color my life with the chaos of trouble

Interesting fact: this test was originally ment to look at a kids “willpower” but it actually tests a kids economic status. Poor kids will eat the first marshmallow because they’ve learned that food/resources may not always stick around while richer kids are more willing to trust that they’ll get the two marshmallows later.

Later testing actually revealed that it was mostly about whether or not the kids trusted the adults who told them they’d get two marshmallows later. (Or more precisely, the reliability of the promise of marshmallows later.) This often had an interaction with the stability and safety of their home of origin, which has a complex correlation with poverty and lack of resources, but not a strictly or simplistically predictive one.

“I think there is pressure on people to turn every negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say, ‘I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.’”

“You are actually–if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning– you’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as–Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so–I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I’m that, too. But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.”