What a brilliant post! Thanks for writing this, Jenn!
I know that my own passion to help others came from seeing my father work in charities like the one you describe here, especially the St. Vincent de Paul, in Dublin. Good people devoting their time to help others is great.
We need to keep in mind that the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time and money doing activities whose primary purpose is not altruistic at all. So when we see people doing something altruistic, and doing it well, and getting very good at it, this is wonderful. And I think it’s wonderful that you spent 5,000 hours doing this.
Regarding the Samaritans, at no point did you say or suggest that anything these charities did was misguided or wrong. We’re not talking about people spending vast amounts of money on frivolous or vanity-driven projects. We’re not talking about a billionaire making a charity donation of $100m for a new stadium named after him. Your EA mind was asking “could we do even more?”—but really, the Samaritans were already doing pretty well. They had got very good and efficient at what they do, they were passionate about that, people depended on them providing that—not just the people they helped, but also the public officials whose failures they were helping to cover up (really, there should not be homeless people in a rich country). I’m not sure I would want them to change. As you perfectly observed, they certainly should not change the humanity with which they approach their role and the people they help.
There may be some explanation of the push-back you experienced in personality-tools like Myers-Briggs. In MBTI, there is a spectrum from “Thinking” to “Feeling”. EA is very much on the thinking (T) end of that. It does NOT mean that EA people are less feeling—it means that EA people care, and so they think about how best to help as many people as possible. Feeling (F) people tend to be more focused on the emotional, less logical approach—they see someone who is unhappy, they want to help. They don’t analyse, they just feel and act. What is potentially interesting is how the two extremes often fail to understand each other—the extreme T’s maybe get frustrated at the apparently irrational, non-optimised approach of the F’s, but maybe also they don’t understand the value that the emotional, feeling connection has for the people. Meanwhile, the extreme F’s tend to view T’s as unfeeling and even cynical, because it’s just not how their brain works—while the EA person in you wanted to help even more people, they may have seen your idea as being less caring, more calculating …
Which is why your post is so great. You clearly manage to bridge the divide—your thinking side understands the EA mentality, but your feeling side sees how individual people react to being treated like people.
I don’t have some magical solution to propose. I’m just sharing some thoughts that were inspired by reading this great post.
And one final point: we must never forget that when a person interacts with an organisation like the Samaritans, it can be transformational for them personally, it can be the moment when they decide that they too will devote more time, energy or money to charitable work. And some people impacted in this way will eventually find themselves in the EA community. It’s hard to calculate the impact of this, but I’ll bet a lot of us, like myself, first encountered charity at home and then broadened our horizons.
What a brilliant post! Thanks for writing this, Jenn!
I know that my own passion to help others came from seeing my father work in charities like the one you describe here, especially the St. Vincent de Paul, in Dublin. Good people devoting their time to help others is great.
We need to keep in mind that the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time and money doing activities whose primary purpose is not altruistic at all. So when we see people doing something altruistic, and doing it well, and getting very good at it, this is wonderful. And I think it’s wonderful that you spent 5,000 hours doing this.
Regarding the Samaritans, at no point did you say or suggest that anything these charities did was misguided or wrong. We’re not talking about people spending vast amounts of money on frivolous or vanity-driven projects. We’re not talking about a billionaire making a charity donation of $100m for a new stadium named after him. Your EA mind was asking “could we do even more?”—but really, the Samaritans were already doing pretty well. They had got very good and efficient at what they do, they were passionate about that, people depended on them providing that—not just the people they helped, but also the public officials whose failures they were helping to cover up (really, there should not be homeless people in a rich country). I’m not sure I would want them to change. As you perfectly observed, they certainly should not change the humanity with which they approach their role and the people they help.
There may be some explanation of the push-back you experienced in personality-tools like Myers-Briggs. In MBTI, there is a spectrum from “Thinking” to “Feeling”. EA is very much on the thinking (T) end of that. It does NOT mean that EA people are less feeling—it means that EA people care, and so they think about how best to help as many people as possible. Feeling (F) people tend to be more focused on the emotional, less logical approach—they see someone who is unhappy, they want to help. They don’t analyse, they just feel and act. What is potentially interesting is how the two extremes often fail to understand each other—the extreme T’s maybe get frustrated at the apparently irrational, non-optimised approach of the F’s, but maybe also they don’t understand the value that the emotional, feeling connection has for the people. Meanwhile, the extreme F’s tend to view T’s as unfeeling and even cynical, because it’s just not how their brain works—while the EA person in you wanted to help even more people, they may have seen your idea as being less caring, more calculating …
Which is why your post is so great. You clearly manage to bridge the divide—your thinking side understands the EA mentality, but your feeling side sees how individual people react to being treated like people.
I don’t have some magical solution to propose. I’m just sharing some thoughts that were inspired by reading this great post.
And one final point: we must never forget that when a person interacts with an organisation like the Samaritans, it can be transformational for them personally, it can be the moment when they decide that they too will devote more time, energy or money to charitable work. And some people impacted in this way will eventually find themselves in the EA community. It’s hard to calculate the impact of this, but I’ll bet a lot of us, like myself, first encountered charity at home and then broadened our horizons.