The biggest thing is just to act like you are already the sort of person who does care. Go do the good work.
Find people who are better than you. Hang out with them. “You become like the 6 people you spend the most time with” and all that. (I remember reading the chapter on penetrating Azkaban in HP:MoR, and feeling how much I didn’t care. I knew that there are places in the world where the suffering is as great as in that fictional place, but that it didn’t bother me, I would just go about my day and go to sleep, where the fictional Harry is deeply shaken by his experience. I felt, “I’m not Good [in the moral sense] enough” and then thought that if I’m not good enough, I need to find people who are, who will help me be better. I need to find my Hermiones.)
I’m trying to find the most Good people of my generation, but I realized long ago that I shouldn’t be looking for Good people, so much as I should be looking for people who are actively seeking to be better than they are. (If you want to be as Good as you can be, please message me. Maybe we can help each other.)
My feeling of moral inadequacy compared to Harry’s feelings towards Azkaban (fictional) aren’t really fair. My brain isn’t designed to be moved abstract concepts. Harry (fictional) saw that suffering first hand and was changed by it, I only mentally multiply. I’m thinking that I need to put myself in situations where I can experience the awfulness of the world viscerally. People make fun of teenagers going to “help” build houses in the third world: it’s pretty massively inefficient to ship untrained teenagers to Mexico to do manual labor (or only sort of do it), when their hourly output would be much higher if they just got a college degree and donated. Yet I know at least one person (someone who I respect, one of my “Hermines”) who went to build houses in Mexico for a month and was heavily impacted by it and it spurred her to be of service more generally. (She told me that on the flight back to the states she was emotionally upset because, while she was homesick and tired of eating beans and rice for every meal (she’s vegan), she knew that life would get in the way, and she would lose the perspective she had in Mexico. The test tomorrow has a way of seeming all important, and she was afraid of losing that perspective of how much worse other people had it, and what the Truly important things are. She got a tattoo that reads “Gratitude” in Spanish, as a permanent and perpetual reminder.)
Maybe you need to go see squalor? I haven’t, so I can’t say. I have thought that I have chose someone concrete to help, perhaps on a weekly basis, so that when I’m considering buying something I don’t need, my thought process isn’t “If I buy this, that’s 4 dollars less that I can give to charity”, but instead, “If I buy this, I Annie won’t get that vaccine.” I haven’t implemented this yet, so I can’t say how effective will be. Social pressure might help: let me know if you want to try something like this with me.
living in pain sent my carometer from below average to full. Seeing squalor definitely did something. I think it probably depends how you see it—did you talk to people as equals or see them as different types of people you couldn’t relate to / didn’t fit a certain criteria? Being surrounded by suffering from a young age doesn’t seem to make people care—its being shocked by suffering after not having had much of it around that is occasionally very powerful—Like the story about the Buddha growing up in the palace then seeing sickness, death and age for the first time?
The biggest thing is just to act like you are already the sort of person who does care. Go do the good work.
Find people who are better than you. Hang out with them. “You become like the 6 people you spend the most time with” and all that. (I remember reading the chapter on penetrating Azkaban in HP:MoR, and feeling how much I didn’t care. I knew that there are places in the world where the suffering is as great as in that fictional place, but that it didn’t bother me, I would just go about my day and go to sleep, where the fictional Harry is deeply shaken by his experience. I felt, “I’m not Good [in the moral sense] enough” and then thought that if I’m not good enough, I need to find people who are, who will help me be better. I need to find my Hermiones.)
I’m trying to find the most Good people of my generation, but I realized long ago that I shouldn’t be looking for Good people, so much as I should be looking for people who are actively seeking to be better than they are. (If you want to be as Good as you can be, please message me. Maybe we can help each other.)
My feeling of moral inadequacy compared to Harry’s feelings towards Azkaban (fictional) aren’t really fair. My brain isn’t designed to be moved abstract concepts. Harry (fictional) saw that suffering first hand and was changed by it, I only mentally multiply. I’m thinking that I need to put myself in situations where I can experience the awfulness of the world viscerally. People make fun of teenagers going to “help” build houses in the third world: it’s pretty massively inefficient to ship untrained teenagers to Mexico to do manual labor (or only sort of do it), when their hourly output would be much higher if they just got a college degree and donated. Yet I know at least one person (someone who I respect, one of my “Hermines”) who went to build houses in Mexico for a month and was heavily impacted by it and it spurred her to be of service more generally. (She told me that on the flight back to the states she was emotionally upset because, while she was homesick and tired of eating beans and rice for every meal (she’s vegan), she knew that life would get in the way, and she would lose the perspective she had in Mexico. The test tomorrow has a way of seeming all important, and she was afraid of losing that perspective of how much worse other people had it, and what the Truly important things are. She got a tattoo that reads “Gratitude” in Spanish, as a permanent and perpetual reminder.)
Maybe you need to go see squalor? I haven’t, so I can’t say. I have thought that I have chose someone concrete to help, perhaps on a weekly basis, so that when I’m considering buying something I don’t need, my thought process isn’t “If I buy this, that’s 4 dollars less that I can give to charity”, but instead, “If I buy this, I Annie won’t get that vaccine.” I haven’t implemented this yet, so I can’t say how effective will be. Social pressure might help: let me know if you want to try something like this with me.
Does that help?
I have seen squalor, and in my particular case it did not recalibrate my care-o-meter at all. YMMV, of course.
living in pain sent my carometer from below average to full. Seeing squalor definitely did something. I think it probably depends how you see it—did you talk to people as equals or see them as different types of people you couldn’t relate to / didn’t fit a certain criteria? Being surrounded by suffering from a young age doesn’t seem to make people care—its being shocked by suffering after not having had much of it around that is occasionally very powerful—Like the story about the Buddha growing up in the palace then seeing sickness, death and age for the first time?