Planning our spontaneity for an hour and a half in a week’s time

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Right now, there are people making plans to be spontaneous for 90 minutes on, let’s say, next Friday week, so that, between 8pm and 9.30pm, they can apply for all the permissions necessary to do what they used to do at the drop of a hat – go for a pint in a pub.

Only now they have to book and confirm their slot, and in order to watch that creamy pint settle, up until July 20 when the pubs reopen as bars as opposed to restaurants, they must also buy at least nine-euro worth of a dinner.

Or a whole heap of crisps.

If they drink too much of the beer – and that would be a trick in 90 minutes – they must signal to all present in the pub that they would like to walk to the toilet, returning to their Perspex-shielded seat by a different route, because going to the loo is now a one-way street.

Some define all this as planned spontaneity – ‘will we go mad for an hour this day week or what?’ – but others prefer to see it as the revival of delayed gratification, described in psychology as what happens when you resist the temptation of an immediate prize in preference for a later reward.

The experts will tell you that a person’s ability to delay gratification relates to other similar skills such as patience, impulse-control, self-control and willpower, all of which are involved in self-regulation.

And delayed gratification isn’t a new concept; indeed, it’s a very, very old one.

As far back as 300 B.C., Aristotle saw that the reason so many people were unhappy was that they confused pleasure for true happiness.

True happiness – according to Aristotle – entailed delaying pleasure, and putting in the time, discipline, and patience to achieve a later goal instead of feeling good now.

Most of us grew up in a world of delayed gratification, even if we never knew what to call it – and, as they say, it didn’t do us any harm.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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