Why Instant Gratification is Ruining Our Lives
With all the time I have now, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. One podcast that I love is called Thick & Thin by Katy Bellote, an influencer and freelance artist. Bellote is a 24-year old living in New York City, and every week she reflects on the excitement and uncertainty that comes with life in her early twenties.
Eager to discover what her most recent thoughts were on her latest episode, I excitedly tapped ‘play,’ and I was captivated. Titled “Why Instant Gratification is Ruining our Lives,” this episode dove deep into the problem that many of us have today. Of course, I knew about this issue and the reason why it exists as a result of how easy technology has made our lives. But, Bellote exemplified parts of her own life where instant gratification was a major detriment to her creativity, which is also her career, and I wanted to echo her ideas now more than ever.
She explained that instant gratification is connected to what’s called the “pleasure principle” in psychology, where humans act compulsively on their needs and wants to get something immediately. In the age of social media, this “pleasure” from likes, for example, rushing in right after you post an Instagram fills that need for instant gratification. The problem arises when we don’t get what we desire instantly, and anxiety and tension often result.
The pleasure principle was explained in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, and it was the main factor behind the id, “unconscious psychic energy” to satisfy wants, needs, and urges (www.verywellmind.com). As children, we act on the id with little concern for social rules, but as we get older, the ego develops to keep us in check.
It is very easy in this day in age to have our wants and needs met almost, if not, immediately. It is important that we recognize our lives were not always like this, and certainly our parents and their parents’ lives were not like this. With this immediacy and frustration about miniscule things, like someone not texting you back right away, we lose the value of patience and the willingness to work on a skill or project if we think it will take too long to finish.
Bellote admitted that when she has a vision of a video, podcast episode, or article (she also has a blog), she will put aside everything else she needs to do and finish that project. She revealed that many people might view this as her being disciplined, hard-working and a visionary, but she realizes she does this because she wants that instant gratification of appraisal. She has been making YouTube videos since she was in high school and admitted it took years for her to reach the success she has now. Art and any project worth talking about takes a lot of time and patience with yourself.
This episode started to make me think about how instant gratification affects my life and the time I’ve been wasting doing nothing. If I was myself as a kid in quarantine, I could read all day long. But, now because of my iPhone and the Internet, I find it genuinely difficult to sit still and focus on reading a book for more than maybe ten minutes. This is terrifying to me and made me think about how impatience will affect my life in the future if I don’t try to do something now. I’ve started leaving my phone in my room when I go downstairs to do homework, or try to read, or cook, and I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be able to do that even for a day. If you’re like me, I challenge you to try this and see how it makes you feel, and then if there’s a new skill you want to learn that takes time and focus, you might be better off.