The perils of living only in the now?

"Everybody, sooner or later, must sit down to a banquet of consequences."  Robert Louis Stevenson

I was thinking today about individuals' relationship to instant gratification and the idea of having what we want right now, in spite of known and likely consequences. 

 

I am interested in a possible link between those children for whom visiting the dentist to discover that they need yet another filling is commonplace and adults who later develop addictive behaviours. 

I wonder whether a child's dental care might be an accurate predictor of their later relationship to themselves, and their bodies, as sites of abuse - prioritising what they want, in the face of acknowledged damage they are likely to inflict on themselves as a result.