I was born into incredible privilege. I can satisfy all of my needs, and many of my wants, and still have plenty of money, time, and energy left over. So what will I do with those extra resources?
I might as well use them to help others, because I wish everyone was as well-off as I am. Plus, figuring out how to help others effectively sounds intellectually interesting.
With whatever portion of my resources I’m devoting to helping others, I want my help to betruly other-focused. In other words, I want to benefit others by their own lights, as much as possible (with whatever portion of resources I’ve devoted to helping others).
One technique that can be helpful is setting a target for how much energy you want to invest in personal vs. altruistic goals. For instance, our co-founder Ben sees making a difference as the top goal for his career and forgoes 10% of his income. However, with the remaining 90% of his income, and most of his remaining non-work time, he does whatever makes him most personally happy. It’s not obvious this is the best tradeoff, but having an explicit decision means he doesn’t have to waste attention and emotional energy reassessing this choice every day, and can focus on the big picture.
I agree with the following statement, which is well put:
I think there are some good examples of this, but they’re not sufficiently prominent in the introductory materials.
One I saw recently, from Luke Muehlhauser:
In a not-very-prominent article in the Key Ideas series, Ben Todd writes:
There’s also You have more than one goal, and that’s fine by Julia Wise.