When I was younger, I was extremely struck by the realization that my choice to donate or not meant the difference between someone else’s living and dying. A lot of decisions started to look very starkly wrong.
I remember telling my dad that I had decided it would be immoral for me to have children, because they would take too much of my time and money away from better causes. “It doesn't sound like this lifestyle is going to make you happy,” he said.
“My happiness is not the point,” I told him.
A few years later, I was deeply bitter about the decision. I had always wanted and intended to be a parent, and I felt thwarted. It was making me sick and miserable. I looked at the rest of my life as more of an obligation than a joy.
So my husband and I decided that it wasn't worth having a breakdown over. We decided to set aside enough for our personal spending that we could reasonably afford to raise a child. Looking back at my journal entries from before and after the decision, I'm struck by how much difference it made in my outlook. Immediately after we gave ourselves permission to be parents, I was excited about the future again. I don't know if or when we'll actually have a kid, but just the possibility helps me feel things will be all right. And I suspect that feeling of satisfaction with my own life lets me be more help to the world than I would have as a broken-down altruist.
I've attended Quaker meeting for the last ten years. The founder, George Fox, gave his followers this advice in 1658: “Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing.”
Quakers have tended to emphasize the part about “that of God in everyone,” with its implication about equality: how can it be right to keep slaves, for example, if the slave has an element of the divine in her?
But my favorite part is that word “cheerfully.” Fox was a man who had been jailed and beaten for his religious beliefs – surely he had a right to be bitter. Quakerism later developed a stern and dour style, but George Fox was not about that.
Some things I can do cheerfully. It turns out that giving up children was not one of them. Other people would have no problem giving up parenthood, but I suspect that everyone has something that would cause an inordinate amount of pain to sacrifice.
So test your boundaries, and see what changes you can make that will help others without costing you too dearly. But when you find that something is making you bitter, stop. Effective altruism is not about driving yourself to a breakdown. We don't need people making sacrifices that leave them drained and miserable. We need people who can walk cheerfully over the world, or at least do their damnedest.
Unfortunately, we are not algorithm-driven machines maximally enhancing the public good, while simultaneously using artificial intelligence to improve our understanding of the public good, and fueling this activity from some magical perpetual motion machine. I think daily we have to both accept and challenge our limits to give, and to expand the diversity and difficulty of activities that nourish ourselves. I did something difficult for me the other day: in my upstate bungalow colony (21 of use share a communal property with individual residences), the governing board cleared a black raspberry bush that gave me a lot of berries and a lot of joy, without my knowledge or consent. Rather than fume, I sent a thoughtful response, which resulted in me leading an effort ($100 budget) to replace the plants. A bunch of us found some end-of-season plants, and seven of us worked together to gather compost and recreate this garden patch better than ever. THIS is what I want more of in my life. Yet I offered only condemnation and annoyance to the woman who huffily came over and tried to keep me from playing fetch with my dog in a dog park (like most everyone else) because it was against city park regulations. I hope someday to be the person who can attempt to engage constructively with someone who offended and annoyed me as much as this woman. Yet spending time stewing in being disappointed in myself will not enable me to become that person. I have to grow my capacity for perspective-taking and concern for the well-being of others, and I can only do this by maintaining my own capacity to engage positively with myself and with the world, which I can only do through nourishing activities, some of which consume resources and benefit only myself (or others only via market transactions). That's the current functioning capacity of my altruism factory, and that's the only way I know of maintaining it and increasing its productive capacity :)