I suppose that I have always been pretty accepting of delayed gratification. This trait was developed early on when I went to live with my father after my parents' divorced. After about 18 months of Dad and I living with my paternal grandmother, dear old Dad remarried. Soon after that, the newly-weds and their 10 year old dependent bought a house of their own. It was a pleasant, 3-bedroom brick house in suburbia benefitting our middle-class status. The only problem was, the new family didn’t have any furniture. Other than one bedroom suit (theirs), a twin bed (mine) and a kitchen table, the house was empty.

Did the newly-weds run out and charge furniture to fill their new "castle"? Remember, this was 1961 and that was not how depression-era adults operated. What they did was embrace what they had lived with all their lives: delaying their dreams. Working three jobs (Dad had two, new-Mom had one), they saved their money. Every 18 months, with almost calendar-like regularity, they would go to the bank, withdraw from their savings, and buy a room of furniture. My bedroom was filled out first with desk, dresser, night table, and lamp. Eighteen months later, the living room: sofa, end tables, lamps, and - splurging like the Rockefellers - a stereo. Next, the dining room. Lastly, the "guest" bedroom. Five years or so after moving into their freshly built love nests, my parents had their house completely furnished and owed no one a dime. I would huess that at least 50% of the original furniture is still part of my parents' "decor" (if one can use that word in this context) to this day, some 45 years later.

My parents lack of experience with credit is one of our "family stories." You know the type of tale: the lore that you bring up occasionally with your mother and father and always laugh about, together. The same kind of story that, if you were to tell to anyone outside your family, they would not "get it." The anecdote (and I swear to its truthfulness) is when my father was about 60 and retired, he and mother needed a credit card to book a cruise or some such vacation. He didn’t have a credit. He had never had a credit card. To make the story even more alien to modern readers, when he first applied for a MasterCard for the purposes of the same trip, he was turned down. Seems my parents had never used any credit and, therefore, had no credit history and, therefore, could not have a credit card. Apparently, such is the wacky world of debit and credit. They send "you’re preapproved!" letters to junior high school kids but not to people who have never even thought about using their services.

I witnessed the entire process and, for better or worse, believed that was how one achieves life’s aspirations. For an impressionable adolescent such as I, it was a clear, stepwise progression. You sense a need, you work (and, in the case of material items, save) for whatever you believe it is you need and, when you have sacrificed whatever it requires to obtain or achieve that need (be it time, leisure or whatever), you obtain your objective. The point is that neither of my parents ever seemed to have, much less express, a feeling of "doing without." I never heard either parent complain about the empty living room or dining room or guest room. There was no sense that if we only had furniture anything would be palpably different or either of them would be "happier." It was just the way it was for that time in their lives. They weren’t exhibiting any profound stoicism. It was more an indomitable sense of the reward will be worth the wait.

What I see today, however, is completely opposite. There is a prevailing sense of "Be happy today and tomorrow be damned!" The question facing psychologist and sociologist is how this came to be. There have been many hypotheses based on many studies. I do not profess to be familiar with all of them nor am I a sociologist or a psychologist. But that does not prevent me from having my own theories. My predominant theory is based on the simple, ancient maxim: You cannot covet what you are not aware exists. Stated another way, you don’t miss what you have never had. We owe the death of delayed gratification - and much of our complete dissatisfaction with our existence - to our "friends," the mass media.

Time was when the only exposure we might have to new fashions and new gadgets was once a year when the newest Sears, Roebuck (or Montgomery Ward) mail-order catalog came to our homes. In the early 20^th century, that was the second most popular book in the typical home - in those ancient times, the Bible was preeminent. The rise of the Sears catalog was a uniquely American contribution to consumerism. The French may have had the first department store but Americans had the first mail-order industry. Daniel Boorstin, in his 1974 Pulitzer Prize non-fiction work "The Americans: The Democratic Experience," described the phenomenon:

"It was not merely facetious to say that many farmers came to live more intimately with the good Big Book of Ward’s or Sears, Roebuck than with the Good Book. The farmer kept his Bible in the frigid parlor, but as Edna Ferber remarked in Fanny Herself (1917), her novel of the mail-order business, the mail-order catalogue was kept in the cozy kitchen. That was where the farm family ate and where they really lived. For many families the catologue probably expressed their most vivid hopes of salvation."

It is not coincidental that many scholars date a major change in American life to the period between 1870 and 1940 when distribution of the Sears, Roebuck catalog circulation rose from 300,000 (1987) to over 3 million copies. This was also the period of the great World’s Fairs. Some called it the "second industrial revolution" - the rise of consumerism. American perception changed from a vision of self-denial and delayed gratification to, more and more, a belief that there is a world of plenty and happiness can be ordered up from a catalog. As one author puts it:

"This shift is Copernican in magnitude, being nothing less than the overthrow of ne world picture (scarcity/work/community) for another (abundance/leisure/self-fulfillment)."

If mail-order was the "first derivative," or starting point, the slope of the resulting sigmoid curve shows no sign of leveling off. In fact, the slope of the curve if becoming steeper, i.e. approaching vertical. We now have an almost inexhaustible supply of sources to feed our want and our perceived "need." The 1957 musical "The Music Man" (Meredith Willson) has a song (appropriately titled "The Wells Fargo Wagon") whose lyrics perfectly capture the rise of consumerism in small town America:

And, thus, the death of delayed gratification. I suppose, to put a more positive spin on the topic, one could call this "The Birth of Immediate Gratification" and be equally accurate. The Wells Fargo Wagon has been replaced by Federal Express and U.P.S. The U.S.P.S. has been replaced by electronic mail. The Encyclopedia Britannica has been replaced by WikiPedia. Books have been replaced by...well, they have simply been replaced. CBS, ABC and NBC have been replaced by the 200 channels of DirectTV and cable. Now, rather than flipping through the Sears, Roebuck, we flip through HSN, QVC and the Jewelry Channel.

This brings us to the "marshmallow test." First performed by Walter Mischel at Stanford University, the test involved 4 year olds enrolled at the Bing Nursery School and marshmallows. The kids were brought into a room individually and given simple instructions. They were each told "You can have this marshmallow now if you want. But, if you don’t eat it until after I get back from running an errand, you can have two marshmallows when I return." Some children ate the marshmallows immediately (Mischel called them "the grabbers"), others waited ("the waiters"). Those observations were not too surprising. What was surprising was what this simple test was able to predict.

Mischel and his team at Stanford followed then children for years after the test. When tested at age 18, the "grabbers" were found to fall apart more easily under stress, had a tendency to to become irritated and to pick fights more often, and were less able to resist temptation while in pursuit of their goals. More startlingly, where the comparisons between the SAT scores of the "grabbers" and the "waiters." The "waiters" scored an average of 210 points higher than the matched cohort of "grabbers." Further, as reported in Daniel Goleman’s "Working With Emotional Intelligence," in their early 20's, the "waiters" were "more intellectually skilled, more attentive, and better able to concentrate. They were better able to develop genuine and close relationships, were more depdnable and responsible, and showed better control of frustration."

As for the "grabbers," the situation as adults was much more ominous. Goleman describes them as adults as being:

"less cognitively adept and strikingly less emotionally competent than those who restrained themselves [at age 4 years old]. They were more often loners, they were less dependable, more easily distracted, and unable to delay gratification in pursuing their goals. When stressed, they had little tolerance or self-control. They responded to pressure with little flexibility, instead repeating the same futile and overblown response time and again."

The point of all this is that we have the conjunction of a bad set of circumstances in America today. First, there seem to be a lot more "grabbers" running around compared to the "waiters." I think if one measured the two groups and sorted them by age, the trend would be a decline in "grabbers" directly related to age. For example, in the 65 and older group, it’s probably about a 50-50 split, "grabbers" to "waiters." In those ages 18-35, I would guess (and, as far as I know, there is no actual study), it would be 70% "grabbers" and 30% "waiters." This might be mere optimism on my part. In the 6-18 age group, I would dare say it would be 95% "grabbers" to 5% "waiters." All you need to do to confirm this is to spend a couple hours in the aisles of Toys ‘R Us and watch the behavior of the parents and the children.

Second, we have more opportunities to view and, thus, sense "a need." With 15 minutes of commercials for every 45 minutes of commercial television, and 4-5 hours of viewing daily we are incessantly exposed to all manner of "things" that, at least according to the narration, we simply must have. And the promises these material "must haves" offer - beauty, love, companionship, envy, success, and the generic "cool" factor - are difficult for the "grabber" mentality to refuse. Chew on this for a second: It has been estimated that by the time a child reaches 21 years old, they will have seen over one million television commercials.

Is there any wonder we are becoming, generation by generation, year by year, a society pathologically indoctrinated in consumerism? In the second half of this discourse, I will discuss more about the self-destructive path of rampaging consumerism and the problems it can lead to in our lives. Even the choices we make have consequences and psychological costs. But there are ways out of the morass and, while painful, can literally save your life and, possibly, your soul. There is much, much more to life than "having" and they are exponentially more satisfying.