Sacrifice for the greater good

Kanisa George

How do we quantify sacrifice? Forgoing your favourite after-meal snack or unwillingly choosing to stay in on Friday night isn’t a task that reaps immediate rewards. For most of us, sacrifice doesn’t sit well with our spirit, as it requires us to give up something we would much rather have.

The Lenten period, leading up to the celebration of Easter, is a period of fasting used by Christians to achieve spiritual revival.

As part of the cleansing process, penance or the Lenten sacrifice requires observers to “give up” something, whether that something is food or drink, a form of entertainment or something else that brings great pleasure.

Religious tenets teach that Lenten sacrifices enable followers to focus on their pursuit of spiritual satisfaction by taking away distractions, fostering a spirit of commitment and developing discipline.

Typically, Lenten sacrifices include abstaining from pleasures such as coffee, sweets, sugar, alcohol, soda or social media, with some believers choosing to practise temperance or committing to vegetarianism for the duration of Lent. At least for those who follow religious principles, fasting and sacrifice commonly result in spiritual satisfaction, and when applied to other facets of life, sacrifice can also deliver positive returns.

The word sacrifice, derived from the Latin word sacrificium meaning “to make,” is habitually associated with negative emotions as it requires us to give something up to be rewarded with something of greater value in the future.

Yet even with all the bad feelings towards the idea of sacrifice, giving something up for a greater reward later down the road is a crucial part of our lives. For many, personal advancement is only possible through hard work and odd sacrifices every so often. And if there is anything we could learn from religious teachings on sacrifice is that the endgame, in most cases, is not short of fruitful.

The thing about sacrifice that adds to its unglamorous appeal, in this instance, is that it eradicates all forms of instant gratification

In order to achieve the desired outcome, we are required to assiduously ignore the desire to experience current pleasure and push the cart further into the future.

The ability to wait for a much more extended period to experience our happy moment, or better yet, our gratifying moment, requires grit and guts and takes far more willpower and determination than we give ourselves credit for.

Not only can self-sacrifice lead to greater happiness, but it can also strengthen one’s “willpower muscle” in the long term, according to Dr Roy Baumeister. Numerous studies follow that when an individual exercises self-restraint in one area of their lives, their ability to do so in all capacities increases. In essence, sacrifice has a ripple effect as our confidence surrounding discipline is significantly improved. For example, the findings of one study showed that even practising to persevere on a challenging but unrelated task is generalised to other situations.

What we don’t always immediately conceive when we think of sacrifice is that there are elements of self-love interwoven in its fabric. Our willingness to set aside desires in front of us temporarily to serve our goals, long-term desires and ultimately, our future self is genuinely one of the greatest forms of self-love.

Sacrifice shows a deep love of self and a commitment to achieving a better version of our lives.

The longer the wait, the sweet the pleasure, isn’t just a meritless saying. Neuroscience shows that periods of concentrated asceticism can create lasting benefits for the practitioner and is worth delaying that piece of chocolate over. Based on a study by Quoidbach and Dunn, the repetition or over-abundance of something pleasurable can reduce our ability to savour and enjoy it, which delayed gratification might be able to fix. The undeniably shocking results of one study proffered that when a person is well travelled, this may undermine their proclivity to savour visits to enjoyable but unremarkable or “less popular” destinations by endowing individuals with a sense of abundance. Of course, this isn’t always the case, but when we over-consume life with no breaks in between, the experience of life becomes moot.

Above all, what many writers believe sacrifice gives you is time. For many, sacrifice is centred around time. And often, in life, when one sacrifices for something that can reward them in the future, they can use time in their favour. One writer believes that by doing this, one can actually gain time in their lifetime, maybe not actual time, but leisure time. It seems hard sacrifices now sometimes reward us in the end. And even if we don’t get the outcome we desire, there are many lessons to learn along the way, and that might be the value in sacrifices.

So what are you willing to sacrifice?