Being Honest With The Great Marshmallow Experiment — A Twist
By: Pretheesh Presannan
Tags: Self Improvement, Nonfiction, Humor, Fake News, Satire

A deeper looking into the marshmallow experiment revealed that it was not an experiment to find out the patient and matured ones, but the naturally greedy, clever, and those bound to blind obedience.

For those of you who are yet to hear about the experiment, here it is :

The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification. In this study, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time. The reward was either a marshmallow or pretzel stick, depending on the child’s preference. — Source Wikipedia

Special mention and advice to infantile self-help writers:

If you are a self-help blogger, you need a minimum of one blog post written about delayed gratification so that people can derive some instant gratification by reading about it and by pretending they are on your side. Not to mention the habit-hacking, no fap, and stoic motivations intended to give the reader an erection without watching porn. Though you very well know you are a hopeless case who escapes his days with rather dull habits and routines (productivity?) because you are scared of being stared upon by mom or wife for playing too much video games in your privileged existence, that should not stop you from giving hope to readers.

Now back to the experiment:

Upon further investigation, some hidden realities were exposed and it is revealed that all that glitters is not gold. It actually turns out that delayed gratification has nothing to do with patience or maturity but everything to do with greed and cleverness.

The children who stayed in the room did not stay there for the reasons we like to think. Forget glorifying them as patient and mature ones, the truth is they endured the time for their own selfishness. There were not delaying any gratification but were being instantly gratified. How? You may ask. I would say they were instantly gratified by the pleasure they derived from their greedy mind.

The pleasure from thoughts of possible rewards was by itself the instant gratification or we could say the only motivation for them to spend time in the experimental room. They were not passing time for any noble reasons.

If you were to be spoon-fed — moment by moment — with icecream, then you would not even mind sitting in a chair for an hour as if in meditation. You are being instantly gratified, but you can later show-off by telling others you meditated for hours. There is no maturity in such a mind. Here, in this experiment, instead of ice-cream, you have the seductive pleasure of greed.

Enduring any process just for the reward one gets out of it is a kind of prostituting an activity for selfish benefits. You do not give a fuck about the activity by itself, which is quite evident here, but only the thoughts about the possible rewards you get out of it.

It is like you want to be successful so that people will think you are a great person, and not because you intrinsically love the process. Your instant pleasure is the thought of ending up like a famous person in the future. I would call it an extreme form of cheapness.

If you had the option to steal the rewards instantly, you would have done it. Seems that is the only reason (inability to steal it) why you endure a process. But one must be decent and honest enough to see that.

Instead of sharing everything with everyone equally, I would rather have them all and pat my back is the mindset required to win in this game. Such a mentality is driven by deep insecurity and distrust towards life, which they think can be controlled by being more greedy and selfish. Also, at the same time, they want to be seen as mature.

Society does not care about the innocent ones who live for the sake of living and not for fulfilling their inner sickness. Such people are not good candidates for the corporate world. It is difficult to show them some kind of end prizes, such as success or fame or approval, so that they can be manipulated into blind obedience.

After all, who wants to pick those losers who would just straightaway pick one marshmallow, eat it, go away, and sit outside enjoying the sunset while being grateful for their life. They are seen as nothing but a bunch of incompetent losers. Everyone knows that gratefulness is an idea to mental-masturbate and not to dangerously live it in reality. It is for blogs and podcasts, do not take it to real life and try to feel it in your bones.

“How would these guys be any use for me?” says one self-help charlatan.” They are content with what they have, fucking losers.”

The only way such losers (innocent and sane) can be forced into blind obedience is by shaming and guilt-tripping them. If they had some sort of trauma like being beaten up or raped, shame them for not being responsible to use that experience to win a gold medal in the Olympics.

“Not that all of such losers will fall for such traps,” said a self-help guru, “but we should try our best to get them hooked”.

If you do not do as I say, you will go to hell — Any Nearby Priest

But that is not the case with the winners of the experiment. The winners, who were wrongfully framed as patient and mature. Yes, wrongfully, but purposefully. They would naturally feel bad if they were to be declared as winners for being greedy and clever, but when the words are changed to patience and maturity, they would feel good.

They must be so sick in their mind that they would rather endure an hour more by mental-masturbating about the double rewards they would get, instead of just being satisfied with one marshmallow.

“Sunset and life outside the room can fuck off, but not my greed,” said one of them.

As we had mentioned before, they aren’t really delaying any gratification, in fact, they are always on their toes, for their greed and thoughts about the rewards — they are always in the ‘itchy’ zone, not in the ‘flow’ zone. The flow zone is mostly associated with the losers.

Of course, they (greedy ones) aren’t really as smart as they think. They do not know what they are missing at the expense of being tricked by their own cleverness. And it is this very ignorance that makes them a suitable fit for the corporate world and other charlatans. The only quality they have is being so confident in their stupidities, which is not a quality at all, but we had been conditioned to see that way.

They would fight with teeth and bone to not see through their secret sickness and delusions. After all, who would want to see that they are stupid? Who wants to see their positive self-image crumble down into pieces? They would rather carry on with their sickness by rationalizing it as a sign of maturity.

But what about the sane ones? We cruelly judge and label them as unworthy losers— those who look for instant gratification. But that is not necessarily the case, as we had seen. Seeing from a non-judgemental perspective, it is just that they relish in joy or pleasure when it is there, they do not want to keep and own it forever. Same with pain, when there is a pain they take it too and move on. In this perspective, these are the real matured ones.

“Maturity is the moment one regains one’s innocence.”― Marty Rubin

Society wants everyone to fit into a particular kind of a person, into a particular mold. So naturally, those who can't fit into the insecure and greedy way of existence will be overwhelmed by low self-esteem and unworthiness for being constantly compared and shamed for not being ‘sick enough’.

But the story does not end there, those kind charlatans will come to save you. Do not worry, they will give you habit tips and rules-for-living to built self-esteem from scratch (in their terms!). And they would show-off as being overwhelmed with tears of joy when they see you falling for their nonsense such as cleaning bedroom for self-worth.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”― Albert Einstein

For example, these people, the so-called losers, if they see a fruit lying beneath a tree while passing by, they would simply take and eat it, unlike the greedy ones who would naturally plan about how to own this tree and have all the fruits in the tree for themselves or even plan about selling the fruits to the very losers they scapegoat to look like winners.

So it is highly advised, especially for the blind self-help seekers, to notice that all that glitters is not necessarily gold and should always be careful to take any self-help medicine with a pinch of caution. That is, you should ask yourself whether you are being inwardly shame-tripped or guilt-tripped or trauma-shamed by other charlatans for the mere sake of making them look superior. Do not put all your self-worth on fulfilling expectations of charlatans and sick ones.

And always remember that catchy title of the popular self-help writer’s story which goes like: