I think the optimal strategy in the market for love is emotional volatility arbitrage. Much like LTCM’s strategy of convergence trades, the aim of emotional volatility arbitrage is to reduce the risk of destabilizing shocks in one’s life. If happiness in life is a function of expectations, then to expect too much is to invite disappointment and be unhappy. In view of the inevitable regression to the mean in life, we should have low expectations that are almost always pleasantly exceeded, rather than high expectations that always lead to disappointment.
In limiting my expectations, I could pretend that it doesn’t matter instead of having to admit that it’s not going to happen, and let cognitive dissonance play its role in making me believe what I do not. But I have not been faithful to this rule – it appears that the heart does not always obey the commands of the mind, even in its best interest. So here are some thoughts on love as irrationality:
i. The more time I spend with her the farther I feel from success. The more I get to know her the less likely it seems that we can be together. This would normally be a negative feedback mechanism for a more rational man than I – the more time I spend and more I get to know her the more I invest in the idea of her, regardless of the expected payoff. I should be cutting my losses but I insist on holding on for the ‘eventual correction’, falling deeper and deeper for someone who may never reciprocate.
ii. Instead of wagering all my happiness on one venture, I should diversify my portfolio and invest in the other girls I’m interested in, weighted to the degree that they are substitutes (ie relative value, or at least relative value not discounted for probability). However, I do not. I feel like none of them would be close substitutes, which I know to be false.
iii. How can I claim to celebrate market competition when I can’t face it on my own? I mouth the platitudes about creative destruction and natural selection but it’s all too real to be on the losing end of it.
iv. Why place my happiness in someone else’s hands in the first place? If libertarians aim to be self-sufficient, then I should love and live only for myself, having only a selfish, Randian love ala Roark and Dominique. In a sense she does meet Rand’s description of love (or at least my hazy interpretation of Rand), embodying the very best that I would want for myself, but I obviously fall short of this criterion.
If happiness in life is a function of expectations, then to expect too much is to invite disappointment and be unhappy.
Cue Socrates’ dilemma.
so much for my ‘core curriculum’ education in the classics.. what, pray tell, is socrates’ dilemma?
Hon, you’re thinking too hard. You don’t have to reconcile all your philosophies just to ask a girl out. You have to be around her and chat with her and make her laugh. Then, ask her out, like I told you. You can do it, and you should. She might be waiting and hoping you’ll ask her out, or maybe the next girl is. Ask her. If she says “yes” and you still don’t know what to do, write to me and I’ll help.
Would you rather be an unhappy man or a happy pig?
pigdom doesn’t sound so bad =)
megan – what happens on this ‘ask her out and she says yes’ business? because i am completely clueless.
Best to load up on the cocaine, then, no?
low expected payoff when costs of procurement and addiction, diminishing returns to consumption, and reduced lifespan are factored in. long way from nozickian experience machines
Does the reduced lifespan really matter, though? Seems a bit foolish (from the happy pig point of view) to hold out for future promises in place of present bliss. Though would you really choose the experience machine? Knowing, beforehand, before the choice, that it meant for instance that you’d never interact with the real people you cared for ever again — that your family etc. would have the pain of losing you, even if after their loss you’d never have any idea of it? That’s pretty much the deal breaker for both the experience machine and, bizarrely, a Christian heaven, for me.
foolish? on the contrary it should seem fairly obvious to the happy pig that he wishes to maximize total lifetime happiness and delay the inevitable slaughter as long as possible. yes there’s a tradeoff but it trades at the maximizing point.
point taken that at some critical point *something* (objective reality? morality? whatever?) trumps utility considerations, but of course i am so far from that point that utility considerations are still the most important for me, and that utility happens to come from the degree of reciprocity of a special someone. which i reasonably expect to be near zero. its like watching a train wreck in slow motion. or a greek tragedy. tragic inevitability of protagonist racing towards his own destruction. whence comes New Rational Man, unbound and unfettered?
the experience machine already exists and you are in it. it is the mind. though my machine is probably malfunctioning.
Wonder if we’re reading the dilemma differently here? I’ve always taken it to ask whether one prefers unhappiness or dissolution — would you trade identity for utility? The happy pig response if your case is as hopeless as you make it out to be I would have thought would be either emotional castration or what they commonly call ’settling’ (just snag yourself any old bird). If you won’t do either (and you aren’t doing either, it appears), is the appropriate answer not ‘unhappy man’? If you really wanted to be the pig, surely, this post wouldn’t even have happened?
In case you couldn’t tell I’m a bit of a man fan rather than a pig fan myself.
Of course there are all kinds of reasons why the divide is artificial (I’m sure pigs have greater goals) or the question doesn’t really work that way (are we really infinitely elastically changeable at our own behest, and who is ‘we’ anyway), but, well, OK, I’m just indulging myself here, I apologise.
I think I felt compelled to comment because I’ve gone through the kind of hopelessness that you describe before and I wish I knew how to tell you that if you keep trying it’ll all be much more than OK. But that just sound fatuous, doesn’t it.