I disagree that ‘giving cause it feels good’ isn’t an EA reason to give. It’s about the head and the heart right? I give because it feels good, and it feels even better knowing that where you give is high impact and if giving makes you feel good then that’s encouraging to others as well :)
And I also started giving when I had my student loan to pay off—maybe if my loan was bigger I would have thought about starting with smaller donations like with The Life You Can Save, but my main motivation was that if the debt is an excuse now, then buying a house will be an excuse later, and then all the other life excuses and I will never do it. So I leapt. People live really well on less than I did even with the donations and the loan repayments, it does mean thinking more about ‘fun’ activities’ though I found that I could still do all those things and where I spent less was on ‘stuff’ - things you buy but don’t really need anyways.
Thanks for mentioning this—I totally see what you’re pointing at here, and I think you make valid points re: there always being more excuses later.
I just meant to emphasize that “giving now feels good” wasn’t something I was prepared to justify in terms of its actual impact on the world; if I found out that this good feeling was justified in terms of impact, that’d be great, but if it turned out that I could give up that good feeling in order to have a better impact, I’d try my best to do so.
I disagree that ‘giving cause it feels good’ isn’t an EA reason to give. It’s about the head and the heart right? I give because it feels good, and it feels even better knowing that where you give is high impact and if giving makes you feel good then that’s encouraging to others as well :) And I also started giving when I had my student loan to pay off—maybe if my loan was bigger I would have thought about starting with smaller donations like with The Life You Can Save, but my main motivation was that if the debt is an excuse now, then buying a house will be an excuse later, and then all the other life excuses and I will never do it. So I leapt. People live really well on less than I did even with the donations and the loan repayments, it does mean thinking more about ‘fun’ activities’ though I found that I could still do all those things and where I spent less was on ‘stuff’ - things you buy but don’t really need anyways.
Thanks for mentioning this—I totally see what you’re pointing at here, and I think you make valid points re: there always being more excuses later.
I just meant to emphasize that “giving now feels good” wasn’t something I was prepared to justify in terms of its actual impact on the world; if I found out that this good feeling was justified in terms of impact, that’d be great, but if it turned out that I could give up that good feeling in order to have a better impact, I’d try my best to do so.