The Marshmallow Test Is Bunk

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 prescho