Our globalized world, which broadcasts atrocities happening thousands of kilometers away from where we live, creates this idea that it is noble to sacrifice your own well-being to "save the world", in whatever way you can manage. I think that this idea co-opts good intentions into an insane collectivist orientation which can never solve its own problems.
I have seen enough frustrated activists and burned out effective altruists to know that it is first of all not sustainable. If the only way to do good is for people to destroy their own health and well-being, then not only does that limit their impact onto the world, but it also means that they will need to be helped by other people to get over their own problems, hence creating a vicious cycle of problem solving leading to more problems, the ouroboros of the mind.
Fundamentally, this entire attitude towards "doing good" is seriously disconnected from any roots. The mind identifies isolated problems, puts them into abstractions and sees how it can solve a general case, such as poverty, or warfare, or discrimination, or inequality, or environmental problems, but the mind runs into many blind spots.
Firstly, it atomizes the problem into sub-components, which is very useful when the problem can be solved by a single person, but when it is distributed to large teams, or in this case the entire world, you run into the fundamental problem of conflicting incentives. One central reason why very little has been done in the domain of climate change for instance is that many of the proposed solutions would have to make people poorer, which runs against the direction of material growth promoted by the system. Or take social inequality, which makes the conflict of incentives even more apparent, as whatever wealth is given to the poor will be taken from the rich, something which they will obviously resist with any means they can.
Moreover, splitting a problem into sub-problems is highly problematic when the system as a whole is too interconnected, highlighting the difference between complex and merely complicated systems, 1 as can be seen in our human body and how modern medicine is very poor at handling complex chronic illnesses, or how the predictions that economists make are essentially worthless, because social phenomenons at scale are significantly more unpredictable than they would like to think.
Another major issue with the mind is that it tends to ignore the entire embodied reality that we experience, preferring to focus on isolated ideas. The reason why people burn out from doing activist work is because they ignore the basic reality that we need concrete feedback to feel like our efforts matter. We are not satisfied with simply seeing a number get bigger at the end of the month, and then donating it to some charity which we have never seen in action. Those are just figures, abstractions in the ether, and do not consciously register as concrete impact on the world to us.
As petty as it might sound, we much prefer to directly participate in something where we feel like we are making a difference, which is why many people turn to tangible activities in their free time, such as cooking, exercising, gardening, and hiking, even if their job consists in highly abstract work, because nothing can replace the sense of agency of working directly with your hands and manifesting a result from them.
This is something that effective altruists refuse to take seriously, because they are constantly trying to optimize towards their idea of what counts as positive impact in the world, through a totally disembodied and frictionless view of it, which makes them think that helping out their neighbors isn't as important as working in a high-paying corporate job for an hour and donating most of the money to charities. 2
Doing good is simply not something which you can abstractly design and seamlessly scale. Every religion starts from the desire to create good people, spread love and help others live life in a more conscious way, and yet we all know the atrocities which have been done in the names of religions over their history. Likewise, every charity starts with good intentions, but ends up becoming a racket aimed at pulling on people's emotional strings. Scale has a way of turning every thing, no matter no noble they are, into rackets, especially in our current times where everything has to compete for attention.
The high decoupler "rational" mind hates the perspectives that focus on local good, because they think that it represents a waste of time and energy which could better be put on "real" efforts, the ones which involve large sums of money and complex technology, but what they rarely consider is how easily it is for actions to become unthethered from their original intentions. As Eric Hoffer says:
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket
A society which requires people to burn out trying to save it, so that it may maintain itself is not one you would want to save anyway. It's a bit like if you were in a marriage with someone who was burning through your savings, constantly pestering you and criticizing everything that you made, exhausting you and making you go insane over time, and you thought about how you might "save" the marriage at this point. There is no saving it, the marriage is simply toxic.
People don't want to go through the same reasoning when it comes to society because obviously we depend on it to survive, and yet to me the conclusion is the same: our society is not worth going insane for. Nothing is worth going insane for, because what people chase are ideas, the phantoms of their ideology which so easily becomes untethered from Reality. Any society worth living in is one which is aligned with human beings, which means that if living consciously systematically casts you out as an outsider, then that means it is not a good society, it's an insane one built by masses of unconscious people following headless ideologies.
I am not suggesting that we should never have to struggle for anything, or even make sacrifices. Those are important, essential in fact for a good life, only an immature child runs away from those. But the difference lies in the broader context and the aims. Genuine sacrifice is in service of consciousness, whether your own, like when you identify parts of your self which inhibit you from expressing your talents, or the consciousness of the collective you are a part of.
But the latter case requires that you live in a conscious collective to begin with, one that provides you with a real culture, as opposed to the screens and algorithms that have replaced it, forming a racket which calls itself a "culture". There are still communities here and there, scattered over the globe, but by and large they have to constantly fight the pressures of the modern world to keep their integrity, which is why they are often quite bourgeois, only allowing people who are fairly rich and who share their ideology to enter in, or they are very secluded, like the Amish for instance.
We live in an atomized world, which is why people are both self-absorbed, and also devoid of any inspiration to live for their higher self, for that requires the guiding hand of healthy role models, the kind of people who can rise above the mass of apathy which renders most inert, lifeless.
Self-absorption is the natural consequence of a world where the only collectives you can serve are all so large, bureaucratic, complicated and abstract that they can absorb all of your time and energy, and give you back nothing in exchange. This is why any remotely intelligent person knows not to try too hard at work, because going the extra mile is rarely if ever rewarded, whereas it incurs a real cost on your time and energy. Better to spend that on what you find personally meaningful, not on what will bring more money to stakeholders.
We humans need to feel impact, which is why the kind of collectives we are geared for are quite small, below Dunbar's number of roughly 150. 3 People become self-absorbed because they do not have any collective they can turn to that feels like home, 4 something concrete they can contribute to, so that they may touch and see the fruits of their action. We are not made for a perpetual grind of abstract actions for abstract rewards, we are embodied creatures, which is why nothing is worth going insane for, because such a process is the sacrifice of Reality for an abstraction, a total inversion of what Life is supposed to be.
1 A car is complicated because it operates in a linear fashion, from the commands to the engine to the wheels. An ecosystem is complex, because it is maintained through feedback loops, which makes it intractable for any simple analysis that relies on sub-division and simplistic cause and effect models.
2 'Frictionless' meaning that they view every hour, every place and every life helped as the same, which implies that only quantitative thinking can apply to their analysis, ignoring all the qualitative benefits of being a positive influence in your local surroundings.
3 The precise number doesn't matter, whether it is 150 or 200, the scale is still incredibly small compared to the scales of the modern world, so the point stands.
4 Something we are also responsible for of course. We are not to blame for the atomization of the world, the trends of mass migration, the lack of any community in one's neighborhood, and the disintegration of the atomic family through the screens and the domination of peer culture, but all of those are things that we can and have to deal with as responsible adults.
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Collectivism Society Morality Consciousness Sovereignty
2026-03-20