Year of Discovery (Week 25: Effective Altruism and Shame)

This week, I hurt my brain. I went down many rabbit holes of conversations, thinking and research, hit a couple of road blocks, backed up to navigate down another direction and hit more road blocks. The process of discovery is full of passageways with some leading to hope and excitement and others leading to anxiety, doubt and the unknown. But at the end of the day, I’m getting more clarity on the big picture why and my broader direction — what’s left is to figure out the micro steps to getting there. While I am a fairly action-oriented person, what’s kept me grounded is a practice of letting go of judgement, a constant reminder that we have long lives and to practice patience and long-term thinking. I’m particularly grateful to my partner, friends and community too, who have been extremely supportive through the ups and downs of my journey.

I’m also grateful that my weekly reflections continue to spark more curiosity. Today, I’m writing about effective altruism and shame.

Effective Altruism | Living Meaningful Lives

I spent some time this week deepening my understanding of effective altruism, a philosophy and social movement that advocates the use of evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others. On Wikipedia:

• Altruism refers to improving the lives of others — as opposed to egoism, which emphasizes only self-interest.
• Effectiveness refers to doing the most good with whatever resources are available — as opposed to only doing some amount of good — as well as determining what is the most good by using evidence and reasoning — as opposed to only doing what feels good or appears intuitively appealing.

Effective altruism is centered around a core philosophical question: How can we, individually and collectively, do the most good? Its belief is underlined in the answer to: If you didn’t have a choice over where you were born, what type of values would you want the world you are born in to have? Often people would say a world that cares for others and one that prioritizes the wellbeing of all.

So if the goal is to end or decrease the suffering of all, the challenge is how to do so most effectively:

• “What counts as ‘the most good’?”
• “How can I do the most good, given what others are likely to do?”
• “Does everyone’s suffering count equally?”
• “Does ‘the most good you can do’ mean that it is wrong to give priority to one’s own children?”
• “What about other values, like justice, freedom, equality, and knowledge?”
• “Can everyone practice effective altruism?”
• Is it better to think of effective altruism “as an ‘opportunity’ or an ‘obligation’?”

William MacAskill, a notable figure within the movement and Associate Professor at Oxford, argues that we should focus on problems that are large in scale, solvable, and neglected, and that one of our top global priorities should be to safeguard humanity’s vast future. He says that we can do so through 1) being intentional about our work and career and 2) significant charitable donations.

1. MacAskill founded 80,000 Hours, which urges that because each of us has 80000 hours in our careers, how can we best use them to help solve the world’s most pressing problems? The organization shares key ideas on how to have more impact in your career, highlights the world’s biggest and most neglected problems and shares tools on how to make concrete career plans.
2. Moral philosopher Toby Ord founded Giving What We Can (GWWC), an organization whose members have pledged to donate at least 10% of their income for the remainder of their working lives to the causes that they believe are the most effective. GWWC was founded in 2009 by Toby Ord, a moral philosopher, who lives on £18,000 ($27,000) per year and donates the remainder of his income to charity.

For me, learning about these different initiatives made me think more about appreciating my time and money as important tools to lessen suffering in the world. They provide strong arguments for how to think critically and carefully about the careers we choose to embark on and how to commit money and/or time towards making the world a more just, equitable, and healthier world for all. They’re also making me think more about applying the same rigor I place on money I invest towards the money I donate: to take time to understand the impact ROI of each dollar that is given — and to leverage existing organizations that are already doing the data-driven work to figure this out (like Give Well).

In this podcast, MacAskill talks about why it’s hard to encourage people to donate some of their wealth and the overall effective altruism movement. He also discusses how donating $1 today to a high-impact cause will yield a higher impact return than $1 in the future — and why building a giving muscle today is critical for all of us.

Questions to reflect on:

• How do you think about your capital and what is ‘enough’?
• What beliefs do you have about money that sets you up to live in a mindset of abudance or scarcity?
• Does happiness come more from prioritizing our own happiness or priotizing the happiness of others?

Shame | Language Learning

I set an ambitious goal to ramp up my French language learning this month and what’s fascinated me the most about the process is understanding why it is so utterly difficult — not just in the grammar, syntax and pronunciation, but more in how quickly my ego and shame deters my learning process.

So I dug into some research to understand this better. Dominique Galmiche at the University of Nottingham studies language shame. In a study with 34 participants who were studying English as their second language, they were interviewed about the range of emotions they felt while learning.

Galmiche found that among the participants who experienced shame, three profiles of learners and reaction styles were identified: 1) those who do everything possible to avoid shame, 2) those who are resigned and quit language learning and 3) those who develop strategies of resilience and fight. The results confirm the belief that students’ engagement is related to their teacher’s motivational practices and attitudes, and they highlight the significant role of negative emotions, including shame, in the students’ willingness to pursue or give up the learning of a FL.

Professor and researcher Dr. Brené Brown writes and shares often about the difference between guilt and shame:

• Guilt is a feeling you get when you did something wrong, or perceived you did something wrong.
• Shame is a feeling that your whole self is wrong, and it may not be related to a specific behavior or event.

Shame has more to do with someone’s whole identity while guilt has to do with a specific behavior or action, hence why shame may feel heavier than guilt. According to Brown, shame makes people feel isolated, trapped, and powerless. So the antidote is shame resilience, which has a goal to help a person experiencing shame to feel the opposite emotions instead. These include connection, empathy, freedom, and power.

The steps of shame resilience:

1. Recognizing, naming, and understanding our shame triggers
2. Identifying external factors that led to the feelings of shame
3. Connecting with others to receive and offer empathy
4. Speaking about our feelings of shame with others

I haven’t fully tried these four steps, but I intend to. The feelings I associate with language learning can be bundled up predominantely into shame and not being good enough. Ultimately, this is the same feeling I experience in other parts of my identity and in situations where I feel like I’m lacking, and building this resilience and muscle will not only strengthen my own language learning but will positively impact other parts of my life where I experience associated feelings around. What holds me back from achieving my goals and acquiring new skills often comes down to the core beliefs I have about myself and deeply rooted fears. So rather than trying to tell myself to do better, realizing that the practice of langugage learning needs to be approached through a multi-faceted lens allows me to work on the true barriers that hold me back from being more self-expressed, vulnerable and willing to make mistakes.

Questions to reflect on:

• In what ways do feelings of shame show up in your day to day?
• How would you like to evolve with and transform feelings of shame?
• What are the real underlying beliefs that are holding you back from meeting your goals?

What I’m listening to this week: Remembering climate change … a message from the year 2071