the unseemingly subtle

We had finished a sumptuous meal and I was going through some pictures of the 55th Wedding Anniversary of the host couple. We had missed the anniversary as we were out of town, so we were looking through the photographs taken on the anniversary, some people we recognized and some we didn’t. The event was a monumentalization for their kids and grand kids and these pictures were communicating and capturing the moment.

I was browsing a snap of the elderly couple and the elderly gentleman remarked, “Look at her, doesn’t she look lovely?” referring to his wife whom he has been wedded to for 55 years.

I think he was reminiscing his past at that moment and he goes on further to say, I quote.

“What am I that she married me”, “I am a nobody”.

I would have presumed that the law of diminishing marginal utility would hold here.

And here was a person who turned the tables on the economic law. Not to reduce our human relations to economic laws and assumptions, but if we juxtapose the companion to a good or service, the law states that we would put high value to its utility in the beginning this value would diminish in time.

And here I found a gentleman at 85 who put me to wonder.

This elderly gentleman was able to turn the law around. Marginal utility assumes that people are guided by their own self interest when determining marginal utility. What this means is a person will put a high value for what accrues to him/her, the next highest value to that what is the next best thing to him/her and so forth. Correspondingly, familiarity would reduce its value in time. However, self-interest has to be present for the law to work.

In this case, the octogenarian nullifies his self-interest, he puts the value on the companion than on himself.

In rendering value for the other more than himself he break the law - albeit he is unaware of this.

I think the elderly gentleman reinforced something very subtle.