For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about how our connection to future selves influences our decisions today.
The phrase “delayed gratification” entered printed English in 1803 (fittingly almost a century after “immediate gratification” first appeared), in the second edition of English economist Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Delayed gratification, Malthus said, was a discipline that most people lacked — with catastrophic consequences both for themselves and for future generations. Were it universally practiced, he believed, food would be sufficient, wages would rise, and “all squalid poverty would be removed from society.”
Since Malthus, the phrase has passed through Freud’s id and ego and the Stanford marshmallow experiment into the contemporary science of prospection, the study of people’s ability to imagine and evaluate different possible futures. Some of the most interesting findings have tried to tease apart the degree to which people identify with their future selves: if you feel more connected to a future you, you might be more willing to put off gratification now. (Indeed, studies have shown that people can be primed to make larger retirement investments by showing them digital simulations of how they’ll look when they’re older.)