Beehiiv is the new place where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
24th March 2026
I reckon we’ve probably all heard of The Marshmallow Test, a psychological experiment led by Walter Mischel at Stanford University in the early 1970s. In this study, a child is offered a choice between one small reward immediately (usually a marshmallow, sometimes a pretzel stick) or two small rewards if they wait for fifteen minutes, during which time the tester leaves the room.
The question is: will the child choose to eat one marshmallow right now, or will they — can they — wait a while and get two?
At stake are notions of self-control and the capacity to delay instant gratification. The original experiments made claims around the links between the ability to wait longer for preferred rewards on one hand, and various indicators of “future success” and “better life outcomes” on the other, including educational attainment and even body mass index (BMI). In a 1988 version, “preschool children who delayed gratification longer were described more than ten years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent.”
Needless to say, re-runs over subsequent decades with larger participant groups and more rigorous testing criteria have dispelled many of these claims, with one new finding which I find particularly interesting: economic background was revealed to have a significant impact on decision-making — as one article in The Atlantic puts it, “Rich Kids Do Better On The Marshmallow Test”, presumably because they live lives where they can be confident that there’ll always be more marshmallows in the future (literally and metaphorically speaking.)
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I can’t help but wonder if part of an extended sequence in Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness was in some way inspired by this experiment.
Survivors of a luxury yacht wreck wash up on a deserted island, and their supplies are soon limited to the bottles of water and the blister packs of pretzel sticks in the orange lifeboat commandeered by head cleaner Abigail. The pretzel sticks are to be rationed, but one night while tending the campfire, two of the men give in to temptation, prising open the plastic to sneak one stick each, and then another, and then another, until soon the pack is empty.
Like the later findings of the Marshmallow Test, economic precarity could be a factor here: one of the men, Carl, is a past-his-prime male model with a massive inferiority complex around his higher-earning model girlfriend Yaya’s success, and the other, Nelson, might (or might not) be one of the pirates who attacked and blew up the yacht.
More than anything, though, it seems likely that Carl and Nelson give into instant gratification purely and simply because they are men, and men seem not to be capable of doing much better.
While the film repeatedly shows spectrums of bad behaviour from men and women alike, there often appears to be an undercurrent of patheticness with the men, of cowardice and weakness, of petty lies and doing things behind other people’s backs. At least the women seem to take more ownership of their high-handedness, their unkindness, their desire to dominate and manipulate, and the film certainly seems much less critical of them than of the menfolk. But anyway, I digress.
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There’ve been lots of conversations with friends recently about binge-watching, including the fact that Gareth is perfectly up for it, but he doesn’t get to do it very often, because I am largely incapable.
I know in this age of impatience, competing distractions and shrinking attention spans, I must seem hopelessly out-of-touch, maybe even a bit reactionary, but deep down, I just don’t think I understand the impulse to binge-watch. Probably truer to say I do understand it, but can’t bring myself to go along with it.
Maybe it’s because I’m a child of the 80s and 90s, when it was perfectly normal to have to wait a week for the next episode of something. Fewer channels, fewer choices; how you spent your viewing time and what you watched meant something, in a way I don’t think it does nowadays, and never will again.
Back then, you were also at the mercy of temperamental VHS machines whose timed recording powers might fail on you without any rhyme or reason, meaning there was every chance of you not seeing something if you ever dared to leave the house. No catch-up options, no streaming services, no file sharing, no YouTube. This was a period of televisual FOMO which held us in its grip for decades.
You’d think that now I’m free from such scheduling tyranny, I’d be a compulsive binge-watcher, but quite the opposite is the case.
I’m still totally comfortable with the sweet-sharp discomfort of having to be patient: The Great Pottery Throw Down finished recently, and the drawing-out of the series over ten weeks from January to March gave a joyous and comforting shape to my winter Sundays. The prospect of obliterating that joy by being able to devour all ten episodes in a few days is unthinkable to me; mercifully, that option was never available (thanks, Channel 4!) but I can imagine many people would gladly have done it, if they could.
Even when I don’t have to be patient, I generally still am. As much as I loved (and I did LOVE) Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass on Netflix (subscription needed), I think the most we ever managed was watching single episodes on several successive nights; certainly, never more than one. Friends we recommended the series to, meanwhile, appeared to get through the whole thing (seven episodes) in two or three sittings. In this particular case, I’m not sure my nerves could have coped with that. But the enjoyment I derived from the prolongation of the experience would have been massively diminished, too.
The only two proper semi-binge exceptions I can think of are when we watched both parts of Last Stop Larrimah on Netflix in one night — but can we really call watching something that only consists of two parts a binge-watch? — and the three parts of Amityville: An Origin Story (UK TV licence needed) in two days, which we saw on BBC iPlayer. More recently, we watched all six episodes of Banjo and Ro’s Grand Island Hotel and all eight episodes of Amanda and Alan’s Greek Job within the space of about three weeks. That’s certainly quite greedy consumption by my usual standards, but still, hardly a reckless blowout.
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I don’t know what any of this tells me about myself or my future success or my life outcomes, measured against the Marshmallow Test yardstick. My educational attainment is pretty good. My BMI, less so. I doubt my parents would describe me as “competent” at anything.
I suppose, as long as I can be pretty certain that the next marshmallow is coming my way eventually, I’ll continue to be content about waiting for it, even if that’s not always a particularly easy feeling to live with. Perhaps because I can have more, you might think that I automatically should. I just don’t think I’d agree with you about that.
Where are you on all this? Are you a binger or a rationer?
Do you feel that provides any illuminating insights into who you are as a person?
Or are you too busy hitting the “Next Episode” button to even ask yourself those questions?