It’s easy to care for our friends. But what about everybody else in our community, your country, the world? Western society tends to overlook that, focusing on our individual success, framing the world as a competitive eat-or-be-eaten arena, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
In the same way that we can embrace proactive giving on a small scale, we can experiment with extending those circles. Just as in loving kindness meditation we wish everybody happiness, we can take steps to bring everybody happiness.
Your social contracts
Remember what you received
Think of all the people who showed up for you. Some did it out of love, some out of obligation, some because they hoped to get something back. But they all helped you to get where you are. Take a moment to recognize that.
Family: The love and care from your parents and siblings, the support from extended family. This won’t be only happy memories, but they put in a lot of effort to get you where you are if you managed to read this blog post.
Community: Teachers, mentors, doctors, that other family that took you on vacation, lovers, friends, investors, people who prayed for you, people who gave you a hug when you needed one, your first employer.
Expanding circles: Who else supported you? Maybe authors, your country with schools and roads, the citizens of other countries through global trade and exploitation, chickens through their lives, the world. That got dark quickly.
Reflecting on what others have done for us can be a powerful way to motivate us to help others. None of us get through life alone. At different points, we have all been supported, guided, forgiven, encouraged, or carried by someone else.
Recognising this can shift us from seeing help as a burden to seeing it as a continuation of the care we have already received. Parents are often the clearest example: for many of us, they gave years of time, energy, patience, and sacrifice before we were able to give anything back. When we remember that, it becomes easier to show up for others now and to pass that care forward.
Cameron
Understand your position
What’s your ability and responsibility to care? Recognizing this doesn’t mean you have to automatically act on it. It’s meant as a framework to help you gain awareness, not to induce guilt or obligation.
Privilege: We all like to believe that our success is down to our genius and hard work but not everybody has the same start. How lucky did you get? Gender? Race? Sexuality? Family? Passport? Physical and mental health? IQ? Grit?
Power: How dependent are others on you? Can they safely voice their needs? Would you in their position? Power could come from you earning more, them not having others to depend on, social status, formal power like guardian/employer.
Resources: What resource do you have to give? Time? Money? Maybe you are very privileged and are close to many people but you just can’t do much right now. That’s ok. Stay aware of your own limits and needs.
Writing this as a white man in his thirties living in Europe with some wealth, good health, and a loving relationship I feel pretty high on the privilege, power, and resources scale. In my day-to-day I just forget about that. For me it takes active effort to bring this back. What helps me: Talking with people who got less lucky, reading fiction, watching documentaries.
Christoph
Give it forward
You have two main resources: Time and money. Use some of both to honor your social contracts. To get an intuition for what’s reasonable, try falling back to the golden rule that exists in all main cultures: “Treat others as you would like to be treated”.
Make time: Based on all of this, who would benefit from your time the most right now? Start there and start small. Experiment with how it feels, how much you can give, and where it becomes too much.
Pay up: In Western society we have a shift from implicit social contracts to explicit ones: Pay your taxes. In more implicit societies that could be remittance payments and community fundraisers. Donate to support your expanding circles.
Team up: Thinking through the above can feel overwhelming and suffocating. So many people, so many needs, so much responsibility. Luckily, you don’t have to do this alone. Find people to join you, switch from overwhelm to excitement.
Start small
Block an hour in your calendar to journal on your position in this world.
Make an effort to talk to people living in different realities. Try to see the world from their perspective.
Identify one specific thing you can do to support. Bet money on doing that.
Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version
This is the kind of stuff I'd love to see and hear more of in EA circles.