Marginal utility, hungry ghosts, and the boozy Gandhi
The crazy linkage.
Desire is ego craving fun.
The ego is not the devil but it always looks for more and then your soul suffers and the ego has fun.
You can turn this upside down and calm that ego.
Let me explain.
I can make you love me
Economics is a hot word, economist is not.
But economists give us concepts that make our life easy. Or, mostly a marketer's life easy. Or: someone-who-studies-economics-only-out-of-curiosity's life easy. Such as me.
One of the concepts is known as Marginal Utility.
They define utility as the satisfaction, value, or goodness derived from the consumption of a particular good (like McDonalds’) or service (like hair salon) or activity (like ice skating).
The concept is important because a thing's utility directly influences the demand and by the law of supply and demand, its price too.
So: your demand can run the market.
Marginal utility is when an additional unit of that good, service, or activity gives you extra satisfaction.
Yes. Sometimes it doesn't.
If I know the marginal utility of every activity, I can influence you to love my content forever.
For this, I can start by knowing my newsletter's competitor: TikTok videos.
Making it easy: Marginal means additional.
Side note: Marginal utility is not marginal benefit, where we talk about value (benefit) in dollars. Marginal utility is the emotional value you derive and everything in life can be researched but not everything has an accurate measurement.
So I can't measure how much your marginal utility of watching a TikTok video is.
The assumption is it rises due to the novel random content every time.
And that's the point. The quantity of marginal utility doesn't matter. It's just a comparison metric. I'll explain.
So you start by taking two combinations of activity (or good or service) of various quantities that provide equal satisfaction to you. This is a relevant topic to marginal utility, known as the concept of indifference curve. You use this curve to compare how much units of satisfaction two combinations give you.
Making it easy: Indifference means no difference.
Why was there a decrease in utility in the 2nd newsletter? Maybe my quality dropped, maybe I posted the newsletter late, or maybe I offended you somehow. Could be anything.
And usually, utility from TikTok videos are higher because:
Each video is new
It's not boring
It doesn't feel like long
The dynamic effect makes it attractive
Constant motion in video hypnotizes you in
Reading is hard work
But what if I:
give unique value in every newsletter
present it the best I can (or the best you ever read)
make the content shorter but fully interesting
give you a lot of information in one newsletter
add interesting AI-generated images throughout
make you feel smarter than I am
post on a set time but don't disturb you any other day or time?
Suddenly your marginal utility of reading my content rises. I'm better than TikTok.
Yeah watching TikTok videos is always fun but it also always comes with guilt at the end of the day. Why? Let's tackle that too.
...and maybe eat me too
There's a scary concept in ancient Buddhism and eastern Chinese culture which is still relevant to this day known as the Hungry Ghosts.
Your insatiable desire for anything in life―aka your bad deeds and wrong intentions―can make you a ghost whose mouth so pin-like and belly so balloony that it's dead-hard to satisfy your hunger. Forever.
Their bodies are "cruel by design." It's Karma.
The understanding is we all are prone to wealth corruption. Your good deeds can give you wealth but the wealth corrupts your soul and you start all the bad. You stop giving and supporting the needy or helping your community or start buying the dirty. That's desire. That's the need for clinginess to money and keeping your wealth score.
Call me an idiot or what you like but I'll say it: We all are hungry ghosts with clothes.
More than 5% of the population is a shopaholic (hungry for new items).
A whooping 18-24% of Americans are sexaholics (hungry for new/exposure to bodies).
Then there are drug addicts, compulsive social media users, obsessive gamblers, and whatnot.
The scary one is the workaholic. Working long hours even for late nights is even being admired socially nowadays. How scary!
"Hungry ghost" might just be a "karma lesson" story shared in old times by old Buddhist monks and nuns to the townspeople in exchange for food and shelter. But it's currently used as a metaphor in Buddhism and it's valid all the while.
A hungry ghost is a mentality.
Too much desire and pressure to achieve that desire always end up in suffering.
The hungry ghost concept should at best surprise you or aware you, but not scare you.
How do hungry ghosts look like you ask? Some even look like angels with cute wings whose hunger: mating with humans. Yeah, there's a variety of hungry ghosts and it depends on the bad deed they did in their past.
…or even hate me?
Not every Gandhi is a Mahatma and I am not very happy saying this.
You know who's Harilal ...Gandhi?
Our Mahatma Gandhi's eldest son. Fate has it that he was born when Mahatma wasn't home. So he got the least time with his dad. Every other subsequent child was lucky.
Harilal grew up in his uncle Laxmidas's home. Mahatma was barristering in South Africa.
When you are wealthy and you don't have anyone to stop you, what do you do? You start having mistresses and drinking ...too much.
He did. For long enough. Then Mahatma asked him to come to South Africa to assist him in the Phoenix Ashram.
(The Phoenix Ashram is a group started by Mahatma where you stand for the truth without violence. This behaviour is known as Satyagraha. People who follow this behaviour are known as Satyagrahi).
He went. But the monk-y life wasn't for him. So after a few months he cut all ties with family and returned to India and dabbled into the old mess: steal, drink, solicit prostitutes, whatnot.
He had to survive, so what do you do? Either you work hard or you work hard. Either a job or your own business ...the bad business. He wore and traded the clothes of the British with whom the entire Indian nation was fighting for independence.
One day he was caught drunk in the street at midnight and remained in custody for the night. Another time a magistrate fined him one rupee. He criticizes his father in the newspaper with a new story daily.
His mother Kasturba always tried to ignore his child's misdeeds and thought he would change someday.
Mahatma was always ready to have him home and take care of him like earlier. But he never returned. On a train one day, Harilal came with an orange for his mother and when Mahatma asked whether he have any gift for him, he replied "Everyone provides for you."
He then turned to his mother and said, ‘Ba, this is only for you. Promise me only you will eat it.’ He said to his father, "Don’t ever forget, you are great only because of the sacrifices made by my mother."
Soon his mother started realizing the end her child is going towards. Every morning she is scared of what the latest newspaper would bring about her son's fresh misdeeds.
She started writing emotional letters explaining her pain seeing her child this way. These letters were spread through the newspaper.
He never returned though. He never changed. A lot of times he was caught drunk and engaging in inappropriate deeds. He died penniless, devastated, and alone four months after Mahatma died.
Now all this comes around as a whole:
Why did he never change? You think: One additional unit of alcohol will help you reduce your anxiety and you drink till sickness but not stop. That's the concept of marginal utility.
Economists assume that every individual is rational and will act on increasing their marginal utility to the maximum.
Now if I buy a large pizza, slice it in 8, and give it to you, your mind will say: I can have it all. But only your body knows how much you can consume.
After 3 pieces, you already start feeling full and bloated. And sick. So the remaining 5 pieces will be wasted because there's no one else to eat and I have just drank 2 glasses of water.
So your marginal utility for the first piece of a slice is the maximum (let's say 140). The second piece will have a reduced marginal utility because you have already tasted it and your stomach is getting full (let's say 120). The third piece is too much for your tiny tummy already (let's say 80). If you eat the 4th slice, the marginal utility is maybe 20. 5th one? It may be 0. 8th one? You may vomit. -140. Etc.
So marginal utility has a diminishing rate as well. The marginal utility can be positive, zero, or negative down the line.
The bottom point is: I have observed that things handled with emotion are scary. You think you can do, have, earn, get, spend it all. But the physical reality is different. Physical reality often has a diminishing marginal rate.
So why do TikTok videos have an increasing marginal rate? Because it deals with emotion. Not until you are 15 hours into watching TikTok videos will your body feel sick and eyes weary.
But rage, fear, envy, etc. are the main culprit in Harilal's case.
There's an interesting perspective by the anonymous author of a controversial book named: Sadly, Porn (affiliate link). He goes by the pseudonym Edward Teach.
There is more satisfaction in depriving someone of something than in getting something for oneself, which is not satisfying at all.”
He uses a story to explain this.
Imagine a mother secretly poisoning her child daily with detergent.
Now, what's her motive? Maybe she wants the attention of "being a great mother who takes care of her sick child all the time." But Edward claims there's a distinction between wanting and enjoying.
She surely wants attention for being a great mother but it's a lie (defense) she tells herself against what she really enjoys: depriving her child of: her.
She wants her child to be deprived of the enjoyment that comes from a great mother. In other words, she wants to deprive him of his satisfaction or enjoyment of her. This is what Edward explains.
"If he were satisfied, then the ledger would not be balanced. All she does is give, and what’s the child ever done for her?"
Mahatma always abstained and advocated for everyone to avoid the consumption of intoxicating liquor (alcohol). For it is a murder of the soul for the time being and murder of the soul is worse than any other crime. People engage in alcohol abuse and end up promoting gender violence, and domestic violence, and can't identify between wife and mother and sister. Aka: Loses the soul.
Mahatma despises alcohol.
And here can be an interesting linkage. Didn't Harilal know the implication on his body of overconsumption of alcohol and doing all the inappropriate? We can hope he knew but my assumption is he wanted to deprive his father of: him. He wanted to deprive his father of his dream of a great nation by being the bad boy of the home. In doing it he found satisfaction.
He is balancing the ledger: What his father did in his childhood, he is doing it to him now.
Also, what do you think: didn't he feel like quitting in the mid? He prolly did but the marginal utility of consuming alcohol is always high to them.
A drinker's marginal utility is infinite because he is irrational (idiot).
We aren't that rational in things dealing with emotions.
And, what do you think? He didn't know that quitting is better? Maybe he did, but our motivation to hurt others is stronger than saving ourselves.
Takeaway:
Your demand can run the market but it can also kill relationships.
The desire never ends. The solution is self-awareness and knowledge of spirituality.
That's why I never have desires but goals to earn with hard work.
Extra reads:
There's even a festival for the hungry ghosts: The Hungry Ghost festival. It is celebrated on the 14-15th night of the seventh month. You place a lantern on your windowsill and the candle attracts the remnants of your close ones and the lantern warns them from doing any harm.
It is advised: you better don't hang your clothes outside on this day. How lovely!
Sadly, Porn is too long. 1000+ pages. You can read a summarized but long and interesting version of Rob Henderson.
Well Said!!