Purpose is Short Ranged

You can't know if you hit if you can't observe the target

From the always delightful despair.com

From J.C. over on Barsoom:

Humans find meaning in their service to other humans. Nothing rots the soul more rapidly than the realization that one is fundamentally of no use to anyone around them. This is why welfare states invariably lead to spiritual demoralization, a decay that you can plainly see written in the neglected flesh of those parts of the population that become reliant on handouts. A purposeless existence rapidly leads to no existence at all.

This is a great point. There are really two key aspects: being of use to people around you. Both aspects are key, and this speaks a bit to why the Effective Altruism movement, and telescope philanthropy in general, tends to fall flat.

Philanthropy, or benevolence, is a two way street. For being of use to others to benefit your soul, you have to be aware of it. Fortunately for humans, we constantly erode our sense of worth and use, so we don’t accomplish one useful thing at a young age and coast for the next 50 years on the laurels. We need to be needed, and we want to believe we are needed, and to do that we need confirmation.

You just can’t get that by helping people you have never met and will likely never meet.

Adam Smith tells us in TMS¹ that gratitude is a large part of how we judge the morality of an action. If I do something to help you, say help you move, and you show gratitude, I am deemed to have done well. If you seem kind of angry, maybe because I dropped your tv, or you weren’t actually trying to move, less so. This holds true whether others are judging me, or I am judging myself. If I or another cannot gauge the gratitude you feel because you are distant or unidentifiable, we can’t really do much with that, and the good deed doesn’t really count. One might argue that is unfair, but, well, that’s how human brains work. Doing things to help people we will never meet and might not have been helped or even really exist doesn’t do a lot for us.

That’s why so much corporate work is so unsatisfying, too; if you can wonder “would anyone notice if I stopped doing this?” you have already passed the feeling useless horizon.

As Smith says, we want to be loved, and we want to be lovely. It isn’t enough to be told that you are doing good things, you have to believe it yourself, and for humans, seeing is believing. Abstract notions that someone, somewhere, is made better off and feels gratitude for our benevolence on their behalf does us little good². We need to see it, to hear it from others around us to believe we are actually needed.

1. Theory of Moral Sentiments

2. To be fair, some people can be motivated by this. Reflect, for a moment, on just how rare they are. How many people toiled to create something that maybe, someday, someone will like? How many more people give up on creative endeavors because they fear no one will like it? Many people may claim to be the former, tortured artists who just are misunderstood by the philistines of their time, but really, how many keep at it, or are actually appreciated in the future? Mostly they just produce nothing people value and tell themselves their real audience just doesn’t exist yet to sooth their egos, not because they actually hope to please that audience.