Effective Altruism: Don’t Underestimate the Good You Can Do in this World
Part 1: Intro, Happiness & Why?
“My biggest fear in the world is that I don’t help enough people.”
I’ve been lucky enough to have met numerous people who have restated this fear – a fear that I felt for about a decade. From a conversation with the community health worker in rural India, to a resident at Columbia, to an incredibly bright RB volunteer – once you realize that our world is in danger and you have the ability to help it, it’s only natural for that fear to kick in. You feel that sense of responsibility to world, sometimes tinged with a bit of guilt “why am I so privileged while 3 billion people live on $2.5 a day?” and you only want to do what’s best to help –but sometimes you don’t know how or worse you don’t think you can do anything about it. This is wrong, you are not helpless against the world’s problems – you can join the fight.
Well, first things first: if that’s your biggest fear in the world, then congratulations you’re already on your way to making the world a better place. If it’s not, then that’s okay – it’s not a requirement for sure, and as a matter a fact it’s no longer my biggest fear. Next, let’s go ahead and eliminate that guilt. Simply by recognizing your privilege and starting to work to heal our world you are making a difference. Awareness is the first step. Further, guilt does nothing. In fact, mild amounts of sadness, anger and anxiety decrease productivity significantly. And if you’re using your productivity power to solve the world’s problems, then there’s no logic in having these feelings since they are clearly interfering with your ability to realize your overarching mission. It’s okay to have them and to learn more about how to manage them check out my emotional intelligence post.
So why isn’t that my biggest fear anymore? Because before helping people you need to find the right balance in your own life – balance in what you want to do, how you want to do it, what you want your work life balance to be, what you want your daily life to look like. Falling off balance is my new greatest fear, because I know it’s the biggest obstacle I have to aiding effectively. Balance is key and everyone’s is different. With this in mind, I’ve decided to write this series of posts that will delve into the following topics:
The Key to Happiness
Reasons why you should help our world
Considerations when choosing an area in which to aid/ work
Considerations when choosing a charity to give to
Considerations when choosing a career
De-bunking popular “altruistic lifestyle” beliefs (like fair trade)
My Life as a case study (in the making)
Sources and motivations for this post include:
My life
Refresh Bolivia
Coco – yes the Pixar Movie.
Robert Waldinger’s TED Talk on Harvard’s 75-year Happiness Study
Elon Musk’s Biography
Peter Singer’s Doing Good Better & his philosophy in general
The Key to Happiness: Relationships
In a study done by Harvard researchers over the course of over 75 years they looked at a group of over 1,500 individuals and analyzed what made their lives “happy.” Further, they used these indicators and correlated them to physical and mental health indicators.
Biggest problem: Loneliness
We need people in all realms of our life: to work, to play, to grow, to live. It’s not about the number of people you have it’s about the quality of your relationships. Feeling like you have someone who you can talk to and will actually listen, understand, validate both your accomplishments and problems in life.
People who experience loneliness (which 1/5 of Americans feel at any given time) have increased health problems after they’re middle aged and decreased brain function.
Remedy: Cultivate relationships to family, friends and/or community.
Benefits: Increased overall wellbeing
Good relationships keep us happy and consequently protect our bodies from physical illness and our minds from both physical and psychological peril. They can make a back-ache feel less severe and being sick in bed with the flu significantly less sucky.
I find that a combination of feeling cared about, understood and capable to overcome obstacles is necessary. But not everyone or every group of people can provide all of this. We can think of support and challenge networks. People can overlap, but goals/ knowledge bases are different.
Support networks don’t need to know the real complexity of your problems, they just need to be invested in making you the best you: exhibit love, listen and be concerned for your overall wellbeing. Challenge networks: exhibit more tough love, challenge me to spin problems around and take responsibility/ change my perspective and pose solutions that might be hard to swallow. For me, given that my family doesn’t understand much of my life since they did not go to college/grad school/any school in the USA – I like to think of them as my support network and my friends and advisors as my challenge network.
Example:
I have a bad day at school, classes were hard and I did poorly on a test.
Family support network: It’s okay, you’re trying your best, a B never hurt anyone.
Challenge friend & advisor network: Maybe get a tutor, spend more time studying, re-prioritize your schedule.
Both have a place and neither live in black and white realms. I personally find sometimes I need the moral-booster to listen and even open up the challenge network that will-through their knowledge of the system’s problems & solutions— inevitably encourage me to grow and do better. There’s no perfect recipe to life but there’s a glimpse of my balance.
The point of discussing happiness is is to say that unless you're happy, you're not going to achieve your full potential and you're either not going to be able to care about our world or not be able to aid it effectively. So first things first: you. Find your balance - it'll never be perfect but get close to it and keep in mind in life and through reading this series. Don't take anything I write to the extreme - some of the stats and comments in here are harsh in that they expose reality in a stark light.
But always remember, in order to truly aid well your happiness is the most important thing to cultivate: so that whatever path you pick you can actually do it, and do it well.
Reasons Why You Should Help Our World
The biggest argument I have for you is morality. The world isn’t fair and you can do something to help it. Peter Singer’s big argument is that as the top 1 billion people in this world we have a moral duty to help the bottom 3 billion. Roughly half the world’s daily income is $2.50 USDs or less and 80% of the world lives with less than $10 a day. Some common myths:
Myth No 1. That’s okay because they live well for that much money there since things are cheaper.
Reality:
Since no one makes that little in the USA we have no idea what that kind of market looks like here. But wherever you go, it’s not enough to live appropriately aka cover your basic needs.
If you want a more detailed view take a look at a documentary on Netflix called Living on One Dollar, where students from Claremont Colleges in Cali go to Nicaragua and experience the reality for themselves.
Myth No2. If it was really that bad, then they couldn’t live on that.
They can’t, they die. A lot. This is an intuitive fact, if you don’t have money you can’t afford care to save your life when you’re dying and that’s the end of it.
Myth No 3. The amount of money I can give/what I can do isn’t enough to do anything. I'm not wealthy enough or powerful enough to make a difference.
Everyone has skills they can use to help - see more on the career section. For simplicity here I'll just address money.
Refresh Bolivia can build a bathroom to a family that’s never had a bathroom, for $300.
Some of the world’s most effective NGOs can generate a QALY for as little as $10. A QALY is a quality adjusted life year – aka a year of high quality life, aka with $10 you just gave someone another year of life. That’s pretty impactful and I’m pretty sure we can all generate $10 to give to someone else in our lifetime.
We’ll discuss what exactly to donate too later.
If that’s not enough here are some reasons from different perspectives.
Emotional:
Helping others makes you feel good, seeing someone else smile when you helped make that smile literally releases dopamine. It gives you purpose in life, increases your happiness and helps your mental state.
Health:
Helping other creates more relationships which increases happiness, look above for the health benefits.
Financial:
If you donate money you can write it off on your taxes. Tax break coming up. Some of the worlds largest corporations double as non-profits to take advantage of this. Corrupt? Yup.
Image:
It’s cool to do good now, volunteering makes you look good to other people and to your employers/interviewers. One year I literally had a volunteer tell me that he was only in Bolivia because he needed to look good for medical school. Unfortunate and low starting point. But his contribution helped us build a bathroom and we were able to change his perspective by the end of the two weeks so double wins.
If you’re going to try to look good by doing good – why not go the extra step and actually put some thought into what you’re doing? This (or the $ one) is probably the weakest reason for doing good and if it’s your only one I encourage you to do some traveling to see the rest of the world and hopefully another, less shallow reason will emerge.
But of course, I think the best reason is morality. However, as long as we’re all on the same mission of aiding in a high impact, effective manner it doesn’t matter to me why you’re on it.
Stay tuned to find out how you can choose where to aid and how to aid. If I haven't convinced you of the need to aid, message me ASAP and I'll throw more stats your way I'm somewhat assuming if you're reading this you're probably already inclined to help.