life barrels on like a runaway train

the internet is full of poignant quotes amidst all the junk that passes for introspection (including most of what you read here). 2 pieces for today:

(paraphrasing) if you got hit by a car tomorrow, would you be upset, or would you just be relieved that it's over?

"the only card you still hold is that you're still alive"

it seems both approaches one interesting question: the idea of whether life has any inherent value. economically speaking, life is merely the aggregation of utility. our lives are essentially defined by the satisfaction that we can get out of it. that leads to an interesting conundrum: we can't know for sure how good our lives will be, so we can only assume how much value we will get out of life.

which brings me morbidly to suicide. it's so easy for suicide to make economic sense. once you bring in discounting and risk adversity, you're pretty much set to justify offing yourself. say you find yourself in a position where you anticipate a lot of horrible things to happen to you in the near future. these happenings, being the nearest temporally, would give you a huge hit on utility. meanwhile, all you can say is that there's a chance that things will get better in the near future. assuming you are risk adverse, what you get is expected utility that is quite low. hence, you can weigh your options, and if it works out to be negative, you're in fact better off killing yourself right now.

we can predict a few things if the above is true. people who are more impatient are very more likely to be suicidal, since they discount more. people who are pessimistic are also more prone to suicide, because their expected utility of good things is lower. people who are more risk adverse should also watch out, since they will also have lower expected utility from potentially good things. clearly, there are ethical issues with regards to testing this theory.

but more interestingly, we should look more at why people don't kill themselves. i suppose people assume a massive disutility from death. if you're a religious type, then you might fear damnation. you might fear causing suffering to others, though that's quite a moot point since you will be too dead to realize that. but i think something which might be harder to explain is simply that we value options a lot. as people, we always want to make sure we can change the course of our lives. suicide, unfortunately, removes all options. i'm not exactly sure whether this can be modeled by looking at risk, or probabilities. perhaps it's something that's not well understood about human psyche.

i suppose this was just one massive digression. what i was disturbed about today was how much i worried about something quite insignificant. so day one after what i hope would be a proper moving-on, all i could worry about was whether the thing i had sent to her was in fact delivered, and not stolen by someone else. perhaps i just want to make sure my money didn't go to waste, regardless of what she decided to do with it. i might feel more comfortable knowing that the delivery company lived up to its side of the bargain and did not misplace it. what strange preoccupations i have.