Gahi na mga uyo! As the community quarantine segued to become
an enhanced one, people continue to go out. Others are pleading to allow them
to work since they are paid daily. Their company has this “No Work No Pay”
scheme. The stringent social distancing mandate by the government was not
followed by some since for them the virus won’t kill them but hunger. Yet,
there are students who roam around the places; there are young and older ones
who socialize through their favorite “tagay”.
The Philippine Information
Agency reported on March 12 this year that President Rodrigo Roa Duterte has
approved the imposition of Stringent Social Distancing Measures in the National
Capital Region (NCR) for thirty (30) days, upon the recommendation of health
officials, as well as members of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management
of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) in a bid to prevent the spread of
COVID-19.
This also includes local
government units which declare suspension of gatherings and the like.
But people continue
to go out and socialize. Some of them cannot confront the thought of being
inside their houses and continue to gratify themselves. This prompted this
author to wonder why DELAYING GRATIFICATION is difficult for others.
Delaying
gratification is the act of resisting an impulse to take an immediately
available reward in the hope of obtaining a more-valued reward in the future.
The ability to delay gratification is essential to self-regulation, or
self-control (Conti, 2019).
There are those in
our society who cannot control their impulses to gratify themselves even in
difficult circumstances. We hear of husbands who drown themselves with alcohol
while his children are dying of hunger. We hear of women who buy clothes and
beautiful bags while their families are in debt. They gratify themselves even
if in reality they are in dire situations.
The same to those who
cannot control their urge to play basketball; go out and be with friends and do
things they like. There’s a term in Freudian psychoanalysis known as the
pleasure principle, which is the instinctual seeking of pleasure and avoidance
of pain in order to satisfy biological and psychological needs. According to
Freud, the pleasure principle is the driving force guiding the id, the most
basic part of ourselves.
But can we as a
species NOT control these urges? Can we not spare some time to sacrifice and
consider the greater good?
Striking concepts are
focused on age. The paper mentions that young people tend to be impulsive and
easily get bored. Deepened discussion is centered on cognitive capacity. Higher
intelligence is associated with a more future-focused tendency. Children and
adults with higher intelligence tend to be better at shifting attention away
from the affective properties of rewards.
Time preference is
associated with the emotional environment in early childhood development.
Children of disengaged and unresponsive parents tend to have a poor ability to
delay gratification. Emotional distress also causes a behavioral shift toward
immediate improvements in mood, leading people to make poor decisions.
And who could not
agree more with poverty? Dr. Eshmat continued: Poverty and the pressure of
present needs can blind a person to the needs of the future, leading
(necessarily) to a stronger focus on the present.
Summing up, people
are not following orders by some amount of sacrifice because they are either
young, do not have higher intelligence to grasp the matters at hand and they
are poor trying to look for a living.
On March 17, 2020, President Duterte has declared a nationwide state of calamity for six
months to address the outbreak of the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in
the country. The declaration will allow the President to tap, among others, the
government’s calamity funds, which were earlier reported to amount to P16
billion under the 2020 national budget. It will also allow local government
units (LGUs) to speedily access special funds to assist their constituencies
during the public health emergency (philstar.com).
That is a wise move
to augment food and basic necessities of the poor. The parents can have their
share in regulating the movements of their young children if they will be bored
and become impulsive as part of responsible parenting.
But then again, it
would take complex processes to attain meta-cognition and cognitive capacity.
This is the reason why education is the best armor for humanity to survive.
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