‘The spurious infinite, especially in the form of the quantitative progress to infinity which continually surmounts the limit it is powerless to remove, and perpetually falls back into it…’ –Hegel
The lure of instant gratification is hard to resist: when we want something, we want it right now. Of course, maturity and reality demand that we learn to wait, that we postpone our pleasures until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And so we stash money in our savings account, and forgo the SUV for the sake of climate change and don’t eat the entire pint of ice cream. We resist the tug of immediate delight for the sake of even more delight in the future.
That, at least, is how we’re supposed to behave. The problems arise with a mental process known as delay discounting, which refers to our tendency to discount the value of a future reward as a function of its temporal distance.
photo { Richard Avedon }
