Is Happiness delayed gratification?

Yeah, a very interesting question. I’ve been writing and talking about different concepts in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People book in my blog articles over the past few months. One statement which Covey writes in his book is that “Happiness is deferring the reward to later”. I must admit I did not agree with that and did not understand his point. Lately though, I think I am starting to understand what he means.

My 11 year old son has been struggling with the concept of delayed gratification. He hates cleaning his room, doing his laundry, practicing a new difficult skill. Kids in general want things now, immediate gratification. They very much live in the present and except for the nagging of “I want it now, now, now”, I think its actually pretty awesome. Why? Because as we get older we live in the past and the future all the time. We keep thinking about things that have happened to us, and plan on things we are going to do in the future. How often do we simply sit there, and are present at that moment and only thinking about what is happening then?

So my son says the actual work or cleaning his room is what he detests and so he avoids doing it. It got me thinking, why do we as adults do those things more easily. For example, we do the laundry, and wash the dishes and, most of us :-), don’t really feel these feelings.

I think the answer is that we do not enjoy the actual washing of the dishes, or washing/folding the laundry (some would argue they do, including me). We enjoy the end result! Having clean dishes and organized folded clothes is nice.

If we think about it, the majority of worthwhile, important things, do not provide immediate gratification. Learning a new skill like riding a bike, building space rockets that take cars into space (SpaceX), improving our effectiveness skills, all are delayed gratification activities or what covey says “Important” things rather than urgent. Yet, the work to accomplish these goals is tedious and hard. In the moment we may feel they are too hard and avoid doing them. The difference between effective people and not effective people is that they do the hard work anyways, even if they don’t feel they want to, in order to reach the delayed gratification. They motivate themselves by visualizing and getting excited about the end result!

So is delayed gratification, happiness? I can see that achieving a big important goal is a happy moment. By definition it requires delayed gratification so yes, i think that it’s possible that happiness can be a result of delayed gratification.

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