5 Ways To Practice Delayed Gratification In Your Everyday Life
We are naturally myopic creatures—eager for quick results, immediate impact, and prompt payoffs. If we’re being honest, we simply suck at waiting.
Our society’s collective patience is on par with a dog who’s just watched its owner close their palm around a tasty treat—we know something’s there, we want it now, so we start inching closer and closer to it in anticipation. It’s painfully obvious that we want our reward now, not later.
Not to be overly dramatic, but our cultural inability to wait has already caused all sorts of problems—from shortsighted political policies created by politicians who just want to get re-elected the next term to our painfully slow acceptance of lifestyle changes that would curb our effects of climate change (reduced meat consumption, plastic obsession, fossil fuel fixation, etc.), but whose positive effects we won’t witness for a very long time.
But there is hope.
By embracing delayed gratification, we can train ourselves—and our communities—to put aside our myopathy in exchange for mutually beneficial fortitude.
Here are five ways you can practice delayed gratification in your everyday life:
One of the most beautifully archaic remnants of times past is the act of sending letters via the US Postal Service. By the nature of the activity, once you’ve mailed a letter to someone, it often takes at least a couple weeks to receive a response.
This delay again reinforces patience and a sense of being intentional with your words and their meaning. So pick up a card, write a letter, and send it to a friend.
When you shoot a roll of film, the photographs are not immediately accessible like they are on digital or phone cameras. This is refreshing for two reasons. The first is that it encourages you to be more present in the act of creating the photographs. If you know you won’t be able to review the shot right away, you take your time to compose—you’re more intentional with your work.
The second is that it allows you to truly experience delayed gratification upon your development and processing of the film days, or even weeks, later.
I recently shot four rolls of film throughout the streets of New York. A few days later, I dropped them off at a local shop called The Color House in SoHo to be developed. But after a few busy weeks, I still hadn’t been able to find time in my schedule to return to pick up the final products. Once I was able to review them, I happily rediscovered each photograph with new eyes.
Cooking can most certainly be an instant form of gratification. You assemble a selection of discrete ingredients, follow a particular set of instructions to combine them, and voilá!, you sit down and enjoy a great meal.
But one way to turn this daily task into an exercise in delayed gratification is through the act of cooking ahead. Take a Sunday afternoon and prep something tasty for the week ahead. Store it nicely in your refrigerator and move on with your day.
Days later, after you’ve forgotten about your prior work to prepare, you’ll be pleasantly surprised and gratified when you come back from a long day and find that your previously cooked meal is waiting for you.
Literally planting a seed in the ground and waiting for it to come to life over the following weeks is one of the most magical and accessible experiences that you can have. But growing your own food is also a great lesson in patience, persistence, and positivity.
And don’t be fooled, there’s no need for a sprawling backyard or acres of farmland to practice delayed gratification through gardening. Just make a small potted plant of herbs on your kitchen counter, plant, wait and watch.
It may not be self-evident, but writing is a form of delayed gratification. By expressing your thoughts in the moment, you’re enabling your future self to a greater sense of self-reflection. You’re creating an artifact of the current time period that will act as a portal for you to time-travel back to your prior frame of mind.
After nearly three months of writing every single day, I’ve already had countless experiences where I returned to old posts and was entertained, surprised, and gratified by my past musings.
5 Ways To Practice Delayed Gratification In Your Everyday Life
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