in defense of instant gratification
I woke up sweaty, cold, and thoughtless—an unusual combination. I often awake with my mind swirling with leftover dreams and a future to-do list I’ll write after breakfast. I lazily turn over my phone and feel the blood chill three degrees even colder. It’s 8:40. My lab starts at 9. I made my brain loop through it again. How is it 8:40? My phone was on Do Not Disturb instead of Sleep mode, and my alarm didn’t ring. Shit. Shit shit shit. I send off a text to my lab partners that I would be late and popped an electrolyte tablet for my breakfast before getting ready.
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The day dragged on with incubation times, dilution calculations, and pipetting. We ended the lab tired. The kind of tired where if a bed were presented at the snap of fingers, I could fall asleep instantly. I biked home, being eternally grateful for music and muscles in my legs to pedal. My mind was numb and my body took over. I don’t know how I got back to my room, but somehow I did.
It was only 3pm, and tomorrow I had an intense class for immunology. The empty window in my calendar couldn’t have been more obvious— the block “Study” almost wrote itself. As if on autopilot, my body slumped itself to the kitchen to make a coffee. Brewing coffee is a sensory experience I love, from smelling the freshly ground beans, to making frothy milk with a kiss of vanilla. But today, it was as mechanical as signing into your computer—you don’t remember your password, you just know where your fingers move on the keyboard. A choreography of habit, bypassing feeling.
I sat back down at my desk and tried to constrain my mind on the material. I knew it was interesting—on any other day, I might’ve even been excited about it. But right now? I was just over it. Sick of this entire concept of sticking to what I have to do, where I have to be. Feeling constantly afraid of the future, this belief that if I don’t do everything right now, I’ll somehow be unprepared, left behind, lost. I am so done with that. Of not trusting the future. Of wringing the utmost potential of each moment until my knuckles turn white.
My morning was the epitome of this. Even when it all went wrong, when I didn’t have my hour before class to get ready, I was fine. On my bike ride to the lab, I kept on rehearsing in my head how I would tell the lab coordinators and tutors that I had a flat tire I had to fix, and how I was so sorry.
But then, life tossed my script right out the window. I am running to the lockers, my cheeks flushed and my back wet, when I see both of my lab partners in the common area, casually sipping water from tea mugs like it was some sort of lazy Sunday morning. One of them had almost fainted during the lecture part of the lab and had to step out to recover. “It was useless and boring anyway,” they shrugged, as if the universe had conspired to say, Relax. At 9:30, we waltzed into the lab room together, and no one questioned or asked a thing. No stern looks, no raised eyebrows. A subtle, silent reminder from the universe to step out of that fight-or-flight and breathe.
Most of my life, I’ve traded away the peace of now in exchange for the hope of peace later. I was told not to sever connections because they might be useful later. I was told to always work, think, look ahead. Of course, it’s a useful skill. I thankfully miss out on the procrastination panic people get when they have two hours to write a full report. But it can be crippling when most of what you do is based in fear—fear that you won’t be able to deal with the unknown future. The more you prepare, the more you perpetuate anxiety, convincing yourself that a disaster you could have prevented is always hovering nearby. And when you’re not working ahead, there’s this gnawing restlessness, this nagging voice whispering that something’s wrong. That you’re missing something.
But what if the only thing I’ve been missing is trust? Trust in myself, trust in the future, trust that maybe, just maybe, I’ll be okay even if I don’t have every second mapped out.
There will always be the next thing you can work on. And even if—if—that rare, dream-like moment arrives, when you finally sit down, carefree, with absolutely nothing demanding your attention, you still won’t be able to let your hand and mind be empty. In the void and absence, you freak out and pick up even more work, because being comfortably busy is better than being uncomfortably at ease. So, you wrap yourself in the familiar rhythm of tasks, believing that in motion, you are secure. You choose the familiar weight of work over the terrifying lightness of just being.
I want my peace now. I want the happiness, the joy, the delight, not when I’ve earned it, but now. Delayed gratification is often sold as the key to success. I disagree. No great artist ever became great because they were gritting their teeth, waiting for the day they’d finally “make it.” No painter dragged themselves to the canvas each morning, hating every brushstroke, just for the distant promise of fame. They did it because of the instant gratification from the colors, the textures, the act of bringing something new into the world. They did it because not creating would be so much harder.
What is your instant gratification? What is something you want to do now, something you cannot wait to do, something that would feel so…right? Because who knows how much time we have? If you’re doing things for some farfetched end goal, who knows if you’ll even make it? Trust yourself that the things you need to get done will get done. That you don’t have to have everything perfectly lined up and ready right now.
Uncertainty becomes bearable when we bubble wrap it in protocols, rules, routines. Even in the lab, we fool ourselves into believing our meticulous precautions are actually meaningful. Does it really matter which way I place the cap of the tube on the bench? Or how obsessively I swap out pipette tips? Or whether a few air bubbles slip into the pipette? Maybe. Maybe not. We soothe ourselves with protocols and rules when dealing with uncertainty, with opaque liquids, and things we cannot see. The unknown becomes less terrifying when we believe we’ve drawn a boundary around it.
The Steve Jobs quote of connecting the dots backwards has the important part at the end. The true art lies not in rigid adherence, but in the grace with which we navigate the known and the unknown. Do we tighten ourselves in fear, gripping for control, or do we soften into trust, surrendering to the tension of ambiguity?
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”