You Can't Slow Down. Ever.

We're all failing the marshmallow test

My book, Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By, is out now. Thank you to every subscriber whose support has enabled me to write it!

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Photo by FlyD on Unsplash

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You can’t slow down. I’m not entirely sure what the phrase means, really, in a world which appears to prioritise speed and convenience over almost everything else. It registers as both utterly obvious and somehow slightly pathetic, jabbing at a sense of failure that we’re trying not to focus on. It’s all a bit too fast; it’s all a bit too much and we’re all nursing the sense that we’re not good at this. Or it’s not good for us. In so many ways and scenarios, human beings will choose something less desirable or preferable if we can just have it now, rather than something we would certainly prefer, but would have to wait longer for, or that would require more friction or energy to obtain. This impulse is deep in us, and is at the heart of what makes us human. It is what makes us relatable to one another, credulous consumers and politically naive. It is what makes us vulnerable, and dreadful, and deserving of compassion.

We chuckle over little children who fail the famous marshmallow test on delayed gratification. ‘You can have two marshmallows if you just wait until I come back into this room. Meanwhile, I’ll leave this one marshmallow here, but don’t eat it!’ says the adult researcher or amateur YouTube momfluencer engaging in a spot of softcore emotional terrorism for likes.

The test is not a window into the developing nous of toddlers. It doesn’t reliably predict the self-control these children will exhibit in adulthood, or indicate anything much except that children from stable households with higher resources are more likely on average to be able to wait it out for the higher reward. Poorer children who perhaps didn’t have breakfast that day, are accustomed to scarcity and are quickly learning that they cannot always trust the adults around them, will more often eat the one marshmallow that luck has placed in front of them. That’s not weakness or lack of character or a red flag of indiscipline. That’s just good sense.

I considered this as I stood, hungry and stupid and riddled with red flags, in my local supermarket this week, staring at a bag of pillowy white marshmallows despite not having consumed one in about a decade, while knowing that what my body required was to eat something with protein and green leaves in it. Something to maintain muscle mass and keep my eyeballs and digestive system functioning and not spur my body, presuming I’d been poisoned, to evacuate an ill advised bag of marshmallows. Something that won’t give me a headache. I bought the protein and leaves without any song in my heart, and trudged home to consume them, reminding myself that few of life’s problems are reasonably ameliorated through the consumption of thirty-five marshmallows.

There’s footage all over the internet of little kids taking the marshmallow test. It is, unsurprisingly, darling to watch. The temptation. I’ve seen children cradle the marshmallow as they waited for the adult to return. They cup it with the gentleness you would offer an injured baby bird. Sometimes they sing or talk to it. They feel this dark, unprecedented grown-up pressure. It is the friction of high time preferences chaffing itchily against the assurance of longer term gain. It is the battle between will and authority and it tests all the mettle of their rapidly forming brains.

They cope, as any of us might, by whispering their secrets to the marshmallow. It melts a little the longer it is clutched in hot little hands, and some tentatively lick the sticky patch of skin and like a hyena nosing blood, their eyes roll back and they are lost. And then the cognitive part of proceedings is over and the world becomes the marshmallow, and the will becomes the marshmallow. We’ve all been there. Some eat it immediately and then pretend not to know where it has gone when asked. Those kids grow up and go into politics, probably.

We chortle affably at small children amid their simple dilemma. We unselfconsciously pretend we are somehow more sophisticated, as though the whole world could never be for us a marshmallow, or a woman or man, or a bad tv show or a bowl of hot, salty chips or weed or cocaine or benzos or whatever else might be your particular marshmallow. ‘If only’, we think smugly, ‘that were my biggest problem’ as we drink our fourth coffee before lunch, the overconsumption of it furring our tongue with bitterness.

This isn’t a column about supermarkets (though I hate them) or how we are all toddlers with high time preferences, really, though I suppose we are. It might be a column about how we can’t slow down, even when we don’t know what to think or say, or have nothing to offer. It’s about how this column is late because the world fell apart a bit last week while I took a few days to think about a loss. A bereavement. How the stories we use to arrange reality in straight lines resisted arrangement, and I knew there was nothing for it but to shut up and wait.

As the world roiled and furied, I was suspended. Everything made no sense in that way it tends not to when there is the reality, the potential, and the future of a person one moment, and in the next, there simply isn’t. I was thinking about the waves this sends out into the people it impacts, the horror and the beauty of how many can be impacted by the value of a single, quiet human life.

I was thinking about the terrible and specific loss of one life. The lost stories and plans it carries away. The connections it severs. The mark it leaves. The version of every person that is lost when a life connected to their own is suddenly extinguished. The devastation of this close up and, for those at a remove, the dull, hollow ache. The sorrow of loss amid its mundanity — its everydayness — and how we can never get used to it, and should never. That everyone we lose should wound us in their going, and in a way we can’t quite ever reconcile ourselves to. That we must remake ourselves around the scar. That this is the price of love, and it is dreadful, and a lifetime’s work, and that it is worth paying.

So I found myself staring at the marshmallows, thinking about how the US bombed Iran this week, and that depending on what comes next, that is understandably how the week will be remembered. Thinking about an early morning phone call sharing the worst news — the kind of call that changes you. And I thought about how you absolutely cannot slow down, take a breath, have a second. How all of us are expected to have an instantaneous take on everything, and to defend it with a sharpened stick against all the other rushed takes that gush forth in an information climate which rewards noise and speed above everything else. There is no second marshmallow. Not for holding on. Not for sitting quietly, and waiting, even when that is all you can do, and what you owe to others.

You can’t slow down. Until you must.