cost of personal resources have to be factored into the current feeling in relationship with the future feeling.
I would predict that if there was a way to experience the result of instant gratification and delayed gratification simultaneously, people would choose the delayed most of the time. However, that would defeat the point - the point is that to value that delayed gratification result, one has to have taken the risks and invested themselves to build it through actually foregoing the instant gratification results, which is why it is so difficult for most of us.
At the end of the day, it is unlikely that I have much affect on my daughter's ability to delay gratification and genetics plays a larger role. However, I am able to introduce her to the concepts and potential opportunities, so that she can make the decisions to develop it or mitigate risks for herself. If we are aware of our limitations and propensities, we could work to find the space to improve our outcomes by tweaking our incentive structure. Maybe my daughter learned that the flavor of grapes is more enjoyable as an after taste than ham, perhaps she was just seeing what the change in order will do - but I am glad she is curious enough to find out for herself.
Too often I hear people take the position that there is nothing they can do, while they are doing nothing - but then, inactivity could be considered an expression of instant gratification too, as it means avoiding uncertainty of future outcomes by doing nothing now.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
