1: We’re all likely familiar with the “marshmallow experiments.”
“Social psychologist Walter Mischel and his colleagues presented children with a single marshmallow and offered them a choice: They could eat it, or wait alone in the room with it for ten minutes, in which case they’d get one more,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
“In footage of some versions of the experiment,” Oliver explains, “the dutiful gratification-deferrers sing or talk to themselves out loud, in an effort to overrule their urge to eat the marshmallow in front of them.
“Participants who were able to resist temptation,” he writes, “went on to enjoy better academic performance and physical health in later childhood, and to demonstrate other positive differences as adults.
“The reasons are still debated,” Oliver observes, “but it seems clear that the self-discipline not to grab the first marshmallow is an invaluable trait for what’s commonly thought of as a successful life.”
Interesting.
And yet, perhaps it’s a bit more complicated.
“We all know there are plenty of people who might benefit from learning to defer gratification much more than they currently do,” Oliver writes.
“It’s just that if we’re the kind of person who vigorously agrees with that statement,” he notes, “it’s highly likely that we’d benefit from learning to defer it less.”
After all, what is the fate of the person that John Maynard Keynes describes as “the purposive man,” who “does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom”?
Is it possible to live what the Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz calls “the provisional life”?
To be so consumed with using our time judiciously, preparing for the future, that we neglect the present moment?
Do we see our present lives “as mere preparation for the stage when we’ll have everything running smoothly”? Oliver asks.
Reflecting on his past, he writes: “Looking back, I see that I was always telling myself that once I figured out how to be a national newspaper journalist, or a good partner, or the best possible parent, I’d let myself relax into those roles.”
As did the philosopher Dean Rickles, who at age twelve was struck by “an absolute epiphany”: the idea “that I could spare my future self trouble and make the future better by acting a specific way” in the present.
“And so he got down to work,” Oliver notes. “Among the various methods by which he made himself miserable so as to be happy later, he practiced piano so aggressively that he split his fingertips open.
“He took deferring gratification to an extreme.
“The strategy of treating life as an exercise in doing favors for his future self served him well in some ways.
“But very badly in others,” Dean recalls, “since I engaged in the practice to a punishing degree from which I’m still recovering … Pretty bloody pathological, and utterly shocking, bizarre behavior in retrospect.”
In the past, Dean assumed that “his future self would thank him; but these days,” he writes, “what I mainly feel for my past self is pity.”
It’s complicated.
“It’s not that concern for one’s future self is entirely bad,” Oliver explains, “especially when we’re young.
“We can argue that it’s easy for [Dean] to regret his past self-punishment now that he’s already an accomplished pianist,” he notes, “just as it’s easy for me to say I wish I hadn’t made myself sick with anxiety studying for my university degree, now that I’ve built a career that may not have been open to me without it.”
2: There is an altogether different version of not living in the present. What Oliver calls “a commitment-free existence.”
“They imagine,” he notes, they are “keeping their options open, though they have of course chosen a path—because choosing to use up some of our finite time in a state of non-commitment is still a choice.”
Marie-Louise von Franz writes of this mindset: “There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that, but whether it is [a relationship with] a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. . .
“The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever,” she observes. “There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering time and space completely, and of being the singular human being that one is.”
These types of people are often charming to be around. “Until one day they very much aren’t, and they’re suddenly the dubious fifty-something in a bar full of 25-year olds, having frittered their real future away on fantasies of an unlimited one,” Oliver notes.
Many of us have elements of both of these personality types, he explains.
“The commitment-phobe can’t bear to enter ‘time and space completely’ because letting himself be pinned down to one relationship or career path means renouncing the other ones,” Oliver writes.
“On the other hand, the too-responsible type holds off from entering time and space completely by always locating the real value of their present-day actions somewhere off in the future.”
3: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.
Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations.
At the end of each week, we are exploring some of the life lessons Oliver shares in his wonderful book Meditations for Mortals.
There is, however, a different way to show up in life, Oliver writes. Instead of being a “perfectionist,” we can be an “imperfectionist.”
“If there’s a single truth at the heart of the outlook,” he observes, it’s “that this, here and now, is real life.”
As in: This is it.
“This portion of our limited time,” he writes, “the part before we’ve managed to get on top of everything, or dealt with our procrastination problem, or graduated or found a partner or retired; and before the survival of democracy or the climate have been secured: this part matters just as much as any other and arguably even more than any other, since the past is gone and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really counts. . .
“We have to show up as fully as possible here,” Oliver writes, “in the swim of things as they are.”
The danger in not living this way, he believes, is that we will “end up treating our actual life as something to ‘get through,’ until one day it’ll be over, without the meaningful part of ever having arrived.”
Does this mean we “live in the moment” and take it easy, “letting go of our . . . ambitious plans—the things we’ll accomplish, the fortune we’ll accumulate, or the difference we’ll make to the world”?
Far from it, Oliver writes.
“It means we get to pursue those goals and feel alive and absorbed while pursuing them, instead of postponing the aliveness to when or if they’re achieved. . .
“It means letting go of the notion that we can’t quite allow ourselves to feel fully immersed in life before those plans are realized, and coming to understand on the contrary that the pursuit of ambitious goals is one excellent way to be fully immersed in life.”
Or, we could decide that this moment or this season is the time to take it easy.
“Perhaps it’s time for a sabbatical,” Oliver suggests, “or for what Tim Ferriss calls a ‘mini-retirement,’ an intentional break in which we undertake, now, one of the adventures we were mentally deferring until much later in life.
“After all, there’s never any guarantee that you’ll still be around to do it years in the future.”
At a minimum, it might be time to spend an hour today enjoying this day.
Which is what Oliver aims to do. “Now, at least on my better days, I realize that the activity of figuring such things out is the substance of an absorbing life, not something I need to do in order to prepare for one.”
And what of the marshmallow test?
Is there any virtue in “accumulating the greatest number of uneaten marshmallows”?
“At some point,” Oliver suggests, “in order to experience the benefits of having received any in the first place, we’re going to have to eat a damn marshmallow.”
More next week!
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Reflection: Am I missing the richness of right now by preparing for a distant future—or can I show up and find meaning in today’s imperfect moments?
Action: Give myself permission to enjoy one small pleasure this week, without guilt or delay—reminding myself that a well-lived life happens in the present, not just someday.
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