The Waiting is the Hardest Part: Narrative-Intuitive Differences Explain Why We Prefer Immediate Gratification

These past 3 months, most Americans have been waiting: Waiting to see family and friends, waiting for the stores to re-stock their shelves, waiting to get back to work, waiting to see whether or not we develop symptoms during a 2-week quarantine. These experiences of waiting highlight a key difference between the Narrative and Intuitive minds, the property that in Two Minds Theory we call "temporal immediacy." Things that are happening right now are experienced by the Intuitive mind. Things that will happen in the future exist only in the Narrative mind. The difference is as simple as that.

The temporal-immediacy difference between our two minds shapes our everyday experiences in many ways. For example, when we are waiting for something good to happen, time seems to stretch out indefinitely. Immediacy means that we actually experience a positive event if it happens now (the Intuitive system), but we can only anticipate it in the future via the Narrative system. "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," in the immortal words of J. Wellington Wimpy, because a hamburger today is tasty and satisfying, while thinking about eating one next Tuesday is bland and dull by comparison. This is always true of Narratives in comparison to Intuitive experiences, because the Narrative mind engages only words and ideas in the higher cortical regions of the brain. The satisfying experiential reality of life requires lower-brain activation. No wonder we value the present much more than the future, and make decisions that provide immediate gratification even when they incur long-term costs. In fact, the future nature of the cost makes it more abstract and Narrative-focused, which further exacerbates our tendency to choose the things that satisfy our Intuitive minds right now. If I have to pay immediately for a hamburger I might choose to eat it anyway because I like the taste; but I'm especially likely to do so if you let me sign up for payment on an installment plan.

The further away something is in the future, the less difference it makes in our everyday lives. This phenomenon has been described by behavioral economists under the label delay discounting. A recent article implicated lack of ability to delay gratification as an underlying element of many behavioral and mood problems. It's a principle also known to accountants, who use the term "discounting" to mean that future revenues count for less than those available today. When determining the value of a company, for instance, business analysts pay less attention to next year's revenue forecast than to last year's actual income, because the further into the future you project the more speculative your forecasts become. Just think about what would have happened to any predictions you might have made around this time last year, for instance. Would you have expected a pandemic, a major economic downturn, and a total disruption of everyday activities like shopping and going to work? That discrepancy is the reason it actually makes sense to discount future events. But the same process is what makes it so hard for us to wait. Think about the great pressure to re-open society after pandemic-related shutdowns: The longer restrictions went on, the more urgently many people wanted to be done with them. Pushing the re-opening date further into the future made it less tolerable to people, regardless of predictions for what the virus might do over time.

One interesting finding from the behavioral economics field is that not all events are discounted at the same rate. Average healthy adults, for instance, have a future time horizon of about 3 years for health-related events. That means that when I think about going for a run (an immediate negative experience in my view), and imagine the difference that running versus not running might make to my future health, I will be especially swayed by any consequences closer than 3 years in the future. Heart disease still seems like an eventual consequence of a sedentary lifestyle, much further out than 3 years. But it's interesting that when the COVID-19 pandemic came along I developed a strong interest in heart and lung health because I figured I might need those systems in working order very soon. Anticipating benefits of running within the next 3 years -- even if those benefits are probabilistic and uncertain -- greatly increased my motivation to run compared to when the benefits were more definite but further out in time. Interestingly this mental calculus for running is not the same for other forms of exercise: Swimming, for instance, I experience as a positive in and of itself, so I'm likely to do that for intrinsic reasons rather than to gain some future health benefit. The health benefit is also there, but it's not the deciding factor -- my willingness to swim is mainly for Intuitive reasons, while a story told by my Narrative mind about near-term risks and benefits is about the only thing that has gotten me to run.

Three years may not seem like a very long time horizon for decisions that affect your health -- after all, you probably expect to live more than just 3 additional years from today. But descriptively that's about what people seem able to hold in their minds. Remember that the long-term view exists only in your Narrative mind, which has limited sway over your behavior. The Intuitive mind is so much more vivid and "real" than Narrative ideas, and it is much "older" than the Narrative mind in an evolutionary sense. Once 3 years might have been a much larger percentage of one's life, and this type of time horizon might actually have been a rational basis for decision-making. Evolution moves slowly, but perhaps it will select for people who can tolerate longer and longer intervals of delayed gratification as our species continues. And three years may actually be a high number when considered in reference to the behavior of adolescents, for whom anything more than 3 months in the future is so steeply discounted that it might as well not exist -- as described in my recent post on adolescent thinking, that might just be an effect of limited life experience. For people with opioid use disorders the problem is even worse, with a time horizon as short as 3 hours for decisions that involve acquiring and using opioids. Someone with this type of problem may be perfectly well aware that using opioids will result in negative health or legal consequences. But if those consequences are more than 3 hours away, the Intuitive mind will prompt them to use the opioids anyway because the "long-term" consequences are experienced only in the less-convincing Narrative mind.

On the other hand, if an unpleasant task needs to be done, it's much easier to assign that job to our future selves than to tackle it today. As suggested in the image at the top of the page, sometimes we delay tasks that involve effort or discomfort, even if they seem objectively like a good idea. This is another case in which the future is experienced through the Narrative mind but the present through the Intuitive mind. If I need to do a project at home that I probably won't enjoy, like plumbing work, I feel much better about putting it on my to-do list than about actually going to the hardware store to buy pipes. Even pleasant activities can work this way -- often I'd rather make a list of hikes for the summer while sitting comfortably on my porch than pack up my gear and actually head off into the woods. Of course, I might enjoy the woods more than the porch once I'm actually there, because by then I would be experiencing them in my Intuitive mind. But I have to endure some effort to get there, and it might seem like too much to face that effort today. Writing a to-do list keeps that effort sidelined as an abstract future Narrative, while I sip a cold drink and my Intuitive mind puts my feet up to relax.