If there’s one thing I’ve never been blessed with, its patience. Specifically that kind of patience that can be metabolized into that essential ingredient for maturity and success: delayed gratification. This has been true for nearly as far back as I can remember. I say nearly because I can, in fact, remember the exact moment when this switch was flipped… and it was also when my status as a life-long gamer was cemented.
Oddly enough it was the U.S. Government– circa the Reagan administration– that trained me in the fine art of immediate gratification. Then again, maybe that’s not so odd. The 80’s were the 80’s after all. Greed is good and all that.
I grew up poor, or as we liked to call it– po’. Couldn’t afford the last two letters, that’s how bad it was. Specifically I grew up a recipient of the government assistance program known as Aid For Dependant Children, or AFDC. Most people out there like to call if welfare. Unlike the mythical welfare queen my mother in fact had only one child. That would be me for you tweakers in the audience. Our family received AFDC thanks in part to my mother’s disability and my father’s inability to pay child support. It was the settling of this later fact in the mind of the welfare administrators that led directly to the act that would make me an emotional cripple– in so far as delayed gratification was concerned.
About know you’re wondering how someone who has no ability to delay gratification himself can manage to drag a story out like this. Chalk up a bit of my sadism to the bureaucrats of Regan era America while you’re at it.
My tutelage began in September of ‘87 when our AFDC status was shifted. Suddenly we were due a bit more money each month and a check for a few months worth of retroactive benefits were cut. Only there was a catch: if we had any of the money from the retroactive benefits left at the end of that first month we would have the next check cut by an equal amount.
Spend it or loose it. So very Reganomical.
So my mother did what any woman with a pushy eleven year old and $200.00 dollars burning in her pocket would do in 1987: she bought him an NES. This of course, came after an agonizing year of visiting department stores and Kay Bee Toys, weighing the pros and cons of the NES and the Master System through internal debates and reading every review I could get my hands on. Somehow my childhood will was sufficient at manifesting desires by prolonged periods of wishing, hoping and obsessing. I got a trip to Disney World this way as well. (Too bad my obsessing over becoming the CEO over a combined Disney/McDonald’s/Sony hasn’t worked out yet, but I figure there’s still time.) It was Nintendo’s choice to allow licensed property games that tipped the scales in their favor. I knew there was no chance of a Batman or a Star Wars game ending up on Sega’s system, and that was that.
Which it is to this very day. My gaming habit, that is.
So there was the moral of the story, right from Uncle Ronnie’s minions: don’t save up for college. Don’t try to build a better tomorrow… we won’t let you have one. Live for today. If you get cash gifts at Christmas don’t tell us about it, we’ll cut your food check the month after. Hell, they still do that shit. Some people refer to it as the “Social Security Trap.” While it doesn’t make sense to theoretically allow people to become rich by stockpiling their government benefits, it makes a hell of a lot less sense to actually punish people for preparing for the future while living on a fixed income. Especially an income that doesn’t scale along with the economy.
I was taught by the hero of conservatives to quite literally live for the day, and I’ve had a hell of a time trying to fight that deeply ingrained lesson ever since. I’d argue that its my own personal kyptonite, only from what I’ve observed damn near everybody in this culture has some degree of an issue with it.
Now you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some 12 year olds to go school on The Narrows right about now.
