Of forgiveness and moving on

A question that confronted me today was whether I should just let go of things and 'move on' as if nothing ever happened. It made me think, and by the end of the day I figured out that the question is essentially one of rationality. There is a part of humans that is rational (economics?) and one that is irrational. The question is how much of a human is what. I would try to bring out certain inherent contradictions between rationality and irrationality through this piece.

A lesson that was learnt today, is that most people are inherently impatient. They will say that they will do something, pretend to persevere and ask 'what happened?'. But eventually, as the day gets long, most people are going to leave your room and move on. Some will come back only to show anger at how disgusting you've been. This is the human tendency to move to lighter situations and self-pity, that I had referenced yesterday. Staying true to the word is not going to be a stable equilibrium, because there is a strictly positive payoff to just forgetting about someone else's pain as if nothing ever happened. To stay put would, in fact, be irrational. In this case, the 'right' thing to do is thus irrational. Only those with an inhuman capacity to bear pain are going to be able to stay put in this sad, depressing environment.

Now returning to the point of 'moving on'. There is an aspect to decision making that is most rational and that we as humans often ignore. It is the idea of 'sunk cost'. We let history dictate our decisions - the ghosts of the past still abound in our present. A rational decision-maker would not consider sunk cost. But most of us do. This is another aspect in which we are all irrational. Or are we? Is history 'sunk'? In the sense that our present actions can't change it, it is. But in the sense that we might still be incurring certain pains because of it, it might. This is much like the concept of depreciation. As a fixed percentage of the capital good, depreciation is a cost incurred over several periods of time. Yes, it diminishes over time; but is is always present. Similarly, the one-off incident might have been a part of the past, but the memory stays. This is what makes us distinctively human, and this is what makes history so important.

In my case, I'm trying to be as rational as I can be. My decision to move on, or not to do so, would be dictated solely by whether the costs that I incur are sunk costs, or variable costs. If I see myself getting hurt in the near future because of the people with whom I want to give my friendship another try, it would be irrational of me to let bygones be bygones. There are certain actions, moments and images that remind one of a very painful past. Maybe this is why this 'moving on' is going to come far in the future, when adaptive memories ensure that the part that pains has been greatly diminished. Till then, I probably do not see myself moving on.

This might paint a very disillusioned portrait of human forgiveness. Maybe it isn't. Like all economic models, there are certain assumptions that lead to this conclusion. One is that there would not be a structural change that might lessen the intensity of the pain. Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel, maybe there is hope that this 'moving on' will also include a change. Maybe there will be more humanity. Maybe ...