It can feel frustrating to be separated from your impact. People in EA have some capacity to resist this, in that we’re more likely to give money to help strangers and non-cute animals and people who live in the future, but that doesn’t mean we’re immune.
Giving money from my basement in Wisconsin while I earned-to-give just didn’t feel as good as going to work every day does now. I knew intellectually that I was probably making an impact, but I didn’t have any mental image of what the impact looked like, or an especially clear story I could tell myself. Now that I work for CEA, I see the “story” every day, and I’ve seen dozens of examples of my work being directly linked to impact.
An answer from theory:
It can be hard to trust other people to do good. I’d guess that EA has an unusually high proportion of people who, consciously or not, endorse statements like “if I don’t do it, no one will” or “to get something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself”.
Even if it’s likely that the person running Organization X is probably better at it than me, I still might have lingering thoughts of “if I could pay myself to run Org X instead of paying them, the world would be better off”.
An answer from personal experience:
It can feel frustrating to be separated from your impact. People in EA have some capacity to resist this, in that we’re more likely to give money to help strangers and non-cute animals and people who live in the future, but that doesn’t mean we’re immune.
Giving money from my basement in Wisconsin while I earned-to-give just didn’t feel as good as going to work every day does now. I knew intellectually that I was probably making an impact, but I didn’t have any mental image of what the impact looked like, or an especially clear story I could tell myself. Now that I work for CEA, I see the “story” every day, and I’ve seen dozens of examples of my work being directly linked to impact.
An answer from theory:
It can be hard to trust other people to do good. I’d guess that EA has an unusually high proportion of people who, consciously or not, endorse statements like “if I don’t do it, no one will” or “to get something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself”.
Even if it’s likely that the person running Organization X is probably better at it than me, I still might have lingering thoughts of “if I could pay myself to run Org X instead of paying them, the world would be better off”.