See also ../../Charities & Donations

I spent a lot of time in my life where I didn’t quite have enough money to do everything. This taught me the value of it, and also showed me how money can be a blocker. Now that I have money, I want to prevent others from being in the same situation. How?

Charity

There are people who are clearly in need of money, and clearly ask for it. There are paths to vet the organizations, and there are ways to easily donate to them, and even have that matched by your employer to maximise impact (see Benevity). Charities can often feel less personal, but it feels like they are one of the main drivers of actual impact.

Grow together

This is what I’d love to do more of. I’d like to help the people around me grow, I’d like to remove obstacles and risk from their lives. But that seems pretty patronizing, right? What if they don’t want to be helped? If I did it “My way”, shouldn’t they get to do things their way?

How would I have accepted help? E.g I accepted the prize money for having high grades in highschool. I would have probably accepted a degree-based scholarship. It feels like you’ve earned those things, rather than having them handed to you. I think the feeling of earning something is pretty important to keep someone from feeling like they’re a charity case.

Structural

You can only go so far with just solving individual problems before you figure out that there’s a structural issue that needs solving.

“It’s the economy you idiot” Nixon, or whatever

But this whole thing reeks of Effective Altruism, a movement I find anywhere from self-serving to sociopathic. You have to keep a balance of making life better for the people living today, while making a change for the people living tomorrow to have a better baseline. I don’t know which of the two I’m better suited for.

Giving vs Creating Impact

There’s a quote bouncing in my head “If you want to feel you are giving, you start your own charity. If you want to make an impact, you donate to an existing one”. I don’t know who said that, someone on Twitter and I mangled it probably. But the sentiment is that there’s a distance between making a difference, and feeling like you’re the good guy.

I get that. It’s important to feel you are giving, but the higher goal should be making an impact. I guess?