Right now, you could take $1000 and sent them to an effective charity. That could be extraordinary (in the sense of: the vast majority of people would never do that) and virtuous!
So that is another way how things work differently in books and in real life—you wouldn’t get the emotional satisfaction of observing your impact. A book can also “cheat” by telling you about the impact even if the protagonist does not observe it.
I guess intelligence ruins this, too. You can do a virtuous thing by buying a homeless guy a lunch. But if you are smart, you will immediately realize that this doesn’t remove the source of his problems, and tomorrow he will probably starve again. But feeding him every day would be too expensive. Again, in a book, it would be likely that you only need to feed the starving person once; then they get to the goal of their quest, or find a job, or something; that is, a one-time intervention solves the problem.
Right now, you could take $1000 and sent them to an effective charity. That could be extraordinary (in the sense of: the vast majority of people would never do that) and virtuous!
So that is another way how things work differently in books and in real life—you wouldn’t get the emotional satisfaction of observing your impact. A book can also “cheat” by telling you about the impact even if the protagonist does not observe it.
I guess intelligence ruins this, too. You can do a virtuous thing by buying a homeless guy a lunch. But if you are smart, you will immediately realize that this doesn’t remove the source of his problems, and tomorrow he will probably starve again. But feeding him every day would be too expensive. Again, in a book, it would be likely that you only need to feed the starving person once; then they get to the goal of their quest, or find a job, or something; that is, a one-time intervention solves the problem.