As promised Sunday, here's short essay on dying/tragedy and affection/love/relationships. This was for my Senior Seminar Econ Class:
Dying Affection
by Lindsey
Almost six weeks ago, my dad found out he was at high risk of dying from a heart attack and would need to have open-heart surgery as soon as possible. The news shocked my dad, who is only fifty-five years-old, and he began to worry that he might die before being able to have surgery or that he would die from complications during the bypass operation. Prior to learning about this threat to his life, my dad did not express his love or care for people very explicitly, not even to me. After learning that his life was at risk, my dad began overtly communicating his love and care to me – and, I imagine, to other people around him. As the date of surgery drew closer, my dad grew more and more vocal in his displays of affection. His change in behavior climaxed the day before surgery when he was very determined to talk to me over the phone before he went into surgery “in case something should happen”. The example with my dad and me is not unique. In fact, I began to wonder why some people become more loving or affectionate to those around them when they find out they could die or might be dying. Why wouldn’t they be just as loving or affectionate before learning that they might die soon? Conversely, I wondered why some people do not become more expressive of their love and affection in the same situation.
Any relationship can be thought of like a contract. For example, employer-employee relationships are literal, written contracts in which both the employer and the employee come to an agreement on certain terms of input and output such as hours worked and salary paid. I will focus on friendship for simplicity. Two people become friends through an unspoken agreement that each person will put a certain amount of effort into the friendship. This effort is displayed through outward signs of affection and concern for the other person. The amount of effort each person exerts in the friendship is based on preferences for the minimum acceptable outcome of the friendship. For example, let’s say that I don’t really care if I remain friends with my friend but she really wants to be at least acquaintances, if not even better friends. I have less incentive than my friend to put the same amount of effort into the friendship as she does, in this case, because her minimum friendship preference is greater than mine.
Our minimal preferences, how long we think we will be friends and the happiness of the other person, all interact to influence how much effort we put into the friendship. Now, let’s assume both my friend and I have minimum preferences of being slightly more than acquaintances but not best friends, we think we will be friends until we die which would be about sixty years, and the happiness of the other person affects our own happiness. I also expect and prefer to become really good friends over time, before we die. If I find out that I might die within a month, my expectation of remaining friends until death now means a friendship lasting only one month rather than sixty years. My immediate preference now shifts to a desire for being really good friends because the end of my life is now sooner rather than later. I now have a huge incentive to put more effort into the friendship since my expectations have caused my preferences to increase. I also might be worried that my friend will be very sad when I die, which makes me sad, so I might try to compensate for that future sadness by trying to increase her happiness in our friendship right now. If I survive, and again expect to live about sixty years, I can work on developing a better relationship over a longer period of time again and the amount of effort I put into the friendship will probably return to “normal”. That reverse effect enhances the argument that the change in behavior is due to shifts in time expectation and preferences.
The reasoning above is applicable to the situation with my dad as well as many other types of relationships in which one person finds out they might die much sooner than expected. An obvious weakness in the analysis, though, is that not all people will increase the amount of effort they put into a relationship when they find out they might die soon. I think this could be because they don’t have different preferences or expectations for the relationship in the future. Another weakness when applying this specifically to parent-child relationships is that it does not fully capture the depth of altruism in a parent-child relationship. For example, a parent is likely to do what’s best for their child even if it makes the child unhappy (i.e. grounding the child). This framework of thought isn’t meant to explain the complexities of a parent-child relationship. In the particular circumstance of an unexpected, terminal diagnosis, though, the model does accurately capture the causes of behavior.
Again, I have to thank my mom, Katy, Mandy, and Julie for helping proof read my paper and
helping me clean up my grammar so I could get an A on this :D.
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