I'm not the only one, who's been saying for years that one of the most destructive phenomena in Western Society is the degraded sensualism that many of us have adopted as part of the culture of Instant Gratification. We want it all, and we want it now.

I wonder sometimes, if they were to repeat the Stanford Marshmallow Experiments of the late Sixties and early Seventies, how many folks would fail it today, as opposed to then.

For those, who are not familiar with the experiment in question, it was performed by Walter Mischel at Stanford University, and the most well-known variation was where they would seat a young child at a table with a marshmallow on a plate in front of him/her, and they were given the choice of eating the single marshmallow now, or waiting a set length of time (generally 5-15 minutes), and receiving two marshmallows.

The study was considered a classic investigation into impulse control and delayed gratification.