need the former to get the latter; in theory, the older you get, the more stuff you have. No wonder people want to freeze themselves. Cryonics offers an obvious strategy to maximize capitalist accumulation. On my salary, I’ll be able to pay for my kids’ college tuition in one hundred and fifty years. If I could freeze my family and let my savings grow that whole time, I’d come back to life after all the work of accumulation is done, taking full advantage of both the deferral and the gratification. This may sound ludicrous, but it’s the logical next step in the current situation. People already freeze their gametes in order to maintain their fertility until they’ve gained the financial security that education and accumulation (are supposed to) bring.
FIGURE 7. A 1930s car advertisement portrays the wise man as investing “his money in a handsome car . . . whereas his foolish neighbour invests his money in a wife and children.” In reality, argues John Cope in his book Cancer: Civilization: Degeneration—The Nature, Causes, and Prevention of Cancer, Especially in Its Relation to Civilization and Degeneration (London: H. K. Lewis & Co., 1932), “The luxurious car brings with it the evils which arise out of inadequate exercise of the muscles. . . . In the end, the man who walks and marries is the gainer. He is healthier and in every way better for the exercise, and both he and his wife are less likely to become cancerous” (299.) These conservative notions of family continue to gain otherwise unjustifiable (in a free market economy) social support.
In its offensive use of disease to create business, the ACI ad bestows a comforting ideal of survivorship. As one woman wrote about giving Armstrong’s autobiography to her dying mother, “I wanted her to be a courageous ‘survivor’ too. I think we find it less creepy or at least difficult when people assume the role of survivor, where they pretend they’re going to live an easy and long life.”19 I get the appeal, I really do. The survivorship metaphor captures the ache of seeing someone sick and feeling completely unable to help. You want them to fight; you want to climb inside of them and join in when they can’t anymore. But the throbbing desires that the term survivor captures do not leave room to recognize the structures of cultural and economic survival in which physical survival dwells. These underwrite a uniquely American insecurity and the fact that, every day, people lose medical insurance by losing a job or partner, and that many Americans can and will lose everything with a single diagnosis. And not because they didn’t work hard enough.
STICKY FACE
In a series of experiments in the 1960s and ’70s, Stanford psychology professor Walter Mischel and his colleagues undertook what would become known informally as the Stanford Marshmallow Experiments.20 The research intended to figure out how attention could be strategically allocated, enabling a subject to delay gratification. Each experiment contained several control groups and differing situations, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll explain the most general protocol. Experimenters gave each of several preschoolers a marshmallow (or pretzel or cookie) and asked the child to sit in a room that was either empty or contained various distractions. Once the adult left, the youngster could go ahead and enjoy the treat he had been given, and the adult would come back. Or he could wait, not eating the snack, until the adult returned and have both the initial treat and another treat. Behind a one-way mirror, Mischel’s team sat back to watch the torment as each child sniffed his marshmallow, poked it, held it up to the light, sat on her hands, tapped his feet, chewed her lips, sang a song, or, glancing both ways, took a teeeeny tiiiiny lick. Many couldn’t resist. Others waited an astonishing hour, shattering the myth that little ones can’t wait. Years later, Mischel found that the children’s ability to wait for their reward correlated to their life success.
Typical interpretations of this experiment maintain it demonstrates that deferral of gratification is a skill that can be learned, can be learned early on, and pays off. Arguably, though, in testing a practice that our political and economic system often rewards—deferring gratification—the experiment also naturalizes this political, psychosocial, and economic skill as unquestionably allied with success. Given that grade-school education does not specifically teach students how to strategically allocate attention, the fact that a child who has this skill can parlay it into success in a system that values it, while significant, is not particularly surprising. For that very reason, the experiment gives insight into how we take for granted the bond between time and accumulation.
Obvious pitfalls prevent us from taking the connection of experiment and real-world success too literally. For example, anyone living in a major city would have been better off buying a small house in the 1980s or early ’90s than tucking away their dimes in Citibank or ill-fated stock to save for a larger house. In other words, we can’t really know until a decade or so later whether buying a home will equal eating or saving the marshmallow. Money saved has to go somewhere other than your mattress to keep up with inflation, and if it does, it goes directly into what the economist Susan Strange so aptly described as “casino capitalism.”21
The marshmallow-equals-deferred-gratification-equals-success translation to real life can fail by several routes. You may have excellent deferred gratification skills that don’t carry a big payoff. For example, the market may crash, leaving you to wish you’d bought that new car, so you’d at least have something. In this case, the means of deferral—the market—failed you. In the terms of the experiment, it would be as if the adult never came back with the extra reward. Skill at waiting matters here, but the practice of deferral also requires faith in both the process and the authority figures that do the distributing.
Or, the rendition from skill to success can fail this way: you did so well at school that you spent twelve years in grad school to become a research biologist, while your little brother, who barely slogged through high school, became much wealthier as an adman than you dare dream about. In other words, he found a better way to get marshmallows than allocating his attention into whistling a mournful tune waiting for the experimenter to come back. Or, the equation can fail because just as the experimenter returns, you topple over and die of excitement while using your marshmallow to sop up the mouth-watering juices pouring down your chin. In this case, you got to enjoy neither the marshmallow you already had nor the immortally deferred one.
The design of the experiment hinders its ability to do any more than gesture to these bigger issues. Its use of insubstantial snack foods, for example, nudges the interpreter to think about material gains rather than other kinds of satisfaction that could result from an ability to concentrate. (The experiment might have focused on an ability to learn math or fall asleep.) Its time limit of a few minutes and the lack of data on the home lives of the children render the possible failures detailed above not only into externalities, but as somewhat ridiculous. But they aren’t. Too close an extrapolation from the experiment obscures the critical fact that what you do, when you do it, and how these things magically converge for some people all relate to a world beyond one’s control—including the chance to have a home situation that enabled trust to begin with. When read in this light, the experiment reminds us that the stipulation to defer gratification, for a life-cycle retirement account, say, offers merely the opportunity to enter a routinized casino bureaucracy, not a means to show off an individual propensity toward managing the frustrative effects of delay.
Above all, let us never forget that without marshmallow eaters, the marshmallow business would go broke and we’d live in a dim, s’moreless world. The noneaters need the eaters, as much as vice versa, just as the married workers depend on the unmarried ones, and the heroic survivors depend on those not so lucky.
If wealth rots the soul, accreting tumors rot the host. Cancer just grows, sometimes as a tumor you should have noticed but didn’t, sometimes as a tumor you can’t help but notice but can’t have removed. It may just live there; you may touch it each day. It may disappear, or it may wrap its way around your tongue. Its changing size may make it seem to be living or dying. Described by words such as apoptotic and runaway, cancer inhabits a competing version of time—not yours, not the one in which savings, Rice Krispie squares, and retirement exist.
Alas,
