'Why I Donate' Thread

Serving my fellow man has always been a major source of personal meaning for me. I guess that makes me a do-gooder. From late childhood I had already committed myself to giving 10% of my income after taxes, but at a certain point I realized point that actually money is probably one of the greatest things I had to offer was money (and probably the greatest thing I have to offer strangers). I have the luck and privilege of having more money to offer than most, and its decreasing marginal utility means I can help others without making a big sacrifice myself.

I still donate blood, and might donate a kidney someday, but I suspect that when I look back on my life I'll count my cash donations among my proudest accomplishments.

For as long as I can remember, I've struggled with the idea that I'm among the wealthiest people in the history of the human race. I have goals and life projects that most people would never even dream of having the opportunity to pursue.  Who am I to have deserved such a privilege among other people? What makes me so special? I'm not special, and the fact that I have all this privilege and wealth fills me with guilt. By donating a portion of my income to charity and contributing to efforts to help make the world a better place, these feelings of guilt are substantially weakened. That's part of the reason why I give - to not feel as guilty.

Another part is that it makes my life more meaningful. By contributing to a cause greater than myself, my life feels purposeful; hopefully the good I do will have positive effects for long after I'm dead. 

There have been a couple moments in my life when I've been pierced by someone else's suffering, before the "fat relentless ego"^[1] can catch up and mire everything in the soup of self-conscious self-reflective rationalisations. There is something true in those moments, and regular donation is a way to spread that truth out across time. 

I.e. I donate because suffering seems bad, and I make it a habit/ commitment because I'm not always thinking about the suffering of others. 

1. ^{^}

   Fantastic Iris Murdoch quote from The Sovereignty of Good. Great trio of essays, strongly recommended. The content is mostly orthogonal to EA commitments (Murdoch's version of doing good is quite blind to consequences), apart from the clearly serious striving to be good present across the essays.