"Anticipation and the Value of Delayed Consumption"

Ah-ha! It looks like you all have confirmed the truth of an actual psychological study by the very name of this blog post--that if awarded a free dinner at the best restaurant in the area, the vast majority of you would rather wait a while before cashing in on your winnings. No, I'm not actually reading psych journals (that particular study published by G.F. Loewenstein), but I did read Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert's book reads almost like a Malcolm Gladwell goldmine and is packed with lots of juicy insights as to why we do the things we do in effort to make ourselves happy.

I particularly liked Loewenstien's study because I recently started to get more serious about starting a routine mindfulness meditation practice and it has proven to be quite difficult to consistently keep mental energy focused in the present. I found a positive spin (justification??) on my struggle in reading Gilbert's matter-of-fact explanation of why we often find it difficult to simply "be here now": because many times "thinking about the future can be so pleasurable that...we'd rather think about it than get there." Gilbert's research frequently indicates humans tend to have very optimistic outlooks on how our futures will unfold. By self-imposing a delay on enjoying our free meal, not only do we get to enjoy our gourmet winnings, we also get the pleasure of looking forward to it for a week or month! As Gilbert points out, "Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double the juice from half the fruit"! Of course not all thoughts of the future are pleasurable, but in general we invent the best outcomes in our imagined futures. What a fabulous natural default setting!!

I highly recommend Stumbling on Happiness for more interesting reading including how people who've been through great tragedy or suffering can say "If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing." And to understand how a Pygmie mistaking a buffalo for a gnat is similar to you being far happier to extend an offer to babysit your nieces a month from now than you'd be to watch the kids tomorrow night.

Enjoy and thanks for your opinions!