I guess my mistake was interpreting your quick take as a sincere question rather than a rhetorical question. I now realize you were asking a rhetorical question in order to make an argument and not actually asking for people to try to answer your question
Thanks for the consideration, but you were actually correct the first time. This was a genuine question, and my view has adjusted based on both your comments, which I am grateful for. I haven’t agreed with everything that you have said, but that does not mean that I haven’t found it valuable. Thank you again for the time and thought. What I was most hoping to get out of this post was answers to my two other questions: “Has anyone else experienced the grief of realising the extent of this atrocity embedded in casual day-to-day life in middle class parts of wealthy countries? Did you also have a breakdown?”. I pushed back a little on your ‘no’ to the first question, with the hope of answering these too.
I wanted to help alleviate your guilt, which I think when taken to such an extreme can be paralyzing and counterproductive. I’ve seen no evidence it actually helps anyone and lots of evidence of it doing harm.
I totally agree with this. For me it has been at times paralysing, but at times extremely motivating. My aim with the post was to see how I can deal with this grief, since I believe it to be justified. I have changed my lifestyle such that I no longer feel guilt (spending less, donating more, working on impactful things), but the despair remains. Maybe it would have been wiser for me to totally avoid it, but having these ideas is not something I regret. When I try to motivate others to action, I follow the evidence that you mention and am more likely to use ‘drowning child’ style reflections about positive interventions that can be made.
Many families are affected by the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust. It seems completely disrespectful to them to try to turn their suffering and loss into effective altruist rhetoric.
I’m Jewish, and highlighting the comparable moral atrocity has been useful for me. I know that won’t be the case for everyone, and it can definitely be a triggering topic.
But I think it would be a stretch to try to apply the concept of “willful ignorance” to global poverty or the world economic system, since people’s ignorance of the “hidden violence” you describe — if it indeed exists — is genuine and not a ruse to try to avoid culpability.
This is a really good point, and definitely helps to diminish the size of the grief. I have vaguely thought along these lines before, but I like the way that you formulate it. I think there is still some gray area here: a lot of people I know do continue to work in jobs that they know are destructive. But I agree that it is not the case for most.
So, I have indulged the Nazi analogies enough. I will not entertain this any more.
This sounds like this exchange has been unpleasant for you, and I am sorry to hear that. I hope some of the detail in this reply have softened some of this, but regardless I hope that you were able to enjoy some parts of it, and continue to make other valuable contributions on this forum. Take care.
In that case, I apologize. I don’t know you and I don’t know your background or intentions, and apparently I was wrong about both.
I think the experience you’re describing — of feeling a sense of guilt or grief or sadness or obligation that’s so big you don’t know how to handle it — is something that probably the majority of people who have participated in the effective altruist movement have felt at one time or another. I’ve seen many people describe feeling this way, both online and in real life.
When I was an organizer at my university’s effective altruist group, several of the friends I made through that group expressed these kinds of feelings. This stuff weighed on us heavily.
I haven’t read the book Strangers Drowning, but I’ve heard it described, and I know it’s about people who go to extreme lengths to answer the call of moral obligation. Maybe that book would interest you. I don’t know.
This topic goes beyond the domain of ethical theory into a territory that is different parts existential, spiritual, and psychotherapeutic. It can be dangerous not to handle this topic with care because it can get out of control. It can contribute to clinical depression and anxiety, it can motivate people to inflict pain on others, or people can become overzealous, overconfident, and adopt an unfair sense of superiority to other people.
I find it useful to draw on examples from fantasy and sci-fi to think about this sort of thing. In the Marvel universe, the Infinity Stones can only be wielded safely by god-like beings and normal humans or mortals die when they try to use them. The Stones even pose a danger to some superhuman beings, like Thanos and the Hulk. In Star Trek: Picard, there is an ancient message left by an unknown, advanced civilization. When people try to watch/listen to the message, it drives most of them to madness. There are other examples of this sort of thing — something so powerful that coming into contact with it, even coming near it, is incredibly dangerous.
To try to reckon with the suffering of the whole world is like that. Not impossible, not something to be avoided forever, but something dangerous to be approached with caution. People who approach it recklessly can destroy themselves, destroy others, or succumb to madness.
There is a connection between reckoning with the world’s suffering and one’s own personal suffering. In two different ways. First, how we think and feel about one influences how we think and feel about the other. Second, I think a lot of the wisdom about how people should reckon with their own suffering probably applies well to reckoning with the world’s suffering. With someone’s personal trauma or grief, we know (or at least people who go to therapy know) that it’s important for that person to find a safe container to express their thoughts and feelings about it. Talking about it just anywhere or to just anyone, without regard for whether that’s a safe container, is unsafe and unwise.
We know that — after the initial shock of a loss or a traumatic event — it isn’t healthy for a person to focus on their trauma or grief all the time, to the exclusion of other things. But trying to completely avoid forever it isn’t a good strategy either.
We know that the path is never simple, clean, or easy. Connection to other people who have been through or who are going through similar things is often helpful, as is the counsel of a helping professional like a therapist or social worker (or in some cases a spiritual or religious leader), but the help doesn’t come in the form of outlining a straightforward step-by-step process. What helps someone reckon with or make sense of their own emotional suffering is often personal to that individual and not generally applicable.
For example, in the beautiful — and unfairly maligned — memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about a point in her life when she feels completely crushed, and when she’s seriously, clinically unwell. She describes how when nothing else feels enjoyable or interesting, she discovers desperately needed pleasure in learning Italian.
I don’t think in the lowest times of my life I would find any pleasure in learning Italian. I don’t think in the best or most mediocre times of my life I would find any pleasure in learning Italian. The specific thing that helps is usually not generalizable to everyone who’s suffering (which, ultimately, is everyone) and is usually not predictable in advance, including by the person who it ends up helping.
So, the question of how to face the world’s darkness or the world’s suffering, or how to recover from a breakdown when the world’s darkness or suffering seems too much, is an answerable question, but it’s not answerable in a universal, simple, or direct way. It’s about your relationship with the universe, which is something for you and the universe to figure out.
As I indicated above, I like to take things from fantasy and sci-fi to make sense of the world. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell laments that society lacks modern myths. He names Star Wars as the rare exception. (Return of the Jedi came out a few years before The Power of Myth was recorded.) Nowadays, there are lots of modern myths, if you count things like Star Trek, Marvel, X-Men, and Dungeons & Dragons.
I also rely a lot on spiritual and religious teachings. This episode of the RobCast with Rob Bell is relevant to this topic and a great episode. Another great episode, also relevant, is “Light Heavy Light”.
In the more psychotherapeutic realm, I love everything Brené Brown has done — her books, her TV show, her audio programs, her TED Talks. I’ve never heard her directly talk about global poverty, but she talks about so much that is relevant to the questions you asked in one way or another. In her book Rising Strong, she talks about her emotional difficulty facing (literally and figuratively) the people in her city who are homeless. Initially, she decided what she needed to do to resolve this emotional difficulty was to do more to help. She did, but she didn’t feel any differently. This led to a deeper exploration.
In her book Braving the Wilderness, she talks about how she processed collective tragedies like the Challenger disaster and the killings of the kids and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This is what you’re asking about — how to process grief over tragedies that are collective and shared by the world, not personal just to you.
Finally, a warning. In my opinion, a lot of people in effective altruism, including on the Effective Altruism Forum, have not found healthy ways of reckoning with the suffering of the world. There are a few who are so broken by the suffering of the world that they believe life was a mistake and we would be better off returning to non-existence. (In the Dungeons & Dragons lore, these people would be like the worshippers of Shar.) Many are swept up in another kind of madness: eschatological prophecies around artificial general intelligence. Many numb, detach, or intellectualize rather than feel. A lot of energy goes into fighting.
So, the wisdom you are seeking you will probably not find here. You will find good debates on charity effectiveness. Maybe some okay discussions of ethical theory. Not wisdom on how to deal with the human condition.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I appreciate your apology and adjustment of tone. I hope that this can inform future dialogues in a way that is helpful for you and for the movement.
I’m not sure whether strangers drowning has the answers I’m hoping for. I listened to a podcast about it, and mostly it sounds like the people who face the world in that way end up extremely unhappy.
Your advice about a container is very wise. It’s a useful technique I discovered through therapy and I’m glad that more people know about it, and to have that faith in the idea validated.
I agree with you that the answer to this question will likely be very individual. Sometimes to the extent where it can be quite lonely.
Thanks for the RobCast recommendation. I’ll listen to it. Likewise for Rising Strong. I like D&D but have struggled with most scifi, apart from more feminist sci fi like Ursula LeGuin.
I absolutely agree with your sentiments on the ability of EAs on average for processing these feelings. I’d love to make it a bigger part of EA—I think many people could hugely benefit from it. And also I believe that it makes your ability to do good so much greater—it has for me at least. Both in terms of having energy to take action, and
If you’re looking for recommendations for your own journey on this, I can really recommend reading ‘a field guide to climate anxiety’. It helped me a lot.
Thanks for the consideration, but you were actually correct the first time. This was a genuine question, and my view has adjusted based on both your comments, which I am grateful for. I haven’t agreed with everything that you have said, but that does not mean that I haven’t found it valuable. Thank you again for the time and thought.
What I was most hoping to get out of this post was answers to my two other questions: “Has anyone else experienced the grief of realising the extent of this atrocity embedded in casual day-to-day life in middle class parts of wealthy countries? Did you also have a breakdown?”. I pushed back a little on your ‘no’ to the first question, with the hope of answering these too.
I totally agree with this. For me it has been at times paralysing, but at times extremely motivating. My aim with the post was to see how I can deal with this grief, since I believe it to be justified. I have changed my lifestyle such that I no longer feel guilt (spending less, donating more, working on impactful things), but the despair remains. Maybe it would have been wiser for me to totally avoid it, but having these ideas is not something I regret. When I try to motivate others to action, I follow the evidence that you mention and am more likely to use ‘drowning child’ style reflections about positive interventions that can be made.
I’m Jewish, and highlighting the comparable moral atrocity has been useful for me. I know that won’t be the case for everyone, and it can definitely be a triggering topic.
This is a really good point, and definitely helps to diminish the size of the grief. I have vaguely thought along these lines before, but I like the way that you formulate it. I think there is still some gray area here: a lot of people I know do continue to work in jobs that they know are destructive. But I agree that it is not the case for most.
This sounds like this exchange has been unpleasant for you, and I am sorry to hear that. I hope some of the detail in this reply have softened some of this, but regardless I hope that you were able to enjoy some parts of it, and continue to make other valuable contributions on this forum. Take care.
In that case, I apologize. I don’t know you and I don’t know your background or intentions, and apparently I was wrong about both.
I think the experience you’re describing — of feeling a sense of guilt or grief or sadness or obligation that’s so big you don’t know how to handle it — is something that probably the majority of people who have participated in the effective altruist movement have felt at one time or another. I’ve seen many people describe feeling this way, both online and in real life.
When I was an organizer at my university’s effective altruist group, several of the friends I made through that group expressed these kinds of feelings. This stuff weighed on us heavily.
I haven’t read the book Strangers Drowning, but I’ve heard it described, and I know it’s about people who go to extreme lengths to answer the call of moral obligation. Maybe that book would interest you. I don’t know.
This topic goes beyond the domain of ethical theory into a territory that is different parts existential, spiritual, and psychotherapeutic. It can be dangerous not to handle this topic with care because it can get out of control. It can contribute to clinical depression and anxiety, it can motivate people to inflict pain on others, or people can become overzealous, overconfident, and adopt an unfair sense of superiority to other people.
I find it useful to draw on examples from fantasy and sci-fi to think about this sort of thing. In the Marvel universe, the Infinity Stones can only be wielded safely by god-like beings and normal humans or mortals die when they try to use them. The Stones even pose a danger to some superhuman beings, like Thanos and the Hulk. In Star Trek: Picard, there is an ancient message left by an unknown, advanced civilization. When people try to watch/listen to the message, it drives most of them to madness. There are other examples of this sort of thing — something so powerful that coming into contact with it, even coming near it, is incredibly dangerous.
To try to reckon with the suffering of the whole world is like that. Not impossible, not something to be avoided forever, but something dangerous to be approached with caution. People who approach it recklessly can destroy themselves, destroy others, or succumb to madness.
There is a connection between reckoning with the world’s suffering and one’s own personal suffering. In two different ways. First, how we think and feel about one influences how we think and feel about the other. Second, I think a lot of the wisdom about how people should reckon with their own suffering probably applies well to reckoning with the world’s suffering. With someone’s personal trauma or grief, we know (or at least people who go to therapy know) that it’s important for that person to find a safe container to express their thoughts and feelings about it. Talking about it just anywhere or to just anyone, without regard for whether that’s a safe container, is unsafe and unwise.
We know that — after the initial shock of a loss or a traumatic event — it isn’t healthy for a person to focus on their trauma or grief all the time, to the exclusion of other things. But trying to completely avoid forever it isn’t a good strategy either.
We know that the path is never simple, clean, or easy. Connection to other people who have been through or who are going through similar things is often helpful, as is the counsel of a helping professional like a therapist or social worker (or in some cases a spiritual or religious leader), but the help doesn’t come in the form of outlining a straightforward step-by-step process. What helps someone reckon with or make sense of their own emotional suffering is often personal to that individual and not generally applicable.
For example, in the beautiful — and unfairly maligned — memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about a point in her life when she feels completely crushed, and when she’s seriously, clinically unwell. She describes how when nothing else feels enjoyable or interesting, she discovers desperately needed pleasure in learning Italian.
I don’t think in the lowest times of my life I would find any pleasure in learning Italian. I don’t think in the best or most mediocre times of my life I would find any pleasure in learning Italian. The specific thing that helps is usually not generalizable to everyone who’s suffering (which, ultimately, is everyone) and is usually not predictable in advance, including by the person who it ends up helping.
So, the question of how to face the world’s darkness or the world’s suffering, or how to recover from a breakdown when the world’s darkness or suffering seems too much, is an answerable question, but it’s not answerable in a universal, simple, or direct way. It’s about your relationship with the universe, which is something for you and the universe to figure out.
As I indicated above, I like to take things from fantasy and sci-fi to make sense of the world. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell laments that society lacks modern myths. He names Star Wars as the rare exception. (Return of the Jedi came out a few years before The Power of Myth was recorded.) Nowadays, there are lots of modern myths, if you count things like Star Trek, Marvel, X-Men, and Dungeons & Dragons.
I also rely a lot on spiritual and religious teachings. This episode of the RobCast with Rob Bell is relevant to this topic and a great episode. Another great episode, also relevant, is “Light Heavy Light”.
In the more psychotherapeutic realm, I love everything Brené Brown has done — her books, her TV show, her audio programs, her TED Talks. I’ve never heard her directly talk about global poverty, but she talks about so much that is relevant to the questions you asked in one way or another. In her book Rising Strong, she talks about her emotional difficulty facing (literally and figuratively) the people in her city who are homeless. Initially, she decided what she needed to do to resolve this emotional difficulty was to do more to help. She did, but she didn’t feel any differently. This led to a deeper exploration.
In her book Braving the Wilderness, she talks about how she processed collective tragedies like the Challenger disaster and the killings of the kids and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This is what you’re asking about — how to process grief over tragedies that are collective and shared by the world, not personal just to you.
Finally, a warning. In my opinion, a lot of people in effective altruism, including on the Effective Altruism Forum, have not found healthy ways of reckoning with the suffering of the world. There are a few who are so broken by the suffering of the world that they believe life was a mistake and we would be better off returning to non-existence. (In the Dungeons & Dragons lore, these people would be like the worshippers of Shar.) Many are swept up in another kind of madness: eschatological prophecies around artificial general intelligence. Many numb, detach, or intellectualize rather than feel. A lot of energy goes into fighting.
So, the wisdom you are seeking you will probably not find here. You will find good debates on charity effectiveness. Maybe some okay discussions of ethical theory. Not wisdom on how to deal with the human condition.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I appreciate your apology and adjustment of tone. I hope that this can inform future dialogues in a way that is helpful for you and for the movement.
I’m not sure whether strangers drowning has the answers I’m hoping for. I listened to a podcast about it, and mostly it sounds like the people who face the world in that way end up extremely unhappy.
Your advice about a container is very wise. It’s a useful technique I discovered through therapy and I’m glad that more people know about it, and to have that faith in the idea validated.
I agree with you that the answer to this question will likely be very individual. Sometimes to the extent where it can be quite lonely.
Thanks for the RobCast recommendation. I’ll listen to it. Likewise for Rising Strong. I like D&D but have struggled with most scifi, apart from more feminist sci fi like Ursula LeGuin.
I absolutely agree with your sentiments on the ability of EAs on average for processing these feelings. I’d love to make it a bigger part of EA—I think many people could hugely benefit from it. And also I believe that it makes your ability to do good so much greater—it has for me at least. Both in terms of having energy to take action, and
If you’re looking for recommendations for your own journey on this, I can really recommend reading ‘a field guide to climate anxiety’. It helped me a lot.