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.
“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.
But despite knowing that delayed gratification is good for us, it is unrealistic to expect a return to the deferred rewards of earlier times. We live with a level of always-on consumerism and advertising saturation that would be pretty jaw-dropping to even the headiest 1980s consumers tanked up on cable TV and their first credit cards.
Jones suggests we should try and strike a balance and navigate a third way between delayed and instant gratification. Perhaps you could call it “semi-delayed gratification”. This third path would recognise that we can’t just concentrate on big, sensible goals. Doing so leaves you feeling demotivated and that you’re missing out. “We work too hard to focus solely on the distant future, we need quicker fixes to focus on too, creating memories that will last as long as our long-term goals,” she says. “We should create different pots [of savings] to support different needs, which give us a future focus, but not at the expense of enjoying the here and now.”
A mindset of semi-delayed gratification would entail saving for the future, but also saving smaller amounts to keep yourself happy and motivated in the present. You build consumer resilience and good habits that enable you to resist clicking on every ad and endlessly ordering online, but you don’t spend every weekend making plans for the future.
What’s more, because you consider each purchase carefully, the goods or services mean more when you get them. “You create a harmony between the short and long term,” says Jones.
There are other benefits too. A recent report (pdf) from the University of Bristol, as part of UK Savings Week, shows that short-term saving reduces the need to borrow. While people often use high-cost credit when borrowing for treats, short-term saving means the costs will be lower and you create a virtuous circle. Andrew Gall, head of savings and economics at the Building Societies Association, said at the report’s launch: “It is encouraging to see clear evidence that not only those saving for short-term goals, such as a luxury item or a holiday, achieve success. Those who set much bigger, longer-term life goals, such as buying a home, also reached their target.”
An important part of semi-delayed gratification is thinking strategically about what makes you happy in the short term, because this enables you to stay on track. According to a recent survey (pdf) by Coventry Building Society, shared experiences such as concerts ranked highly: 64% of respondents said that a ticket for an experience would make them happy. However, 90% of those surveyed said it wasn’t a priority to save for such shared experiences. So one way of helping yourself embrace semi-delayed gratification is to think about how much you actually value these experiences. Once you have a more tangible idea of what these kinds of treats and experiences are worth to you, you can set about budgeting for them and getting a healthy balance between treating yourself now and saving for the future.
Of course, the pressure to spend is still there, no matter how well you’ve cultivated your new mindset – the latest technology or a luxury holiday is far more enticing than watching your bank balance grow. So, how do you resist temptation?
“Set achievable goals, ones for the short and long term, and reward yourself for hitting them,” says Jones. “Focus on what you can control and don’t let life’s unexpected problems derail you. Use habit-stacking methods to ingrain this way of saving into your mindset and develop triggers to remind you. There are also plenty of apps around to support you.”
Whether you’re saving for the short or long term, Coventry Building Society can help you reach your goals