A Message on Caring – Part 3

There’s a mental shift that happened to me when I first started internalizing scope insensitivity. It is a little difficult to articulate, so I’m going to start with a few stories.

Consider Alice, a software engineer at Amazon in Seattle. Once a month or so, college students show up on street corners with clipboards, looking ever more disillusioned as they struggle to convince people to donate to Doctors Without Borders. Usually, Alice avoids eye contact and goes about her day, but this month they finally manage to corner her. They explain Doctors Without Borders, and she actually has to admit that it sounds like a pretty good cause. She ends up handing them $20 through a combination of guilt, social pressure, and altruism, and then rushes back to work. (Next month, when they show up again, she avoids eye contact.)

Now consider Bob, who has been given the Ice Bucket Challenge by a friend on Facebook. He feels too busy to do the challenge, and instead just donates $100 to ALSA.

Now consider Christine, who is in the college sorority ΑΔΠ. ΑΔΠ is engaged in a competition with ΠΒΦ (another sorority) to see who can raise the most money for the National Breast Cancer Foundation in a week. Christine has a competitive spirit and gets engaged in fundraising, and gives a few hundred dollars herself over the course of the week (especially at times when ΑΔΠ is especially behind).

All three of these people are donating money to charitable organizations, and that’s great. But notice that there’s something similar in these three stories: These donations are largely motivated by a social context. Alice feels obligation and social pressure. Bob feels social pressure and maybe a bit of camaraderie. Christine feels camaraderie and competitiveness. These are all fine motivations, but notice that these motivations are related to the social setting, and only tangentially to the content of the charitable donation.

If you took Alice or Bob or Christine aside and asked them why they aren’t donating all of their time and money to these causes that they apparently believe are worthwhile, they’d look at you funny and they’d probably think you were being rude (with good reason!). If you pressed, they might tell you that money is a little tight right now, or that they would donate more if they were a better person.

But the question would still feel kind of wrong. Giving all of your money away is just not what you do with money. We can all say out loud that people who give all of their possessions away are really great, but behind closed doors we all know that those people are crazy. (Good crazy, perhaps, but crazy all the same.)

This is a mindset that I inhabited for a while. But there’s an alternative mindset that can hit you like a freight train when you start internalizing scope insensitivity.

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