The Puzzle of Farewell Letters

Economics assumes that people are rational, self-interested, utility-maximizers. There are many scenarios where this seems not to be the case. Addiction seems irrational, charity appears altruistic, suicide is unlikely to be utility-maximizing. But in all these cases there are good arguments and strong cases for why the assumptions made by economists still hold. Today I want to tackle such a puzzle: Why do people write farewell letters and/or last wills?

It seems irrational: It is costly during your lifetime (you have to sit down and write the thing, thinking about who to tell what and what to give whom). You don’t reap the benefits of seeing the happy faces reading your last letter, cause you are dead.

I wrote a “farewell letter” for when I die. It's for my parents; I am their only child; I propose a system where they would interact with my friends regularly thus ease their pain (hopefully). Again, this seems irrational. It took me 10 hours to come up with this and about 5 hours to write. And I will never see the plan in action, cause I will be dead.

So why did I write it then?

Making my parents happy

My first answer is “to ease the pain of my parents”. That seems altruistic. Here any arguments of “warm glow” (the theory that altruism isn’t a thing because people give only for warm glow reasons) don’t apply. I can't have a warm glow for something I don’t witness.

Making my death easier.

Well, do I have to witness my charity to feel the warm glow. I can also imagine the charity and feel the warm glow. I might have written my farewell letter in order to ease my pain of dying. For some reason, I imagine dying in an airplane crash. The pilot tells the passengers we have to emergency land, we are in the mountains, and the likelihood of surviving is pretty low. I imagine closing my eyes and thinking of my parents and friends reading the farewell letter and being happy. That gives me a warm glow. Maybe I wrote the letter to ease these 5 minutes of free fall before death.

Making the thought of death easier.

What is the likelihood of getting 5 calm minutes to think about your death before your die? I think its pretty much zero. In an airplane scenario, you have so much adrenalin you aren’t thinking at all, least of which at your farewell letter. So that is not it. But I weirdly like the thought of dying that way. I think that’s the main point! I wrote a farewell letter not for my parents, also not to ease the non-existent 5 mins of dying, but for me to run through a happy death scenario every time I am confronted with it. It takes away the fear of dying whenever it pops in my head.

This is how I like approaching such Puzzles:

1. Puzzle: farewell letters are costly and no obvious benefits.

2. Far-reaching explanation: Charity (dismissed)

3. reaching explanation: Family (dismissed)

4. explanation: easing my death (too thin)

5. strong explanation: easing the though of death (understood)

For me, I have thus arrived at a rational, self-interested, and utility-maximizing answer to why I wrote a farewell letter.