Thank you for the care & attention you’ve put into this post.
I think spending time attending to your mindset & life circumstances is almost always a very effective thing to do.
In my experience, it has been hard to be genuinely, enduringly helpful to others when I don’t feel okay about myself or my own life.
If I gave away all this money I’ve just got and really angered my parents, who I love so much, and completely broke their trust, then committed suicide, I would still make more of a positive difference to the world than selfishly getting “better” and spending it on myself
This is almost certainly incorrect. Your altruistic impact will probably be distributed over a long time horizon (unless you have inherited a truly staggering sum of money, on the order of billions of dollars, and even then it would probably take many decades to figure out how to give away that money in a sensible way).
This long time horizon entails year after year of trying to make effective things happen. It will be much easier to embark on that journey if your fundamentals are right – enough savings to take care of yourself & those you love, relationships with friends & family in a comfortable place, enough slack to be able to explore many different possibilities for ordering a life.
Thank you for the care & attention you’ve put into this post.
I think spending time attending to your mindset & life circumstances is almost always a very effective thing to do.
In my experience, it has been hard to be genuinely, enduringly helpful to others when I don’t feel okay about myself or my own life.
This is almost certainly incorrect. Your altruistic impact will probably be distributed over a long time horizon (unless you have inherited a truly staggering sum of money, on the order of billions of dollars, and even then it would probably take many decades to figure out how to give away that money in a sensible way).
This long time horizon entails year after year of trying to make effective things happen. It will be much easier to embark on that journey if your fundamentals are right – enough savings to take care of yourself & those you love, relationships with friends & family in a comfortable place, enough slack to be able to explore many different possibilities for ordering a life.