I’m now entering the final month of my year-long Foundations [1] project.1 [2]
This month’s focus is service.
While the previous foundations have all focused on making one’s own life better, this one centers on contributing to the well-being of others. I thought service would be a good capstone for the project, a reminder that the point of life is not self-optimization, but to contribute in a meaningful way to the world at large.
For those interested, you can read the previous eleven months of foundations updates here:
- Fitness: Start [3], End [4], Books [5].
- Productivity: Start [6], End [7], Books [8].
- Money: Start [9], End [10], Books [11].
- Food: Start [12], End [13], Books [14].
- Reading: Start [15], End and Books [16].
- Outreach: Start [17], End [18], Books [19].
- Sleep: Start [20], End [21], Books [22].
- Reflection: Start [23], End [24], Books [25].
- Connection: Start [26], End [27], Books [28].
- Focus: Start [29], End [30], Books [31].
- Organization: Start [32], End and Books [33].
The Paradox of Altruism
Service is a component of nearly all of the world’s religions, and has long been considered a central part of the good life. Outside of a few cynics, nearly everyone agrees that helping other people is both good and good for you—we feel happiest when our lives are rich with meaningful pursuits.
But there’s a bit of a paradox when it comes to altruism.
For one, many of the benefits of service, such as meaningful goals, social approval, and avoidance of excessive self-rumination, come from the selfless intention behind the acts. If you only join a charity to get networking contacts, you won’t feel as good about your time there as you would if you were genuinely motivated by the cause.
Conversely, many of the most socially-beneficial activities don’t seem to align neatly with what affords the greatest psychic benefits of service.
There’s a case to be made that the most altruistic thing you could do would be to earn the highest possible salary and donate as much as you can to charities that assist the desperately poor. This means a hard-driving lawyer who takes on high-paying corporate work and donates most his income may actually be contributing more than a public defender who devotes her career to helping (relatively) well-off first-world clients.
Similarly, while volunteering your time may seem more charitable than earning an income through work, it may be the case that your paid work contributes more than your unpaid labor. Taking care of family also seems to straddle the divide—hardly a selfless act, but also contributing to the common good.
Given these debates, what should “count” as service? Does working a nice job and giving some excess money away count? Or must you volunteer your time and energy? Does volunteering that benefits you in some way you count? Or must the act be entirely selfless? What about helping friends and family? Does that count, or is true service given only to anonymous strangers who couldn’t plausibly reciprocate?
My own perspective for this month is to cast a wide net: to assume that the motivations for helping are pluralistic, and so different kinds of service probably accrue different kinds of benefits. Still, I want to be mindful of the differences of service among being an attentive father, volunteering to community causes, and philanthropy aimed at maximizing the benefit of each dollar donated.
How Selfish Am I?
In assessing my own altruism, I definitely feel a gap between my ideal and my actual behavior.
I don’t currently volunteer anywhere. I volunteered quite a bit while in university, but since then I haven’t volunteered regularly. Also, if I reflect on my past volunteering, much of it was with student organizations and community events, rather than helping the genuinely needy.
In terms of philanthropy, I used to donate more of my income than I do now. Some of that seems due to the increased financial pressures of raising children and living in an expensive city. Some of it was probably due to some not-entirely-irrational fears about the longevity of my business and current livelihood. But, given my actual life circumstances, the reduction in charity seems miserly.
In terms of a more direct impact I make with my career, it’s hard to say. I’d like to believe that my work benefits people, but the net benefits of online punditry are hard to pin down. After all, if I’m ultimately wrong about my beliefs or the core advice I offer people, my work’s net contribution to society might actually be negative. Thus, I think there’s more uncertainty in estimating my work’s impact than there would be for say, a doctor, teacher or accountant.
I’d like to think I’m fairly generous with friends and family, but this too, seems to blur the distinction between service and self-improvement.
Even the ethics of my consumption choices is debatable. I’ve long believed that some form of vegetarianism is probably2 [34] better for the world, but I eat seafood, eggs and dairy. The ethics of those choices are unclear to me, and it may be that my choices make the world worse off—depending on how you count it, eggs and shrimp contribute more to suffering than beef.
All of this is to say that the gap between the potential good I could do and what I actually accomplish seems unconscionably large.
Low-Hanging Fruit
The flip side of having a large potential-actual gap in a foundation is that improvement tends to be quite attainable. It’s easy to make significant improvements to your health if you never exercise, but it’s much harder to increase your VO2 max if you already run daily.
Thus, while my self-assessment is ego-bruising, I am hopeful that I can improve my overall service contribution with some effort.
Some things I want to do:
1. Donate more money.
Given my relative abundance, I should donate more to charity, especially to charities that are highly cost-effective in terms of the benefits they provide. From an effective altruism [35] standpoint, this is probably the most beneficial thing I can do.
2. Volunteer regularly.
I’d like to start volunteering more. I think my ideal would be a once-per-week commitment, but that may be tricky in the beginning since it may not line up neatly with the needs of different organizations.
3. Be more generous with friends, family and community.
While helping close contacts is not an entirely selfless act, I do think it is an important part of cultivating a more service-minded personality. I think I could take a more active role in seeking out ways to help people around me.
4. Improve the likely impact of my work.
This one seems hardest, but it is potentially one of the more consequential aspects of my service.
To me, the most important factor is the overall quality of my advice and ideas. If my ideas are better than the most-likely substitute, then my work benefits the average reader. If my ideas are worse than that, my work makes my readers worse off.
I don’t think this is a trivial assessment. In my mind, the online ecosystem is full of bad ideas turned into popular content. I have been wrong about important things, and I think that wrongness made my advice worse than it could have been (and possibly worse than nearby alternatives).
Since I’d never knowingly share bad advice, the problem I face is ignorance. How can I improve the ultimate, unknowable value of my work? I suspect the best answer is to adopt good epistemic and communication practices, things like being honest and transparent, doing my homework, and deferring to people who likely know more than I do about a topic. I can’t guarantee this will result in the best advice, but it does seem likely to help.
Still, I suspect a big factor that will ultimately influence the quality of my work is the quality of my learning. If I learn more, and can increase the quality of my advice and ideas, then the chance that my career is a net positive goes up.
_ _ _
Given these more nebulous ambitions are too large to implement in just one month, I’m going to focus most of my efforts on the first three: getting back into the habit of charitable giving, attempting to find volunteering opportunities in the following month, and trying to be more active about helping out in my home and community.
Toward the end of the month, I’ll share some reflections from my research in this topic, as well as how my attempts at service went over the month.
Footnotes
- I’m working on my personal Foundations project three months ahead of the Foundations course [36] and posts here. Technically, I’m already on the 23rd of this month—I extended the previous month owing to a family vacation—but I’m keeping the monthly posting schedule for consistency.
- I have a lot of uncertainty regarding how to appropriately weigh animal rights in my overall ethics. [37]