I’ve just finished the last month in my year-long Foundations [1] project. In this post, I’ll share some reflections about this month’s focus: Service. Soon, I’ll share some takeaways from my readings and experiences from the project as a whole.
In case you’re interested, here are the previous months:
1. Fitness: Start [2], End [3], Books [4].
2. Productivity: Start [5], End [6], Books [7].
3. Money: Start [8], End [9], Books [10].
4. Food: Start [11], End [12], Books [13].
5. Reading: Start [14], End and Books [15].
6. Outreach: Start [16], End [17], Books [18].
7. Sleep: Start [19], End [20], Books [21].
8. Reflection: Start [22], End [23], Books [24].
9. Connection: Start [25], End [26], Books [27].
10. Focus: Start [28], End [29], Books [30].
11. Organization: Start [31], End and Books [32].
Smalls Steps to Service
Compared to my original hope, my actual accomplishments this month in terms of service were relatively minor. I donated blood, and I donated to the top charities recommended by GiveWell [33].
I had hoped to do more volunteering, but it quickly became apparent that my original plan for the month wasn’t going to work. Drop-in volunteering opportunities are rare—most organizations want volunteers who can commit for at least a few months. Additionally, most positions require background checks, orientation training, and more.
Given this, I felt it was a better use of my time to research organizations I might be willing to make a commitment to, rather than rush to try to fit it into my schedule this month. I filled out an application to one organization, which works on refugee resettlement, but I may have to wait awhile until I hear back.
Despite this setback, I tried to adhere to the spirit of the service foundation by helping out as much as I could informally throughout the month.
It may not have been the most time-intensive challenge of the year, but I also think it was one of the more important. Completing all of the readings for the month led me to reflect much more on my own philosophy of service in my life and how this aspect of my thinking had been underdeveloped.
Attitudes, Not Habits, Sustain Our Foundations
When I began this project, my focus was largely on habit change—the kinds of routines and automatic behaviors that I assumed would underpin success with these foundations. So, when I started exercising last year, I assumed much of the success would come from the daily repetition and strengthening of the automatic habit.
In practice, that isn’t what happened. Although I had a good run of exercising at 6 a.m. every day for about 3-4 months, it eventually unraveled as a habit when my wife broke her foot and I had to take over care of our kids in the early morning. Once the habit streak broke, and the dark mornings of winter set in, I stopped working out in the mornings most days.
But I didn’t stop exercising. Instead, I shifted my exercise to the afternoons and evenings, a routine I had been struggling to maintain prior to starting this project. Except, instead of struggling to maintain it, I’ve kept it up almost every day for one year now.
Ultimately, what made a difference for me with regards to fitness wasn’t a habit; it was a shift in attitude and beliefs. Staying in good shape became more important to me. As a result, I manage to fit it in every day now, even though I don’t have an extremely consistent routine.1 [34]
This wasn’t true for just fitness. For eating better, sustainable improvement didn’t rely on having some specific breakfast I ate, but a better general understanding of nutrition and a deeper desire to eat healthier. The same was true for organization, sleep, and reading.
Flipping the Perspective on Altruism
The biggest shift I felt this month, then, wasn’t a concrete habit change, but a change in my attitude towards service.
I entered the month feeling a little guilty about my failure to do more, and, admittedly, I still feel that way. However, I’ve started to see some glimpses of a new perspective on these issues that I haven’t noticed before.
In brief, I think the commonsense way of thinking about morality is to view it as a set of side-constraints on the goal of having the best life possible. Basically, don’t lie, cheat, steal or hurt other people, but otherwise try to live the best life you can.
However, there’s evidence that the better perspective on life, as espoused by many great thinkers, is to invert that idea: self-interest forms a set of side-constraints on the goal of doing the most good you can do with your life. So, don’t sacrifice to the point that you undermine your health, relationships or emotional well-being, but otherwise try to have the greatest beneficial impact on others with your time on Earth.
Such a change in attitude, from the hedonic to the eudaimonic, isn’t simply a matter of ethics, but also of life satisfaction. Happiness and well-being may, ironically, be maximized when they aren’t made the aim of one’s strivings.
I don’t have any special claim here to beneficence. I’m aware there’s still a pretty large gap between my potential and my practice. But I do think the month’s focus, plus all the readings, helped me make a small shift in this direction.
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Thanks to everyone who has followed my project updates all year! In the next essays, I’ll provide some quick takeaways from the 102 books I read this year, followed by some thoughts on the successes (and stumbles) of the project as a whole.
Footnotes
- Interestingly, I can recall having a conversation about this phenomenon with James Clear, prior to the runaway success of his book [35]. Habits, as automatic behaviors, are probably overrated when explaining someone’s success. But behavior change tends to be a necessary precursor to attitudinal change. It may be the case that a habit, sustained for a period of time, is necessary to precipitate some kind of change in attitude or identity, after which the habit itself is not so necessary. Conversely, if you keep up a habit for years but don’t change your underlying attitude, that behavior will tend to revert back to baseline upon any obstacle or friction.