Guilt is useless, and delayed gratification is a skill.
As I took a beer out of the fridge, I knew it was going to get me nowhere. I hadn’t slept well the previous night, and I had to help my wife setup Golu in the afternoon. Typically when I have beer in the afternoons, I need to sleep for a couple hours. Delayed gratification is something I don’t do well with, and my mind said, c’mon you can beat your sleep today. It’s just one beer. So, I had the beer. I helped her setup the props for the dolls while having a beer, and then had a sumptuous lunch. We were going to unpack all the dolls and arrange them after lunch. My younger one wanted to be put to sleep, so I told my wife that I’ll be out after putting him to sleep. And that’s it. I surfaced two hours later. The dolls were all up. I profusely apologised to my wife, and she sweetly said you hadn’t slept well the previous night, so it was OK. I was writhing with guilt inside. Throughout the evening, as I looked at the dolls, I felt guilty for having that beer and kept apologising to my wife. I knew this guilt was useless. I was again going to be presented with a situation where I would have the option of delaying gratification, but I would choose to indulge anyway and later feel guilty.
Now, while the guilt I was feeling added no value to me as I wasn’t anyway learning form it, it was genuine. The guilt was genuine. I also go through classic cases of false guilt. False guilt is one of my favourite chapters in the book What you think of me is none of my business by Terry Cole-Whittaker. Me and my wife that decided we needed to head out for dinner last Friday. We were visiting extended family in another city the next day, and we were going to leave the kids and my parents back, as it was a really quick visit and it did not make sense to take everyone along.
Me and wife were sitting in the restaurant digging into a Mezze platter, and both of us looked lost. Solemn, eating quietly. We looked at each other suddenly and I said ‘are you thinking what I’m thinking’. Yes- I’m guilty that I’m here outside on Friday night instead of spending time with my mother when I know I’m not going to be here the whole weekend, and you are guilt that you are not spending time with the kids. We were drained. The entire week we’d been busy running all day, so we deserved this break; weekend and Friday night included. False guilt is a mood killer and the most useless feeling you can have. You are neither here nor there. You are just wasting precious time. At least, with genuine guilt, there is some chance of learning from it; I’m not saying that I have, but there is a chance. False guilt is absolutely useless.
I’m not going to talk a lot about false guilt in this post. I’m just going to focus on my struggle with delayed gratification, the associated guilt, and how I beat myself up over it. Apparently a lot of the ability to delay gratification gets inculcated in your early childhood, and this can be a make or break aspect of how the person turns out as an adult. The first time I read about the importance of delayed gratification was in the book Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck, and it was an eye opener. I then knew why certain people could always finish things early, and why people like me always scrambled at the last moment. I always used to think the problem was procrastination. It was to a large part, but the ability to delay gratification would have given me the necessary balance in life. A lot of times you procrastinate because you don’t want to do something; sometimes it could be fear of failure, but sometimes it could just be that you don’t like doing something. However, you don’t always get to do only things that you like or want to do. Delayed gratification would have helped me get the things that I did not like done early, so that I could move on to things that I liked. Instead, I did what I liked first, and then would procrastinate when it came to parts that I did not like, as there was anyway nothing to look forward to. As early as I remember, I’ve always struggled with delayed gratification. I would plan upfront before my study holidays, for the number of hours I would study every day, the portions that I would cover, when I would play, when I would watch TV etc. I would end up playing all the time and doing everything other than studying. The morning of the exam I would be freaking out about how I was going to fail. I would somehow get an average score, but the stress of the entire thing made schooling and exams one of my biggest hatreds.
This pattern continues till date; just that it is now work. I have a great job, a well-paying job in a futuristic technology space. However I don’t love it. Given an option, I would not do this, but at this point in time, I also don’t know what I want to do, so I continue to do what I do. It helps me and my family live a more than comfortable life. I do desperately want to break out of this pattern though. It will make my work life so much better.
I’ve done some work on this in my therapy sessions. The conflict between what my inner child wants to do, and what the adult in me wants to do, takes a significant toll on my mind. My inner child only wants to do what it likes, and the adult wants to be the disciplined, organised, planned executor. My inner child eventually wins, and my adult continues reprimanding the inner child, and in this melee, I’d be dying of stress. I’ve worked on this extensively, but I haven’t managed to break out of this pattern yet.
I don’t know how it sounds to you, but when I start writing a post, a high level topic comes to my mind. The rest of the post just flows automatically. I don’t try to control the direction it takes or what I intend to talk about. Sometimes I think my writing reveals what I need to know. I did not intend to talk about delayed gratification in this post. It was going to be purely about guilt. However, as I’m at this point of the post, I’m thinking I need to forcefully practice delayed gratification. It might not be for something that matters significantly, but just for me to get used to it. For example, when I’m reaching for a biscuit, I should probably tell myself that I can eat the biscuit, but after I cycle for at least 5 minutes; forcefully incorporate delayed gratification into my daily routine. At least once a day, for something; could be anything random. I’m writing this as it is coming to my mind. I don’t know if it will work, but I will give it a shot. One of the biggest areas of frustration for me has been my procrastination. I’ve tried different things to address it. I think I’m now going to approach it from the angle of delayed gratification. Let’s see how it goes.