A Bit of Sacrifice

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?

In his paper titled Reasons Why We Rush for Immediate Gratification, Shahram Eshmat, PhD (2017) posits these reasons: Uncertainty, Age, Cognitive Capacity, Poverty, Impulsiveness and Emotion Regulation.

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.