Have you experimented with the approach of trying to use positive motivation on yourself to donate more instead of negative motivation? In other words, think of life like a computer game where the objective is to save as many lives as possible. You increase the rate at which your score grows by levelling up in your career and finding clever ways to subsist on less money, and you can periodically collect bonuses by hosting effective altruism meetups. You don’t necessarily have to stress yourself out trying to eke out the very highest score possible… then the game would stop being fun, and besides, stress will make it harder to get the high score anyway (life is a marathon, not a sprint—and it’s very complicated and full of potential shortcuts, so you’re probably better off using your mental energy to look for shortcuts than risking being penny-wise and pound-foolish).
There are a lot of people who are trying to figure out what their purpose is and what they want to do with themselves. Making money is an interesting problem, and when it comes to doing good for the world, there aren’t many careers whose direct effects compare with donating lots of money.
(These are just thoughts; it may be that your method of motivating yourself tends to be a more reliable way to produce donations in practice. But I do wonder if my method would work better for folks who have heard fungibility arguments and don’t seem to take them seriously, at least in terms of framing all donations as points earned even if they donate a relatively small amount and only earn a small number of points.)
Have you experimented with the approach of trying to use positive motivation on yourself to donate more instead of negative motivation? In other words, think of life like a computer game where the objective is to save as many lives as possible. You increase the rate at which your score grows by levelling up in your career and finding clever ways to subsist on less money, and you can periodically collect bonuses by hosting effective altruism meetups. You don’t necessarily have to stress yourself out trying to eke out the very highest score possible… then the game would stop being fun, and besides, stress will make it harder to get the high score anyway (life is a marathon, not a sprint—and it’s very complicated and full of potential shortcuts, so you’re probably better off using your mental energy to look for shortcuts than risking being penny-wise and pound-foolish).
There are a lot of people who are trying to figure out what their purpose is and what they want to do with themselves. Making money is an interesting problem, and when it comes to doing good for the world, there aren’t many careers whose direct effects compare with donating lots of money.
(These are just thoughts; it may be that your method of motivating yourself tends to be a more reliable way to produce donations in practice. But I do wonder if my method would work better for folks who have heard fungibility arguments and don’t seem to take them seriously, at least in terms of framing all donations as points earned even if they donate a relatively small amount and only earn a small number of points.)