Can’t get no gratification? How to strike a balance between saving and spending
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There’s always something to tempt us into parting with our money, but by adopting ‘semi-delayed gratification’ you can enjoy the best of both worlds. From TV streaming services to online shopping to food delivery apps, instant gratification is a huge part of modern life. If we want it, it’s only a click away and getting it feels good. But instant gratification can be ruinously expensive, highly addictive and stop us from achieving our long-term financial goals.
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“Smartphones and social media lead to endless scrolling with product placement and adverts delving into our subconscious, triggering the impulse to buy now,” says Rachel Jones, senior marketing manager at Coventry Building Society. “We have become a nation fixed on the dopamine hit of online purchases.” Delayed gratification – the idea of deferring something that we want – feels like part of an increasingly distant past.
In fact, these concerns aren’t entirely new. The first credit card was launched in 1958 and, as cards spread across the US then the world in the 1970s and 80s, concerns about instant gratification became widespread. A host of studies have explored the links between a person’s ability to delay gratification and better long-term life outcomes – most famously the so-called marshmallow experiment, conducted in 1970 at Stanford University. In its most basic form, a child was left in a room with a marshmallow for 15 minutes. When the researcher returned, if the child hadn’t eaten the marshmallow, they were given a second marshmallow.
