Crosspost.
The best charities save lives for a few thousand dollars. If you earn $100,000 per year and give away 10%, you can save about 100 people over the course of your life. I think we generally aren’t good at visualizing what’s really at stake. So here is me attempting vaguely to grok 100 lives.
Ted Bundy killed around 30 people. So by saving 100 lives, you’ll save more lives than Ted Bundy killed. You’ll save more lives than if you prevented all of his killings.
100 lives is twenty-five families of four. It’s ten families of ten.
It’s about 1% of annual U.S. gun homicides.
It’s a hundred extra children who get to live to adulthood, rather than being snuffed out in childhood by a horrible disease, in agony and terror. That’s several kindergarten classes. An amount of child death prevented equivalent to stopping many school shootings. Pick some kindergartener you know—imagine that you could prevent them and everyone in the two neighboring classes from dying. That is how much death you personally can prevent.
Imagine your mother, father, and brother dying. Multiply that by 33. Add one. That’s 100 deaths.
100 lives is about the number you could save in two years if you pulled a different child out of a burning building every week.
The saddest things I’ve ever read are funeral poems written in the wake of a child’s death. Reading them is just about the only time I cry, but I think it’s important to read them to remember what we’re fighting against. Here’s one such example:
Could I have another moment?
Another kiss, another smile,
One more chance to watch you sleep
Or just to sit awhile.
Another:
God took you from me suddenly
I could only sit and cry
Hold her tightly in your arms
Kiss my girl goodbye
On that website, there are 19 such poems. 19 is 19% of 100.
The best charities that help animals prevent animals from spending about ten years in a cage per dollar. So if you give away 10% of your income to effective charities, each year, you can prevent animals from spending about 50,000 years in a cage. Over the course of 40 years, that will mean that you personally will be responsible for preventing animals from spending about 2 million years in cages.
A human life is about 29,000 days. So this would be like if every 20 minutes, you freed a chicken from a cage that would have otherwise confined it for an entire year.
2 million years is about the years in 25,000 human lives. So the total amount of time you kept animals out of cages for is 25,000 times greater than the number of years in a human life.
2 million years is about 1,000 times the length of time since Jesus was born. It’s about 400 times the amount of time since the earliest Egyptian empire. It would be as if you kept 400 chickens out of a cage for the entire time since the ancient Egyptians first roamed the Earth. As if for the whole time since Rome fell, you’d kept 1,300 chickens out of a cage.
On average, dogs live about 10 years. 2 million years is equivalent to freeing 200,000 dogs from a cage, where they’d otherwise live for their whole lives.
You can prevent millions of years of confinement or hundreds of deaths. Don’t lose sight of what that is.
Hi Matthew. Great post. I really like combinations of numbers and story-telling. I think they are a core motivation for people getting involved in effective giving.
Thanks.