I ended up making a post based on Kuhan’s. It’s somewhat shorter and has less of a focus on careers. I ended up getting 14 reactions (for reference, I have a bit over 600 friends on Facebook). I wonder if accompanying the post with a new profile picture would have been a good way to get more engagement haha.
My birthday is today! For the past two years, I did birthday fundraisers, but this year, instead of gifts or donations, I’m asking for just five minutes of your attention.
In eighth grade, I discovered a social impact–oriented career site called 80000hours.org and learned about a new social movement called effective altruism.
Previously, I knew about various issues like environmental degradation or extreme global poverty, but never really knew what to really do about it. I had learned a bit from UNICEF posters around school about how cheap it was to provide essential goods and medicine in parts of the developing world, but never saw any examples of ordinary people taking that opportunity seriously.
I had learned about income inequality of the United States, but not the much more extreme inequality on a global scale. It turns out that someone making $70,000 per year is in the top 1% of the global income distribution, while 700 million people live on less than $2 per day (~$700 per year, and this is adjusted for lower cost of living in poorer countries). Millions of people—often children—die each year of easily preventable ailments such as malaria and vitamin A deficiency.
Similarly, all I knew of animal farming was idyllic illustrations on milk cartons and meat packaging, and never learned about the horrific conditions in which farmed animals are raised in truly are, and the terrifying scale of the cruelty. Over 40 billion land animals and 40 billion fish from factory farms were killed for food in 2019, but the issue gets little attention compared to other well-known causes.
And then there’s the issue of safeguarding our future. Existential risks to civilization are estimated by philosopher Toby Ord and others to be more than 10% likely in the coming century, partly due to potential misuse of emerging technologies such as synthetic biology or advanced artificial intelligence. But if all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity could survive for incalculable years, reaching heights of flourishing unimaginable today.
So in tenth grade, I decided to take the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 10% of my income in my future career* (1% of my 红包🧧 money while a student lol) to high-impact charities. As I struggled with depression through high school due to chronic sleep deprivation and academic stress, the commitment to trying to make the biggest positive impact on the world that I could was something that kept me going.
*Dear siblings: yes, I will make sure to build up months of savings and pay off student debt first, etc.
I ended up making a post based on Kuhan’s. It’s somewhat shorter and has less of a focus on careers. I ended up getting 14 reactions (for reference, I have a bit over 600 friends on Facebook). I wonder if accompanying the post with a new profile picture would have been a good way to get more engagement haha.
Ooh I like the changing profile picture idea, can I add that to the post? (I’ll give you credit of course)
Yeah sure!