Utility and Emotion
Utility is a personal satisfaction that people feel. It may be bigger or smaller in environment where one is living and experimenting. One of the important and main environmental factor is time. Time decides the size of utility that people feels. Utility of emotions also depends on time.
When human uses or does one thing steadily, they feel tired of it, and that’s when the utility increases much slowly. At first, when they’re interested at the thing they’re doing, utility increases fast though. If we used one for a long time and the utility rises slowly, people will find other to maximize their utility. The total utility of one will be larger than other, but marginal utility of other is bigger than the one.
In that case, the one is the sunk cost, which means it was needed for other’s marginal utility, and the one was basically a step. Emotions are also same with this knowledge. Friendship, happiness, and love are few positive emotions human feels, and it’s based on utility. Human gets tired of ones that make then feel these emotions. They might want more from others, which means the first emotions they have felt is sunk cost for other bigger satisfaction.
There is a discussion if emotions are also the one part of utility of humans, and I agree with the idea that the positive emotions are the one part of utility. Humans feel satisfaction with it and want more, and get tired of it as time passes by. We can’t stop ourselves from getting tired of one thing, but we can slow down the point where the marginal utility starts to decrease.
