Compassionate Purpose: Personal Inspiration for a Better World

Magnus Vinding

Introduction

The suffering of the world cries out for relief. Every single day, countless beings are trapped in unbearable suffering that we would do almost anything to escape if we were in their place. And things could get even worse in the future.

This reality can seem overwhelming. Yet rather than turning away from the suffering of the world, we can face it head-on and seek to alleviate it, not just in a half-hearted way, but with all our being. This can be our existential response to suffering.

The stance I argue for here is not a naive or utopian one, nor does it assume that the endeavor of reducing suffering is simple or easy. On the contrary, it involves being realistic and pragmatic about the challenges we face. Only by grounding our ideals in reality can we be effective in creating a better world.

Still, we have an enormous opportunity to prevent suffering. Just as the worst suffering is utterly horrific, our opportunity to prevent it is profoundly precious. Indeed, it can be difficult to grasp how real and significant this opportunity is, and how important it is that we use it well.

This book is about seizing this opportunity to create a better world, with a realistic and pragmatic approach, but also with hope, inspiration, and unyielding resolve. It is about how we can rise up and defy the enormity of suffering, and ultimately bring greater relief to sentient beings.

0.1 Self-Help Meets Impartial Ethics

Self-help books are often deeply motivating and inspiring. They encourage us to be our best selves and to find personal purpose and peace of mind. Yet these books are rarely based on a clear ethical foundation. The connection between personal motivation and ethical considerations tends to be unclear, and the focus is often on pursuing just any goal of your choice.

In contrast, books on rigorous and impartial ethics do tackle crucial questions about values and how we should ideally act in the world. Yet such books are rarely motivating or directly useful at a personal level.

This leaves a major gap. We have much to gain by combining both of these important aspects: personally inspiring self-development firmly grounded in impartial ethics. That is what this book aims to provide.

0.2 Why Compassionate Purpose?

Compassion is typically defined as sympathy for others' suffering combined with a desire and motivation to alleviate it. Compassionate purpose, then, is a higher aim and commitment centered on reducing suffering. It is about making the greatest compassionate impact we can, which I argue entails a special focus on reducing extreme suffering.

Why this strong focus on reducing extreme suffering? In short, because this is, I believe, the highest and most urgent moral purpose we can pursue — a view that I and many others have defended at length. For many of us, a powerful motivation is that the overriding importance of reducing extreme suffering becomes difficult to deny when we actually witness such suffering: when we see someone writhing, screaming, and desperately trying to escape unbearable pain.

Once severe suffering goes from being a mere abstraction to being a gut-wrenching reality right before our eyes, our ordinary concerns begin to look trivial by comparison. Yet the moral importance of extreme suffering should arguably not depend on whether we happen to confront it directly. After all, extreme suffering is no less real even when it is invisible to us, and we can virtually always take steps to reduce it.

Thus, if we find extreme suffering to be of overriding importance when we face it firsthand, we may on reflection conclude that we have strong reason to reduce extreme suffering in general, even when it is not particularly salient or close to us. In other words, we may conclude that “out of sight, out of mind” is not a valid justification for disregarding the paramount importance of extreme suffering.

Another strong motivation can be derived from the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If we were experiencing unbearable suffering, and if we were unable to alleviate this suffering on our own, we would urgently want others to help us. Indeed, there is plausibly no situation in which we would more strongly want help to improve our condition. By extension, if we apply the Golden Rule, we have similarly strong reasons to help alleviate the extreme suffering of others and to actively prevent others from experiencing such horrific states in the first place.

0.3 Outline of the Book

My goal in this book is to present an actionable and pragmatic approach to compassionate purpose. Specifically, I will lay out and apply a framework that invites us to pursue moral self-development based on reason and evidence, guided by the aim of reducing extreme suffering.

The first chapter provides some opening motivation. It reviews several ways in which we ourselves may benefit from embracing a higher ethical purpose and points to helpful mindsets for taking on challenges.

In the second chapter, I outline some justifications for the pursuit of compassionate purpose and then present a framework that serves as the foundation for the rest of the book: a way to think about and approach our personal lives with an eye to compassionate impact.

In the remaining chapters, I apply this broader framework and seek to provide evidence-based suggestions across key dimensions of personal development. For example, I explore inspiring narratives, self-compassion, and tools for dealing with the psychological challenges of trying to reduce suffering. Other key dimensions include sustainable compassion for others, a candid understanding of the human mind, social life and relationships, healthy self-transcendence, and finally, concrete actions we can take to reduce suffering.

0.4 How to Use This Book

This book is not meant to be implemented all at once, nor is it an invitation to moral perfectionism. The aim is to help us move in a better direction, beginning with our main bottlenecks. For some of us, the main bottleneck may be harsh self-criticism, distraction, or poor habits; for others, it may be uncertainty about how to help, lack of hope, or a diminished sense of agency.

It thus makes sense to treat this book as a toolkit rather than a checklist: you can identify one or two areas that seem most important for your future impact, work on them in small and sustainable steps, and return to the rest as needed. If this book helps you remove one major bottleneck and take one more effective step to reduce suffering, that alone is deeply worthwhile.

1 Purpose Can Be Good for Us

Much evidence suggests that having a higher purpose can be good for us in various ways. My aim in this chapter is to review some of this evidence so as to help motivate the pursuit of compassionate purpose.

Note that I am not claiming that the personal benefits we may experience upon adopting a compassionate purpose are among the strongest reasons to adopt such a purpose. I do not believe that they are. But it is still worth being aware of these potential benefits and realizing that the adoption of a higher ethical purpose can in many ways be enriching and meaningful for us personally.

1.1 Challenges Can Be Good for Us

In order for us to have a sense of engagement and progress in our lives, the optimal level of challenge is neither too high nor too low. For example, one study found that people with large amounts of free time reported lower subjective wellbeing than did people with moderate amounts (with an optimum around 2 to 5 hours a day). This was true even when controlling for income, education, and employment status.

Taking on an appropriate level of challenge can prevent various unpleasant states that may otherwise burden us. These states include not only momentary feelings of boredom, but also more enduring feelings of not getting anywhere, not living up to our potential, and not contributing as much as we feel we could.

More broadly, taking on a suitable level of challenge enables us to grow. It can help us develop useful skills and give us a justified sense of self-efficacy. As a result, we may both become better able and more motivated to take on greater challenges, rather than shying away from them.

To be sure, a part of us might believe that we would be in a better state if we could reduce our challenges to zero. Yet the benefits of taking on challenges suggest that this belief is mistaken, and it may even be harmful. After all, on top of whatever stress may arise from our challenges themselves, the sense that “I should be at zero” can add an extra layer of tension. It can make us feel as though we are on the wrong track, or as though we are doing something that is bad for us, even when we are in fact at a healthy level of stimulating challenge.

In sum, not only are we better off when we pursue a certain level of challenge, but we are likely also better off if we internalize this insight by framing a manageable level of challenge as acceptable and even optimal. Rather than viewing ourselves as naturally passive and fragile, we can rightly view ourselves as active and antifragile: as individuals who can grow stronger from challenges, at least when we face them in the right amounts. And the endeavor to reduce extreme suffering could be the ultimate proving ground for our antifragility — a worthy challenge if ever there was one.

1.2 A Higher Purpose Can Be Good for Us

Beyond the benefits of having some measure of challenge in our lives, there are also many benefits to embracing a higher purpose. For one, having a higher purpose can give us a greater sense of direction and stability, like a solid anchor that grounds us. As a result, having a purpose may help us better handle the adversity and difficulties of life. A strong version of this idea was famously expressed by Nietzsche: “If one has a why in life, one can bear almost any how.”

These claims are not purely theoretical. Studies suggest that a stronger sense of purpose may indeed boost our resilience. For example, people who strengthen their sense of purpose through a reflection exercise are less prone to distress immediately afterward. Likewise, people with a stronger sense of purpose report greater wellbeing and less perceived stress, despite encountering the same number of daily stressors as those without a strong sense of purpose.

Another benefit of having a sense of purpose is that it can make us less concerned about how others perceive us. For instance, one study found that the self-esteem of people with a strong sense of purpose is less contingent on whether they receive “likes” on social media, suggesting that their self-esteem is more stable and internally grounded.

People with a sense of purpose also tend to have better health outcomes across a wide range of measures. For example, they have lower rates of cardiovascular disease and dementia, fewer sleep issues, and lower all-cause mortality. A partial explanation for this pattern may be that a sense of purpose motivates a greater focus on the future, which in turn encourages healthier lifestyles.

As a practical takeaway, the finding that we can boost our emotional resilience by reflecting on our sense of purpose suggests that it is helpful to actively affirm and hold on to our purpose in difficult situations, even if we already have a strong sense of purpose.

1.3 A Prosocial Purpose Can Be Good for Us

While there are significant benefits to having a strong sense of purpose in general, there are some unique benefits to having a purpose that is prosocial: aimed at benefiting others.

For instance, one study looked at four distinct purpose orientations among college students — prosocial, financial, creative, and personal recognition — and examined how well these purpose orientations predicted outcomes 13 years later. Only the prosocial orientation predicted a greater sense of personal development and a sense of having identified and realized a purpose later in life.

Moreover, studies have found that altruistic behavior is linked to greater wellbeing and better health outcomes. For instance, in experiments where people are randomly assigned to either spend money on themselves or on a stranger in need, those who help the stranger report greater wellbeing.

There is also evidence that prosocial behavior can strengthen our sense of purpose. For example, one study found that people who were given money to spend in prosocial ways felt a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives, as well as a greater sense of self-worth, compared to people who were given money to spend on themselves. Another study found that people who showed higher adherence to moral standards had a stronger sense of purpose after a four-year follow-up period, and the greater the adherence to moral standards, the stronger the sense of purpose.

Lastly, embracing a prosocial purpose may benefit us by reducing what some have called maladaptive self-absorption or self-obsession. That is, having a higher prosocial purpose may help us move beyond an obsessive focus on our own problems and concerns, which is often a source of misery. We may underestimate the harmful effects of such a self-absorbed focus as well as the beneficial effects of pursuing a higher prosocial purpose in a balanced way.

1.4 Can a Prosocial Purpose Be Bad for Us?

In light of the findings reviewed above, it is worth asking whether having a prosocial purpose can also be bad for us in some ways. After all, few things are purely good for us. So what might be the pitfalls of pursuing a prosocial purpose?

For example, one might end up pursuing an altruistic purpose in an unbalanced way that neglects basic self-care and self-compassion. This may in turn lead to burnout and stress-driven behavior that fails to help others and that might even harm others. Furthermore, there is the risk of being overwhelmed by the suffering of the world, which can cause empathic distress and sorrow.

There is also a risk that our pursuit of a prosocial purpose ends up being more about us than about the beings we are trying to help. In other words, our efforts to help others might end up being mostly dictated by our own needs and how we feel about particular causes and actions, rather than being about what actually has a beneficial impact for those in desperate need.

These are just a few of the pitfalls associated with the pursuit of a prosocial purpose, including the compassionate purpose explored in this book. And sadly, these pitfalls are by no means rare. Pursuing a compassionate purpose can be good for us in various respects, but if we pursue it in unhealthy and unskillful ways, it can also be bad for us — and for others. Hence, one of the main goals of this book is to provide some evidence-based tools for avoiding the pitfalls of a compassionate purpose, and for navigating such a purpose in balanced and healthy ways.

1.5 Tying It All Together

There is a natural progression across the points made above. First, we have good reason to embrace a certain level of challenge in our lives: we are to some extent antifragile, and we can grow and be better off when facing the right level of struggle.

Second, we have good reason to pursue a higher purpose: it can make us more resilient to stress and improve our health and wellbeing.

Third, we have good reason to pursue a prosocial higher purpose: it provides an especially strong sense of purpose over time, and the same is true of ethical and prosocial behavior. So why not embrace an ethical and prosocial higher purpose, such as the compassionate purpose explored here, as our healthy struggle and challenge in life?

Lastly, we have good reason to steer clear of the pitfalls of a compassionate purpose and to adopt a balanced approach that takes our own needs into account. So why not embrace a balanced compassionate purpose, where we try, as far as possible, to create harmony between our own needs and our higher compassionate purpose?

Again, the points I have reviewed here are not meant to be a rigorous argument in favor of pursuing a compassionate purpose; they mostly serve as a preliminary motivation. Continuing in this preliminary vein, I want to close this chapter by sharing a bit of my own perspective on compassionate purpose.

My perspective is that a deep and worthwhile purpose is there for the taking. The world lacks many things, but an exceedingly meaningful purpose is not among them: we have a compassionate purpose available to us that stands up to intense scrutiny, irrespective of how we may feel about it. In short, we can find a profound Nietzschean why in compassionate form. My aim in this book is to explore the personal how for this why.

2 A Framework for Compassionate Purpose

If we are to pursue compassionate purpose in a systematic and effective way, it helps to have a framework that can structure this pursuit. My aim in this chapter is to present such a framework and thereby lay the foundation for the rest of the book. To ground this framework, I will first outline some justifications for the pursuit of compassionate purpose.

2.1 Values First: An Urgent Purpose

The compassionate purpose I explore in this book is to reduce extreme suffering for all sentient beings. The term “extreme suffering” here refers to intense and horrific states of suffering. Examples include experiences of being tortured, eaten alive, or burned alive — any state of torment that begs for urgent relief. Note that the emphasis on extreme suffering does not imply that milder forms of suffering are unimportant, but instead reflects the view that the most severe forms of suffering merit special priority.

I realize that, for many of us, this may not seem like the most inspiring purpose, and perhaps not the kind of purpose that satisfies our need for an uplifting vision. Such reactions are understandable, and they certainly reflect how I myself have at times felt about this purpose.

Having said that, I do not believe that our immediate emotional reactions are the ideal arbiters of our highest values. It seems better to let our highest values and purposes be guided by deep reflection and to then satisfy our personal needs in accordance with such well-grounded values — as opposed to placing our emotional needs first and deriving our values from our personal needs for uplifting inspiration.

The good news is that we can find hope and inspiration while pursuing compassionate values aimed at the reduction of extreme suffering. In fact, such values can themselves be a potent source of inspiration and motivation in their own right. Hence, embracing the compassionate purpose explored here does not give us reason to adopt an attitude of apathy and hopelessness. On the contrary, as we will see, it can give us a profound sense of care and hope in connection with what truly matters.

2.2 Justification for the Compassionate Purpose

A fuller justification for this compassionate purpose can be found in other works; in this section, I will merely outline a few of the arguments and intuitions that support it.

First, before getting to the issue of suffering, we may ask what justifies any purpose aimed at benefiting others. One answer may be that it is simply a matter of common sense. After all, the world is large, and the total beneficial impact we can have on others is much greater than the beneficial impact we can have on our own lives. We can make an enormous difference for others with resources that for us are quite modest, which alone is a strong reason to devote at least some resources toward helping others.

Additionally, at a more philosophical level, one may argue that a clear view of personal identity gives us compelling reason to help others and to see others' welfare as being just as important as our own. That is, we are all variations on the same theme — other sentient beings are essentially different versions of you — and hence it ultimately makes little sense to give less weight to the interests of others. Yet to be clear, one need not accept this stronger view to agree that we have good reasons to help others, which seems sensible in any case.

Next, if we endorse the aim of benefiting others, what might be the reasons to focus on the prevention of extreme suffering? As a preliminary reaction, one could again say that the importance of reducing extreme suffering seems highly intuitive and commonsensical, especially in light of how excruciating and unbearable it feels. This may help explain why many of us already care about reducing extreme suffering and consider it a key priority.

In more substantive terms, there is the argument that extreme suffering is bad and morally urgent in a way that nothing else can compare to. For instance, the supposed badness of the mere absence of blissful states does not compare to the badness of extreme suffering. Experiencing the most extreme suffering rather than an untroubled state is a grave and urgent problem, whereas experiencing an untroubled state rather than the most intense joy is not a problem. In part due to this asymmetry, it seems reasonable to hold that we cannot outweigh the very worst suffering by adding pleasure that does not itself relieve suffering — for example, that we cannot offset someone being burned alive by adding many instances of sublime joy elsewhere.

A related view is that it is morally wrong to create pleasure at the price of extreme suffering, whether by action or omission. According to this view, it is wrong to spend resources on creating future pleasure (for its own sake) when these resources could instead prevent extreme suffering.

Furthermore, a separate line of argument holds that there is a stark quantitative asymmetry between the worst states of suffering and the best states of pleasure, which in turn favors prioritizing the reduction of extreme suffering. For instance, one might hold that a full day of ceaseless torture would require many years of the most intense bliss to be outweighed. On this view, the worst states of suffering have disproportionate moral weight such that the prevention of extreme suffering generally has priority over the creation of pleasure in real-world decisions.

Lastly, given the gravity and prevalence of extreme suffering, and given the wide range of moral views and arguments that support a strong focus on its alleviation, we should at least be able to agree that it merits considerable priority. That is, the reduction of extreme suffering deserves at least a significant fraction of our individual and collective resources.

It is lamentable beyond words that extreme suffering exists. Moreover, it is regrettable that efforts to reduce extreme suffering can take away resources from other endeavors that we may also yearn to pursue. There is little to like about these realities, and we may do well to validate any frustrations they provoke in us. Even so, the tempting move of denying or downplaying the reality of extreme suffering will do little to ameliorate it. The best way to mitigate this reality is to acknowledge it and resolve to do something about it.

2.3 There Is More to Life and Purpose than This

An objection to the core value and purpose outlined above might be that there is more to life and purpose than just trying to reduce extreme suffering.

I agree that there is more to life than that. My claim is not that the reduction of extreme suffering is the only thing that matters or that it is the only purpose worth pursuing. However, I do believe it is ultimately what matters most. When held up against other purposes, the reduction of extreme suffering generally seems more important.

Yet, in any case, adopting the compassionate purpose of reducing extreme suffering does not require us to think that it is the single most important one. It is enough to think that it deserves to be among our core priorities, which is a fairly uncontroversial and widely endorsed view. In other words, the pursuit of compassionate purpose does not have to be a matter of all or nothing. We can adopt this purpose to the extent that we find it plausible, and we can pursue the practical directions explored here to the extent that we find them reasonable.

2.4 Personal Development for Compassionate Impact

Having outlined some reasons to embrace a compassionate purpose centered on the reduction of extreme suffering, let us turn to the question of how best to pursue this purpose. What follows is a rough framework for thinking about personal development aimed at compassionate impact.

A key idea underlying this framework is that it can be helpful to translate the abstract aim of compassionate impact into more specific traits and virtues that are conducive to this aim. Such a translation can help make our aims more concrete and actionable by making it clearer which tangible steps to take.

The idea is thus that we can cultivate the traits and virtues (and habits, attitudes, and so on) that are most conducive to compassionate impact, developing them to the degree that generally best serves the aim of preventing extreme suffering. This resembles the ideal of finding the golden mean on a sliding scale between two extremes, yet where the golden mean we are aiming for is defined in terms of optimal compassionate impact.

For example, when it comes to taking action for the benefit of others, we neither want to act so much that we completely neglect ourselves, nor do we want to act so rarely that we make little difference. Instead, we want to find a golden range where we balance taking care of ourselves with taking meaningful action for others, allowing us to reduce suffering in a sustainable and effective way.

Consider Ben, who works so hard to reduce suffering that he sleeps only five hours a night, never exercises, and rarely sees any friends. As a result, he is in a chronic state of low-grade burnout and brain fog, making one costly mistake after another. His commitment is strong, yet his approach undermines his ability to sustain that commitment. With a more balanced approach, he could be both healthier and more effective.

In contrast, consider Lea, who also cares deeply about reducing suffering and has read extensively about it. She tells herself that she needs to get her life fully sorted before she can contribute. She aims to get her routines dialed in and her mind fully calm. Yet as time passes, the ideal state she is waiting for never quite arrives, and she takes little action. Her pursuit of self-optimization has effectively become a form of avoidance, and her potential impact remains unrealized.

These examples illustrate just one of the many balances we aim to strike. The figure below sketches the broader framework, loosely depicting the general idea of optimizing different dimensions — different virtues and capacities — so that they point toward the higher compassionate aim. (One should not read too much into the specifics of this figure; it is just meant to be a simple sketch that includes some of the main dimensions I will explore in this book.)

Image summary: Diagram shows how multiple virtues and capacities, such as self-compassion, healthy social relations, intellectual insights, and mental and physical health, contribute to compassionate commitment and purpose, ultimately reducing extreme suffering.

To be sure, it is a complicated question which traits and virtues are most conducive to compassionate impact, a question that hardly admits of simple or precise answers. Yet these complications need not prevent us from pursuing sensible answers informed by reason and evidence.

2.5 Many Dimensions

A key point is that there are many dimensions — many distinct traits, virtues, attitudes, and so on — that are relevant to compassionate impact, and a high level of development along one dimension does not imply a high level of development along most others.

Some support for the latter claim can be found in the empirical literature on the transfer of learning from one domain to a dissimilar one. While there is evidence that such “far transfer” can occur in some cases, the general picture is that knowledge and skills in one area tend to have limited impact on knowledge and skills in other areas.

Moreover, we can readily give examples of virtues that do not entail each other. For instance, one can be highly knowledgeable about intellectual subjects without being particularly compassionate, and vice versa. Indeed, even many prosocial virtues appear to be quite distinct, such as compassion and integrity, or impartial moral concern and interpersonal kindness.

To be clear, the point is not that different virtues tend to be wholly uncorrelated, or that the development of one virtue cannot greatly enhance another. The point is merely that it is easy to overlook the many distinct traits and virtues that are relevant to compassionate impact.

2.6 Individual Differences and Context

It is helpful to keep in mind the relevance of individual differences and broader contextual factors. For example, some people may do best by cultivating greater orderliness, while others may do best by allowing a creative mess around them. This may even be true of the same person at different times, with the optimal level of orderliness being high in some periods and low in others.

There are also situational shifts that occur on shorter timescales. For instance, the optimal level of agreeableness changes depending on whether we are interacting with fair-minded people or people who seek to exploit us. The same applies to different cultural contexts: some traits may be more helpful in some cultural environments than others, implying that the most beneficial traits in one cultural setting cannot necessarily be generalized to another.

These caveats are worth keeping in mind when exploring optimal traits and practices. For example, when studies find that people tend to benefit from a given practice, there is often substantial variation in who benefits and in which contexts.

This broader point about individual variation is also relevant in terms of what people can get out of the different chapters in this book. Some chapters may be useful for some people while being of limited use for others. That is to be expected, as our personal bottlenecks are likely to differ.

2.7 Open Exploration

In closing, I want to emphasize the exploratory spirit of this book. I do not write from a position of authority claiming to have definitive answers. Instead, my aim is to explore — alongside the reader — relevant ideas and evidence on how we can best enhance our personal lives to reduce extreme suffering. What follows is an invitation to develop ourselves compassionately and with the humility that our understanding will continue to evolve.

3 The Role of Inspiring Narratives

There is more to living a compassionate life than just having clever cerebral ideas. Whether we are aware of them or not, we all have many non-intellectual parts of our minds that are central to our motivation.

My aim in this chapter is to highlight some of the shortcomings of an overly intellectualized approach to compassionate purpose. I will explore the uses of inspiring narratives and propose some specific narratives and perspectives that may be useful in the pursuit of compassionate impact.

3.1 The Cerebral Misconception of Motivation

Our motivation differs fundamentally from simple propositional memories and beliefs. For example, to remember the name of the capital of France, we can simply repeat the word “Paris” a few times and we are likely to retain it in our long-term memory. By contrast, long-term motivational change is much harder and more prone to drift, and it often requires continual renewal and revitalization.

Indeed, various scholars have argued that this is one of the main reasons why religions across the world have converged on having regular rituals and sermons, namely to continually reinforce the motivation to cooperate with fellow group members. There is evidence that supports this hypothesis, including experimental studies finding that religious rituals increase ingroup cooperation.

On this account, when sermons consistently have people repeat messages along the lines of “lead us not into temptation” and “how good it is for brethren to dwell together in unity”, the main purpose is not to convey mere propositional content (which could be memorized with less frequent repetition). Rather, the ritual serves more as a motivational seminar aimed at preventing drift toward selfish behavior that obstructs group cohesion.

In other words, human motivation may easily drift toward selfish concerns by default, just as we drift toward poor health if we fail to exercise, and hence regular rituals of “motivational exercise” may be needed to consistently steer our motivations in more compassionate directions. The challenge, then, is to identify motivational ideas and practices that are effective for this purpose.

3.2 The Motivating Functions of Stories

Religious rituals are not practiced in isolation. Instead, they are supported by foundational myths and stories that help make sense of and motivate the rituals. This raises the question of whether stories can also play important roles in the pursuit of compassionate purpose. As we will see, there are reasons to think they can.

To be clear, the claim that stories and narratives can play useful roles does not imply that we should be willing to embrace false beliefs about reality. After all, narratives need not be about reality as it is, as opposed to being fictional or focused on future visions and possibilities. Moreover, stories can affect our motivations even when we understand them to be fictional. For instance, studies suggest that fictional stories that model helping behavior or depict individuals in need can increase prosocial behavior.

A potential advantage of stories and narratives is that they can touch parts of us that are not easily touched by mere propositions. Indeed, research has found that stories activate a broad network of neural circuits, attesting to our vivid immersion and “transportation” into the story. Engaging and colorful stories can connect with us in ways that the colorless abstractions of academic moral philosophy rarely do.

Of course, none of this is to say that we should stop basing our decisions on sound moral reasons and empirical evidence. The point is rather that narratives and stories may play helpful roles in motivating us to act on sound reasons and evidence in the first place.

3.3 Moral Heroes

Stories about moral heroes can be found across cultures in myriad forms. This historical convergence may reflect the motivating effects of such stories. As noted, stories that model prosocial behavior can motivate people to act in prosocial ways, and heroic stories are arguably the ones that most clearly model prosocial behavior.

More broadly, there is the phenomenon of “moral elevation”, which is an emotional state evoked by observing highly virtuous acts. Studies have found that moral elevation can motivate altruistic behavior and increase support for compassionate policies, and these effects also occur in response to fictional depictions of virtuous deeds. Moral elevation is thus a plausible hypothesis as to how heroic narratives can increase prosocial motivations and behavior.

Below are the outlines of a few hero figures and narratives whose use has considerable precedent and which stand as natural candidates for practical exploration.

3.3.1 Heroes of Compassion

A bodhisattva, as understood in Mahayana Buddhism, is a heroic being who works to liberate all sentient beings from suffering. Specifically, a bodhisattva is someone who has developed bodhicitta, which is the compassionate intention to cultivate insights and skills for the benefit of all beings. An important aspect of the bodhisattva path in Mahayana Buddhism is that the path is essentially an invitation extended to all of us, asking us to become real-life heroes for a better world.

In addition to this open invitation, we find various idealized bodhisattva figures to help elevate and inspire us. These include Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of supreme compassion, who in one story grows eleven heads and a thousand hands in order to tirelessly alleviate the suffering of sentient beings everywhere.

In East Asia, this idealized bodhisattva is known as Guanyin and is often represented as a white-robed female figure who shows up to resolve conflicts and help troubled beings. There is also the female bodhisattva known as Tara, who in some myths originates from a tear shed by Avalokiteshvara over the torments of the world, whereupon she vows to join Avalokiteshvara in the endeavor to relieve the suffering of all beings.

The main thing to notice here is how the narrative approach of Mahayana Buddhism differs from a mere set of abstract moral principles. Rather than giving us bare moral abstractions and wishing us good luck with it, we instead find personifications of moral ideals, with stories that are more memorable and more likely to inspire moral elevation than any set of principles alone.

Of course, Mahayana Buddhism is not the only tradition with stories about heroes of compassion. Such heroes are found in virtually all traditions. For example, in the Christian tradition, Jesus is often regarded as a hero of compassion, with some Christian authors even arguing that compassion was the virtue that most exemplified his life.

3.3.2 What Would Lady Justice Do?

Beyond heroes of compassion, we may also find value in looking to the hero figure and aspirational ideal of Lady Justice, who stands for impartiality and unbiased judgment. One reason to draw on Lady Justice is that general altruistic behavior (e.g. charitable donations) and justice-related behavior (e.g. giving compensation to unfairly treated parties) are driven by partly distinct cognitive systems. More broadly, compassion itself is not explicitly impartial, and hence we often need further support to make our compassion more even-handed.

Thus, we may also want to use tools that render ideals of fairness and impartiality more salient. One such tool is to call to mind Lady Justice, calm and incorruptible, with her biases blindfolded and her decisions weighed on the scales of evidence and reason. When the crowd roars for one side, she does not flinch; she turns to the evidence. What would Lady Justice do?

3.3.3 Underdogs of Defiant Hope: What Would Samwise Do?

Another heroic narrative is that of the humble underdogs who refuse to give up even when all hope seems lost: a small fellowship that rises up to defy the towering monster of suffering, daring to be a light in dark places.

This is essentially the story depicted in The Lord of the Rings. Despite facing the very fires of Mordor, heroic characters like Aragorn and Samwise Gamgee refuse to give up. When defeat seems certain, they summon all they have and push through the fear and exhaustion. For Frodo.

This is a story we can also live out in the real world. In the midst of personal difficulty and ongoing suffering on a vast scale, we can hold onto something. We can hold onto compassionate purpose: to relieve the most desperate suffering.

This is worth fighting for. And in this fight, there is always hope.

Even though we cannot save all beings from torment, we can still look to those we can save and exclaim: “I can carry you!”

3.4 Perspectives of Preciousness and Gratitude

Beyond narratives about moral heroes, there are perspectives that remind us how lucky we are to possess unique capacities and opportunities. For example, the first step in the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Lojong is to reflect on the “rarity and preciousness of human life”. What we are invited to reflect upon is that we are, in an important sense, incredibly privileged to have been born human. There are so many kinds of creatures on Earth — birds, fish, insects, and so on — yet among all these, we happen to be born as beings who possess a unique opportunity to prevent suffering.

The point is not that humans are more precious than other beings, but rather that we have a rare and precious potential: to embrace compassionate values, to cultivate wisdom, and to pursue informed actions for the benefit of all beings. Despite all that is wrong in the world, we can find much to be grateful for — and humbled by — in having this precious potential and opportunity.

Another perspective that can evoke a justified sense of preciousness and gratitude is to think of our fellow humans who use their time and energy to relieve and prevent suffering. We can be grateful to such individuals both for the impact they are having on the world at large as well as for inspiring us with their example — by showing us the possibilities of human life. Keeping such people in mind can give us a sense that we are not alone in wanting to alleviate suffering and may help us see ourselves as being part of a shared endeavor alongside many competent people.

Of course, the suggestion here is not to indulge in these perspectives such that we overlook the immense urgency and prevalence of extreme suffering. The aim is rather to avoid the mistake of adopting a perspective that sees only the extreme suffering that is occurring around us or that may occur in the future. While such a perspective has the merit of keeping the chief problem in view, it is also starkly incomplete, as it provides little motivation or direction for the mitigation of this problem. That is a reason to adopt a more balanced outlook that includes both the problem and the many forces that have the potential to address it.

3.5 Our Best Self: The Effective Protagonist

Studies suggest that having a sense of an “ideal self” can have various benefits, including greater wellbeing, increased helping behavior, and enhanced motivation for self-development. In the context of compassionate purpose, we can think of this ideal self as a protagonist in an ongoing story: a wiser version of ourselves who has learned, over many chapters, to use their time and abilities in ways that have the greatest compassionate impact.

Note how this definition of our best self is distinct from notions of a “real” or “authentic” self. The best self is understood as something that we can aim for and strive to be, not as something that we already are deep down. After all, we can always improve, and imagining that we are already our best self is a recipe for hubristic pride and complacency.

This is not to say that we should always be dissatisfied with where we are, but simply that we have reason to keep our eyes on the unfolding arc from who we are now to who we could become. In particular, it may be helpful to occasionally bring our best-self protagonist to mind and ask what they would do in the present scene. In doing so, we treat our lives as an evolving narrative in which each decision is a small but meaningful next step in our story of compassionate purpose.

3.6 The Case for an Inspired Approach

Having outlined some narratives and perspectives that may support compassionate motivation, we can ask why it is worth adopting a broadly inspired approach to compassionate purpose.

When hearing about a higher purpose centered on the reduction of extreme suffering, some people might assume it must be a dry and colorless endeavor, with no room for inspired vitality, warmth, and creativity. Yet such a reaction overlooks a number of crucial points.

First, a perpetually dry and colorless approach is rarely sustainable. On the contrary, to build optimal motivation, we often need to draw on many diverse sources of inspiration that help make our lives more vibrant and engaging. These may include anything from music and movies to social activities and engaging hobbies.

Such colorful elements are not superfluous fluff. For many of us, they are more like essential fuel for both our core needs and our higher motivations.

Second, if we give other people the false impression that effective efforts to reduce suffering must be grey and exhausting, the main thing we achieve is to discourage people from contributing to this endeavor. In contrast, if we honestly demonstrate that a life animated by such efforts has room for a rich palette of experiences and inspiration, other people may feel more inclined to contribute to this endeavor.

Third, we have reason to adopt an inspired approach in light of the broader psychological effects of inspiration. For example, studies have found that states of inspiration predict increased wellbeing, creativity, and drive to master one's work. Moreover, there is evidence of a bi-directional relationship between inspiration and goal achievement, suggesting that “goal progress and goal inspiration build on each other to form a cycle of greater goal inspiration and greater goal pursuit”.

Of course, we can also go too far with inspiration, such as by getting high on it to a degree that distorts our beliefs and priorities. Rather than maximizing inspiration, we want to find a sweet spot of balanced inspiration: an effective state where we are neither stuck in passivity nor in manic overdrive.

It is also worth steering clear of the misconception that we should always feel inspired, let alone that we are doing something wrong if we are not. While feelings of inspiration can be relevant evidence as to whether our current projects are a good fit for us, it is not realistic to expect to feel consistently inspired. Indeed, in most everyday activities, strong feelings of inspiration are likely suboptimal, as they can crowd out other emotions that are more appropriate to the situation. We may do best to cultivate inspiration more as an underlying attitude than as a constantly felt emotion.

To develop a more inspired approach, we can adopt low-friction practices to continually reinforce compassionate commitment. Such practices may include:

- Re-reading morally inspiring texts or passages, such as Shantideva's dedication prayer.

- Listening to songs that embody compassion or a sense of awe.

- Viewing morally inspiring visual art or symbolic images to prompt moral elevation.

- Finding and co-developing inspiring communities that provide social support.

In stark contrast to the naive picture of a grey and suffocating approach, the optimal approach to reducing suffering is in many ways just the opposite. If we are to remain consistently motivated in the pursuit of compassionate purpose, and if we are to motivate others, we will do well to integrate the full range of the human experience — by allowing art, color, and music to inspire and energize our pursuits, and by cultivating a realistic sense of hope and opportunity. We have good reason to adopt such an approach of inspired compassion, not in the service of getting high, but in the service of having an optimally motivated and inviting mindset for reducing extreme suffering.

4 Self-Compassion

Self-compassion is a powerful tool for sustaining long-term efforts to reduce suffering. In this chapter, I will review some of the benefits of self-compassion and show how we can cultivate it.

4.1 Why This Is Important

It might be tempting to downplay the importance of self-compassion and self-care. After all, there will always be others who are worse off than we are and who seem more deserving of our limited attention. So why, given that larger and more urgent context, would we focus on self-compassion and on taking care of ourselves? That can sound selfish and like a failure to get our priorities straight.

While this sentiment is understandable, it is nevertheless mistaken. The fact that there are many beings who are worse off than we are does not undo the fact that we ourselves also have real and essential needs. Nor does it undo the simple fact that we are better able to help others if we ourselves are healthy and relate to ourselves in constructive ways. The vast amount of suffering in the world thus ultimately turns the sentiment above on its head: it gives us strong reasons to pursue effective self-care and to develop a healthy level of self-compassion.

4.2 What Is Self-Compassion?

Self-compassion involves having sympathy for our own struggles and distress as well as having the motivation to alleviate our distress. Crucially, this is not the same as self-pity.

Self-pity is commonly defined as self-absorbed unhappiness over one's own problems, which differs from self-compassion in two principal ways. First, unlike self-pity, self-compassion is not self-absorbed: having sympathy for our own struggles does not imply that we single ourselves out as being uniquely hurt or victimized.

Second, self-compassion differs from self-pity in that it does not motivate us to wallow in our unhappiness. On the contrary, those who are high in self-compassion tend to ruminate less over their own misfortune, which may be part of the reason why they experience less depression and anxiety.

Furthermore, self-compassion is not about rationalizing bad behavior, also known as self-justification. In fact, studies suggest that self-compassion reduces such tendencies. Compared to those in a control group, people who engaged in a self-compassion exercise reported greater motivation to apologize for a recent transgression, as well as a greater commitment to avoid similar transgressions in the future.

Interestingly, there is a robust link between people's level of self-compassion and their beliefs about its effects. People who are low in self-compassion tend to believe that self-compassion leads to low motivation. In contrast, those who are high in self-compassion tend to see it as helpful and motivating, which is more consistent with the broader body of evidence. This suggests that low self-compassion may partly stem from inaccurate beliefs about its motivational effects. Indeed, one study found that inducing more favorable beliefs about self-compassion resulted in a greater willingness to adopt self-compassionate responses compared to inducing negative beliefs about it.

4.3 The Benefits of Self-Compassion

There is evidence that self-compassion can motivate us to improve ourselves across a broad range of domains. For example, a set of experiments found that self-compassion motivated people to study more for a difficult test after an initial failure, and it also increased motivation to improve a personal weakness. Another study found that higher levels of self-compassion predicted greater self-improvement derived from experiences of regret.

These observations make sense from a theoretical perspective: if we adopt a compassionate stance toward our own personal failures and challenges, it may feel safer to face them and try to work on them. Consistent with this view, people who are induced to have greater self-compassion are better able to acknowledge their role in negative events without getting overwhelmed by unpleasant emotions. More broadly, self-compassion appears to make us more resilient and better able to adapt to challenging situations.

This broader pattern is also evident in mental health outcomes: low self-compassion is associated with anxiety, stress, and depression, whereas high self-compassion is linked to greater wellbeing and life satisfaction. Meta-analyses likewise find that self-compassion interventions help reduce symptoms of anxiety, stress, and depression. Furthermore, there is evidence that self-compassion can help treat eating disorders, and it is also linked to reduced narcissistic tendencies.

Studies have found that a key component of low self-compassion is harsh self-criticism, which appears to be the main factor underlying the connection between low self-compassion and worse mental health. Similarly, there is evidence that self-compassion interventions alleviate mental health problems in large part by reducing harsh self-criticism. Thus, avoiding harsh self-criticism is plausibly the most important aspect of self-compassion.

Moreover, self-criticism is a key predictor of altruistic burnout among helping professionals, such as nurses and social workers. This suggests that reducing self-criticism is especially worthwhile for those seeking to reduce suffering in sustainable ways.

Beyond the beneficial effects on mental health, there is evidence that self-compassion can help improve our productivity. For example, studies have found that people who are high in self-compassion tend to procrastinate less, and they experience less stress when they do procrastinate. Another study found that even among people who report that they are prone to procrastination, those who scored high in self-compassion were still better able to realize their long-term plans than those who scored low in self-compassion. Generally, self-compassion appears to improve our self-control, which may help explain its beneficial effects on procrastination and goal adherence across a wide range of domains.

Lastly, there are many studies linking self-compassion to better physical health. In terms of health behaviors, self-compassion is associated with healthier eating, exercise, and sleep habits; in terms of health outcomes, it is linked to global measures of physical health, better immunity, and lower levels of stress-induced inflammation.

Of course, self-compassion is not all we need. As with everything else, the promotion of self-compassion entails real opportunity costs, and self-compassion alone is by no means sufficient for us to be effective in the pursuit of compassionate purpose, even if it is a critical component. Indeed, studies suggest that self-compassion is only weakly to moderately correlated with compassion for others. Yet research has also found that interventions focused on the promotion of both self-compassion and compassion for others can be effective at raising both, which hints at the value of developing along each of these dimensions.

4.4 How to Develop Self-Compassion

There are various practices for increasing self-compassion, and I will present just a few of them below. Note that the development of self-compassion can feel difficult in the beginning, as we might be changing deeply entrenched patterns in how we relate to ourselves. Such difficulties are to be expected, and they only give us more reason to be kind to ourselves. Fortunately, research suggests that self-compassion can become the new normal after several weeks of regular practice, and that it can then become a stable source of ease and comfort.

4.4.1 Acknowledging Difficulty

A common first step in self-compassion exercises is to acknowledge that we are experiencing some difficulty and to allow it to be there without running away from it, fighting it, or analyzing it. The difficulty in question can take many forms. For example, we might be concerned about some upcoming event or feel pained by the suffering of others. Or we might simply feel a sense of discomfort without there being a clear source.

Acknowledging whatever difficulty we are experiencing without becoming entangled in it can serve at least two key functions. First, it can create space and awareness that help facilitate compassion. After all, if we are not aware of our distress, we can hardly extend compassion toward ourselves as we experience it. Second, acknowledging our difficult feelings may help ease our struggle with them. The difficulty may still be there, but by recognizing it, we at least stop adding the extra burden of trying to suppress it.

4.4.2 Remembering That Suffering Is a Normal Part of Life

Another exercise is to remind ourselves that suffering is a normal part of life and that we are not alone in facing difficulties. This reduces the sense of isolation and inadequacy that is characteristic of low self-compassion and enables us to look at the bigger picture beyond our momentary experience.

That is, rather than seeing our suffering as a unique personal failing for which we shame ourselves, we can bear in mind that suffering is a common feature of sentient life. We are neither alone in experiencing suffering, nor did we create our capacity to suffer. Recognizing this can help us meet suffering with a sense of solidarity and kinship rather than self-blame.

4.4.3 Relating to Ourselves Like a Compassionate Friend

The aim of this exercise is to relate to ourselves with the same kindness that we would extend to a friend who needs support. For example, if we imagine a close friend in our situation, facing the same struggles, how would we respond to them? What supportive sentiments would we feel toward them? Next, we can try to turn those supportive sentiments toward ourselves. To make this concrete and practical, we can use statements like “may I be kind to myself in everyday life” or “may I support myself in my daily actions”.

Alternatively, we can imagine how a compassionate friend would feel and respond to us if they could see our struggles, and then try to adopt that as our own response toward ourselves. In effect, we can become our own compassionate and supportive friend.

5 Facing Adversity in Healthy Ways

Self-compassion is a valuable tool for facing adversity in healthy ways, but it is by no means the only one. This chapter will explore various other tools.

The goal here is not to avoid adversity, which is neither possible nor desirable. Rather, the goal is to build a robust and constructive response, cultivating skills such as resilience and flexibility that enable us to work through challenges in service of compassionate action.

5.1 Relating to Our Suffering in Healthier Ways

We can sometimes make our suffering worse by relating to it in unhelpful ways. For example, in addition to some raw feeling of pain or frustration, we may have the thought that we should not be suffering, or that there is something wrong with us for having aversive experiences. This may in turn lead to more unpleasant feelings, such as added frustration or shame.

Buddhists often refer to this as the second arrow of suffering: the first arrow is the sensation of pain or discomfort itself, and the second arrow is the resistance and friction that we may unwittingly add on top. Similar concepts are found in cognitive behavioral therapy (C.B.T), in which the cognitive appraisal and framing of our experiences are understood to be significant for how we feel overall.

To be clear, the point here is not that we should ignore pain as a potential danger signal that is worth acting upon, let alone that we should rationalize unnecessary suffering. The point is simply that in cases where we cannot avoid suffering, we will likely do better by not adding a second arrow, precisely to avoid creating more suffering. Below are some suggestions for how we can relate to our suffering in healthier ways.

5.1.1 Reducing Resistance to Our Unavoidable Suffering

One helpful approach is to reduce the resistance we may feel toward our own unavoidable suffering. This might involve changing our reflexive response to painful feelings, such as by keeping in mind that we have not necessarily made a mistake when we suffer, and by adopting the attitude that it is okay to suffer sometimes (when we cannot do anything about it).

This way of relating to our experience lies at the heart of acceptance and commitment therapy (A.C.T), a kind of therapy that encourages acceptance, curiosity, and openness toward difficult feelings, and that many studies have found to be effective for treating conditions such as chronic pain, O.C.D, anxiety, and depression.

Note that the somewhat clunky framing of “reducing resistance” — as opposed to simply “accepting” — is deliberate in this context. We might sometimes not be able to fully accept our suffering, in which case aiming for complete acceptance may be counterproductive. If some level of resistance remains and is beyond our conscious control, we are likely better off letting it be, as opposed to striving for an unachievable aim that may ironically add resistance rather than reduce it.

5.1.2 Updating Our Expectations About Suffering

A complementary strategy is to update our expectations about suffering and discomfort. For example, if we expect to almost never experience any unpleasantness, we are likely to be disappointed, and we may be more inclined to add further arrows of frustration and struggle on top of our raw discomfort.

The truth is that there will almost always be some subtle feelings of discomfort or disturbance in any given moment. And while it might be unpleasant to face this reality, it may ultimately be more unpleasant to be in denial about it, such as by holding on to the unrealistic and consistently disappointing expectation that we will ever be entirely free from disturbances. We may find greater relief by adopting more realistic expectations.

5.1.3 Shifting How We Relate to Our Thoughts and Worries

Metacognitive therapy (M.C.T) encourages us to take a step back from our thoughts and to become aware of the implicit beliefs that drive our mental habits. These may include “positive” metacognitive beliefs about how our habitual thoughts and worries help keep us safe (even when they are in fact counterproductive) or “negative” metacognitive beliefs about how certain thoughts or sensations are dangerous (even when they are quite normal and harmless).

As we recognize these underlying beliefs, we can update them in more accurate and adaptive directions: we internalize that many of our worries actually do not help keep us safe and that our thoughts and sensations in themselves are not dangerous.

One of the central skills in M.C.T is detached mindfulness: noticing thoughts and feelings as tran-zee-unt mental events rather than facts or commands we must follow. Instead of engaging with the mental content, such as by arguing with it or worrying about it, we simply leave it alone. This is the equivalent of noticing a phone ringing but choosing not to answer it. The phone is allowed to ring, but we can learn not to pick it up. Observe, don't engage.

Even if we are generally good at practicing detached mindfulness, there may still be specific areas in which we can benefit from applying it more consistently. That is often the key challenge: applying detached mindfulness to our most triggering thoughts, sensations, and emotions — the ones we most habitually get caught up in and treat as more serious or useful than they really are.

A related technique used in M.C.T is that of postponing worry: instead of worrying constantly about a given issue, we can plan a fixed window in which we will give the issue our full attention, and otherwise let it rest. Studies have found that worry postponement can reduce both worry duration and frequency, especially among people with anxiety. Beyond reducing worry, this technique has the benefit of exercising our power to choose whether to engage with our thoughts and worries.

M.C.T is an effective treatment for a wide range of mental health problems, and studies suggest that it may be more effective than C.B.T for depression and generalized anxiety disorder. Additionally, there is evidence that M.C.T can help treat addiction, including internet addiction.

That said, improved metacognition cannot fully substitute for self-compassion. Metacognitive skills and self-compassion make partially distinct contributions to mental health, and some benefits of improved metacognition are stronger when combined with a higher level of self-compassion. It therefore makes sense to cultivate both these core pillars of mental health.

5.1.4 Addressing Trauma and Persistent Mental Health Issues

We cannot always think our way out of suffering. Sometimes, specialized support is needed to address trauma-related patterns and other persistent mental health issues.

Psychological trauma exists along a spectrum. Many of us display traumatic patterns that fall short of severe trauma but still shape how we relate to ourselves and the world around us. Others may find themselves caught in a loop of reliving severe trauma. In either case, working with these patterns can help ease the distortions and burdens that often result from unhelpful processing.

Post-traumatic stress may keep our mind in a state of elevated threat sensitivity and hypervigilance. This state can distort our attention and cognition, making us more driven by fear and stuck in rigid thought patterns. For example, we may become prone to catastrophizing and think within a narrow range of possibilities even when a broader range is available. Such thinking patterns can lead to suboptimal decisions across many areas of our lives.

Recovering from persistent mental health issues may involve working with a trained therapist to build healthier patterns of relating to our thoughts and feelings. Evidence-based self-help interventions such as online programs and workbooks with limited professional support can also be helpful. For treating P.T.S.D specifically, a meta-analysis found that metacognitive therapy tends to be highly effective. There is also emerging evidence that prosocial behavior can help reduce P.T.S.D.

If we struggle with enduring mental health issues, seeking effective support is a key part of the compassionate project, not a selfish detour. It is an investment in both our wellbeing and our capacity to help others. Moreover, acknowledging and resolving mental health issues need not mean defining ourselves as mere victims. On the contrary, it can ultimately help us become more active and take greater responsibility in our lives.

5.1.5 Realizing Our Strength to Handle Discomfort

Lastly, it is helpful to realize that we generally do have the strength to persevere and grow even when we are facing uncomfortable conditions. In particular, we can come to see ourselves as individuals who have the strength to handle a certain level of distress, as opposed to seeing ourselves as creatures who must shy away from the faintest hints of discomfort — a self-perception that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if we start acting on it.

This resembles a recommendation often found in Stoicism, namely to avoid letting our immediate discomfort dictate what we do, and to go beyond a reactive state in which we are thrown about by the reflexive commands of pain and desire. Some amount of discomfort is not detrimental to us, and choosing a modest level of discomfort in the short term often results in less discomfort in the bigger picture.

Persevering in the face of discomfort may seem to be in conflict with self-compassion, yet this apparent tension rests on a misconception about what self-compassion entails. Properly understood, self-compassion does not involve seeing ourselves as unable to tolerate distress or being unwilling to choose short-term discomfort. On the contrary, self-compassion involves caring enough about ourselves to make choices that benefit our long-term aims, while also displaying care and understanding toward ourselves for the discomfort that may be involved in those choices. It is thus possible to both have high self-compassion and high confidence in our ability to tolerate discomfort.

5.2 Understanding the Instrumental Value of Suffering

It is often helpful to understand the beneficial effects that suffering can have. Again, the point here is not to rationalize suffering or to deny its felt badness, but simply to adopt a more informed and accurate perspective regarding its functions and potential benefits. This may in turn reduce some of the arrows that we add on top of our suffering when we believe its effects to be all bad, and not least help us navigate more skillfully in the midst of unpleasant states.

5.2.1 The Helpful Functions of Unpleasant Emotions

Unpleasant emotions serve a number of helpful functions, and they can even play an important role in psychological growth and wellbeing. For example, fear can help alert us to danger, sadness can be a signal that we need to change something in our lives, embarrassment can help sharpen our social awareness, anger can help us assert our boundaries and resist unfairness, regret can be a catalyst for self-improvement, and so on.

Beyond these helpful motivational roles, studies suggest that unpleasant emotions and moods can improve information processing. For instance, experimental studies have found that people who are induced to experience mildly unpleasant moods tend to show greater attention to detail and improved recall, are better able to detect deception, are less prone to common errors in judgment, and are better at coming up with high-quality arguments as judged by independent evaluators.

Of course, the benefits reviewed above by no means imply that unpleasant emotions cannot also be excessive and dysfunctional, as they often are.

5.2.2 Suffering Can Motivate Us to Reduce Suffering

Perhaps the greatest instrumental benefit of experiencing suffering is that it can help us better understand the moral significance of suffering, and thus potentially motivate us to reduce it on behalf of all beings. Indeed, a number of studies suggest that painful experiences can increase compassion and altruistic behavior.

For example, one study found that people who were induced to experience physical pain made more sympathetic moral judgments compared to controls, partly due to greater perspective-taking among those in pain. Another study found that people who had experienced significant suffering in the past were more likely to help outgroup members in need, and this held true for helpers who had undergone different kinds of suffering, such as interpersonal harm, group-based harm, or natural disasters. Likewise, studies have found that the severity of people's past suffering predicts greater compassion and increased helping behavior aimed at relieving others' suffering.

Of course, none of this implies that we should seek out suffering in order to gain these potential benefits. After all, suffering can also have many detrimental effects, including debilitating trauma and embitterment. The point is simply that it can be helpful to be aware of these potential benefits so as to realize that suffering need not be all bad in terms of its instrumental effects. And with the right tools, we can sometimes use our suffering to help others.

5.3 Leveraging Our Suffering for Compassionate Ends

As mentioned, suffering can motivate us to reduce suffering by directly alerting us to its moral significance. Yet this motivating effect may be more likely to occur if we make a deliberate effort to foster it, such as by drawing an explicit connection between our own suffering and the importance of reducing suffering for all beings.

Specifically, we may engage in the Buddhist practice of Tonglen, which is essentially about transforming suffering into compassion. A classic Tonglen exercise is to use our current suffering as a starting point for wishing relief for all beings who are undergoing similar experiences of suffering, and then progressively widening that wish outward. For example, if we have a headache, we may wish relief for everyone who has a headache right now, then broaden this wish to everyone who is in physical pain right now, and finally expand our compassion to include all sentient beings.

5.3.1 The Lotus in the Mud: Appreciating the Lessons of Our Suffering

A common metaphor in Buddhism is that of the lotus flower in the mud. This is often taken to symbolize the possibility of genuine compassion and relief (the lotus) in the midst of suffering and adversity (the mud). A further meaning of the metaphor is that the lotus grows from the mud itself, meaning that the mud of our suffering plays a key role in creating the lotus of our compassion for all sentient beings.

One way to apply this perspective in our own lives is to reflect on how our past suffering may have played a role in developing our own compassion. Perhaps we can even feel some gratitude for the ways in which our past suffering has opened our eyes and added greater depth to our outlook and priorities.

For me personally, this attitude is not merely theoretical. It is to a large extent how I view my own past suffering. I can honestly say that I am grateful for how my past suffering has broadened my perspective and forced me to confront some of the more horrifying aspects of reality, and not least how it has given me much deeper and more important priorities in my life.

For instance, having fluid suctioned from my inner ear, enduring acid burns in my armpits, and undergoing brief episodes of intense despair are all experiences that have helped inform my (still limited) perspective on the significance of suffering. Similarly, seeing desperate mothers holding their dying children and watching the routine abuses inflicted on non-human animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses helped me question my more superficial ambitions and instead turn toward reducing suffering as my core purpose.

5.4 Taking Responsibility

A helpful approach to facing adversity is to take responsibility for how we deal with it. While many of our challenges may not be of our own making, we can still take responsibility for handling them in a productive way and for pursuing a constructive path forward. Such an attitude of responsibility has a number of benefits.

For example, there is evidence that a sense of responsibility, both toward ourselves and others, can be an effective tool for self-regulation. Moreover, there is an extensive literature on self-efficacy suggesting that taking personal responsibility for our actions can be empowering and improve our resilience and wellbeing.

Another benefit of taking responsibility is that it helps us avoid what is in some sense the opposite mindset, namely a mindset of perpetual victimhood. Such a mindset has been associated with a number of detrimental traits and behaviors, beyond just a reduced sense of agency and self-efficacy. For example, studies have found that a sense of victimhood is associated with reduced empathy and a greater sense of entitlement to behave selfishly and aggressively.

None of this is to deny that we can sometimes be treated unfairly. Nor is it to deny that many problems are better addressed at a systemic rather than a personal level. The point is simply that we have good reason to face our challenges by taking responsibility for our path forward, without embracing victimhood as a core part of our identity.

5.5 Acknowledging Mistakes and Moving Forward

We will at times say things that we should not have said, or invest in things we should not have invested in, or simply fail to follow a sensible plan that we had laid out for ourselves. In other words, mistakes are inevitable. This has important implications for what it means to have a healthy and pragmatic approach to life.

An approach that does not leave room for mistakes is self-defeating. Indeed, studies suggest that people with high levels of perfectionism tend to have worse outcomes, such as greater distress and lower grades, than those who strive for excellence through ambitious but achievable goals.

Thus, it seems helpful to adopt an ambitious yet self-compassionate approach that expects some stumbles along the way, realizing that the optimal approach to reducing suffering is one that has room for occasional mistakes.

Fortunately, we do not have to be perfect in order to make a significant difference, and even modest contributions can still be extremely helpful. Rather than getting stuck in a binary mindset according to which we are either making a perfect contribution or no contribution at all, it is both more accurate and more motivating to view our compassionate impact in gradual terms: as something we can always incrementally do more of, without there being any magic threshold along the way. And even if we have made many mistakes in the past, it is still not too late for us to move in a better direction from where we are.

How, then, can we move forward in an effective way if we feel like we have made a mistake and failed to act in alignment with our values? Studies find that it helps to actively affirm our values. This has been shown to foster genuine self-forgiveness, greater motivation to do better going forward, and increased prosocial behavior.

We can affirm our values by writing them down, reflecting on why they are important, and recalling past instances where we lived by them. In the most minimal version, we can briefly affirm our values to ourselves. Provided the sentiment is genuine, we might say: “I affirm my commitment to compassion and integrity because my impact on future suffering truly matters and I care about living by these values; I have often acted on these values in the past, and so I can continue to act on them in the future.”

Another helpful way to move forward after a mistake is to view it as a learning opportunity that we approach with curiosity and self-compassion. Specifically, we can try to understand the causes of the mistake like a scientist and identify practical steps to avoid repeating it in the future. This process may become more motivating if we realize that our learning not only has the potential to benefit ourselves, but also the many beings whom we are trying to help, including those who deal with similar struggles as we do.

5.6 Suggestions for Handling Acute Adversity

I conclude this chapter with some practical suggestions for handling acute adversity. The suggestions are ordered by intensity, starting with tools for immediate crises and progressing toward practices that support constructive action. Many of these suggestions can be helpful even if we are not facing acute adversity; we can always start wherever we find most useful on this ladder of practices.

5.6.1 Cyclic Sighing for Rapid Relaxation and Pain Relief

A helpful technique when in acute distress is to practice cyclic sighing, also known as the physiological sigh. The practice is simple:

- Inhale deeply through your nose to fully expand your belly.

- Add a sharp inhale that raises your chest.

- Slowly exhale through your mouth in a long, complete release.

Following this breathing pattern for just a few minutes can help reduce distress and relax our nervous system. A benefit of cyclic sighing is that we can use it almost anywhere, and there is some evidence that it can even reduce the felt intensity of pain.

5.6.2 Taking a Self-Compassion Break

A brief exercise for dealing with acute adversity is to take a self-compassion break consisting of the following three steps. First, clearly acknowledge and validate that this is a moment of suffering, such as by saying to yourself “this hurts” or “this is stressful”. Second, acknowledge that suffering is a normal part of life, and that you are not alone in facing the struggles of life. Third, try to extend kindness to yourself, treating yourself like a compassionate friend would treat you, by being supportive and accepting toward yourself.

More generally, when facing a serious setback, it may be helpful to take a longer break from whatever we are doing in order to prioritize self-care and regain our footing. That is often a worthwhile investment.

5.6.3 Practicing Detached Mindfulness

Our minds often react to adversity with urgent commands to try to “fix” our thoughts and feelings. Yet instead of engaging, we can practice detached mindfulness by simply noticing our thoughts and feelings as passing events. We acknowledge that the “worry phone” is ringing, but we make a conscious choice not to pick it up. This can prevent a difficult situation from spiraling into a panic loop.

5.6.4 Reaching Out for Support

We need not face pain and struggle alone. We can reach out to other people for support, such as a trusted friend or family member, a mental health professional, or a crisis line. Our support network can help provide comfort and perspective when we face hardship.

5.6.5 Connecting with Moral Elevation

In moments of distress or hopelessness, witnessing acts of moral beauty or heroic endurance can help restore our moral resolve. Watching a favorite inspiring scene or recalling a moral hero may shift our perspective from despair to moral elevation, reminding us that perseverance is possible even in the darkest times.

5.6.6 Holding On to Our Deeper Purpose

Another way to boost our resilience is to connect with our sense of purpose. A helpful strategy when facing difficult situations is thus to hold on to our deeper purpose by vividly reminding ourselves what we are working toward and why it matters.

5.6.7 Reappraising Our Suffering and Broadening Our Perspective

It is sometimes helpful to reappraise our suffering. One effective reappraisal technique is temporal distancing: to imagine how our future self would view this situation. By adopting the perspective of our future self a year from now, we broaden our outlook beyond our immediate struggles and gain more of a bird's-eye view that can give us greater ease and resilience.

Another technique is to remember that our unpleasant emotions can play useful motivational and cognitive roles. Specifically, it may help to keep in mind that our suffering can be a strong motivator for reducing suffering, and to actively seek to use it that way. We can thereby transform our suffering into compassion for everyone, including ourselves in the current moment.

5.6.8 Taking One Small Action Toward Our Goals

A crucial insight from research on behavioral activation is that action often precedes and builds motivation. Thus, to get out of a rut, it is helpful to focus on taking a small action toward our goals, where this action is allowed to be as small and easy as needed. For example, we may jot down a single idea we have been thinking about, or read just a single paragraph in a book, or write just a single sentence in a project we want to complete. The key is to lower the barrier to action until it feels almost effortless. Once we begin, momentum often follows naturally.

6 Reducing Extreme Suffering in Healthy Ways

Attempts to reduce extreme suffering come with a unique set of challenges that deserve attention in their own right. These struggles are familiar to many: You feel exhausted, guilty for resting, unsure how to help, and tempted to either overwork or shut down. You are pained by ongoing suffering, and you feel an urgency that has no clear direction. You close your laptop at the end of the day, not knowing whether anything you did mattered.

But there is an opening. You can learn to carry this differently. Your ability to bear it and do something with it can grow. That is what this chapter is about.

6.1 Acknowledging the Difficulty of the Endeavor

It may be helpful to take a step back and acknowledge the monumental difficulty of trying to reduce extreme suffering. Indeed, there are many ways in which this can be a strenuous undertaking.

For one, it can be difficult to face the sheer reality of extreme suffering in terms of both how horrific and prevalent it is — in hospitals, slaughterhouses, torture prisons, and so on. Confronting such realities is often painful.

Second, even if we do face up to these realities, it can be difficult to know what to do about them, not only in terms of which actions are most helpful, but even in terms of which actions are helpful rather than harmful.

Third, even if we have a reasonable idea about which actions are most helpful, we may still find it difficult to motivate ourselves to pursue those actions. After all, the actions in question might be inconvenient or unpopular, and such factors can be a motivational hurdle for many of us.

In short, we should not expect the endeavor of reducing suffering to be easy. Being clear about this may help validate the real difficulties we face when trying to reduce suffering, while also bracing us for them. We can learn to see these difficulties as a normal and expected part of the endeavor, rather than as a surprising aberration that implies we are doing something wrong.

6.2 Focusing on What We Can Change

Perhaps one of the most helpful suggestions when facing the immense suffering of the world is to focus on that which lies within our power to change. The sad reality is that there is much suffering that we cannot do anything about: countless instances of appalling suffering will continue to occur despite our best efforts. This can be overwhelming to think about. However, from a pragmatic perspective, we will likely do best by focusing on that which we can realistically influence: all the torturous suffering that we can prevent.

Many traditions have highlighted essentially the same idea. For example, Stoic thinkers often recommend that we focus on what we can control and let go of what is beyond our control. A similar sentiment is expressed in the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

In this same spirit, many texts emphasize how even a limited difference can still be deeply significant. For instance, an important passage of the Talmud is summarized as “Save one life, save the entire world.” A similar point is made by a classic parable about a child who helps starfish on a beach where thousands of them are stranded. When asked whether the effort to help makes a difference, the child gently helps another starfish and replies, “It makes a difference to that one.”

This point becomes even stronger if we explicitly frame the difference we can make in terms of extreme suffering. For example, even if the difference we can make is “only” to prevent a full day of extreme suffering, this is still an inconceivably significant difference, regardless of how much suffering there may be beyond our reach. Similarly, when we ourselves experience intense suffering, we directly realize that even a brief moment of intense suffering is clearly worth preventing, and we see that it is a serious fallacy to think otherwise just because there are many instances of suffering elsewhere.

6.3 Focusing on Positive and Constructive Goals

The aim of reducing extreme suffering is negative in nature, meaning that it is about the absence or prevention of something. Such aims can be motivationally challenging. Unlike positive goals, which involve the presence of something, negative goals do not directly imply a process of gradual construction. Yet goals often need to be gradual and constructive in order to consistently engage our motivations.

This suggests a pragmatic need to translate the negative goal of reducing extreme suffering into positive and constructive aims. That is, we may benefit from reframing this goal in terms of proxy aims centered on the gradual construction of various resources, where these resources in turn help reduce suffering.

A useful analogy might be the concept of potential energy in physics. For example, when we perform work to lift an object, we increase its potential energy — a kind of stored capacity to do work later. Likewise, we can conceive of positive and constructive efforts as a way to gradually accumulate capacity that we can later release to spare sentient beings from suffering.

More broadly, as a concrete metaphor for this protective capacity, we may view our overarching aim as steadily building a fortress that can protect sentient beings from extreme suffering, where each constructive effort is a brick in this fortress.

What might such positive and constructive aims look like in practice? We can, for example:

- Gradually build up a healthy community of individuals who are dedicated to reducing suffering in effective ways.

- Contribute to our collective knowledge base such that our decisions can be better informed.

- Create resources that convey the horror and moral importance of suffering.

- Build better institutional frameworks for reducing suffering.

- Develop practical capacities to directly help beings in need.

This constructive framing also applies to how we think about and live our individual lives. Rather than seeing our personal lives as aimed chiefly at our own wellbeing, we can view our lives as also being about well-doing: a constructive quest to develop and realize “positive impact potential”. We may then seek to build such potential by cultivating healthy mindsets, becoming more knowledgeable, developing relevant skills, and so on. From this perspective, our lives can rightfully be seen as a quest for something of truly immense positive value, where this positive value is defined in terms of our potential to prevent extreme suffering.

6.4 Seeing Compassionate Impact as a Gradual Process

When confronting the horror and prevalence of extreme suffering, we may feel a strong urgency to immediately “get out there” and do something about it. This sense of urgency can be a potent motivator, and it is in many ways an apt response to our condition. However, it is worth combining our sense of urgency with the insight that compassionate impact is usually a gradual process. If our sense of urgency prevents us from engaging in a gradual and well-considered process toward reducing suffering, it is probably not conducive to optimal impact.

Instead, it is likely better to view our compassionate impact as a long-term process that we can pursue in incremental steps, without a frenzied need to make all our impact right away. This perspective may help foster a healthier and clearer state of mind for reasoning about our impact. Additionally, it may give us more space to develop the kinds of skills that are instrumental to impact over the long term — skills that might take a lot of time and effort to cultivate.

Seeing our impact as a gradual process may also boost our ability to handle adversity. For example, if we make a mistake, we can see it as something to learn from within a larger process toward compassionate impact. Moreover, by seeing our impact as a gradual process, we avoid the false notion that we are necessarily failing if we are not “out there” right now to directly help suffering beings, as opposed to patiently building skills and resources that might ultimately lead to greater impact.

6.5 Dealing with Uncertainty

A common challenge for those seeking to reduce extreme suffering is how to deal with the uncertainty that is involved. Indeed, when trying to reduce extreme suffering, it can often feel like virtually everything involves vast uncertainty, even to the point that it becomes paralyzing.

Once again, a helpful first step may be to validate these feelings. After all, that we face great uncertainty is not some inaccurate perception, but rather a deep truth about our condition. There really is great uncertainty about how we can best reduce extreme suffering, and there always will be.

6.5.1 Accepting Uncertainty

The inevitability of uncertainty suggests that we would do well to simply accept it as part of the endeavor. This relates to the point about focusing on what we can change while letting go of what we cannot: we can change how we respond to our uncertainty, but substantial uncertainty will remain in any case. This acceptance is also in line with findings suggesting that greater acceptance of difficult thoughts and feelings can help mitigate stress and depression.

6.5.2 Remembering What We Are Confident About

Another helpful tool is to remind ourselves of some ideas and observations that we are confident about. For example, while we might be unsure of many things, we may still be highly confident that extreme suffering is worth preventing and that we want to help prevent it. Even if there are many other goals that are worth achieving, the reduction of extreme suffering is at least among the goals that are most worth achieving.

Having confidence in such statements might seem trivial, yet it is in fact deeply significant. It provides at least the outline of a goal that we can systematically aim toward and learn about, thus providing some clarity of direction. There is a certain privilege in having such a rough direction, as well as in being able to pursue it, even if only to a limited degree. Many people may not have even a rough direction in their lives, let alone the freedom to pursue it.

6.5.3 Holding On to Robust Recommendations

It is also worth keeping in mind that there are some practical recommendations that seem relatively robust. These recommendations can be divided into two broad categories: those pertaining to large-scale aims and projects, and those pertaining to our individual traits and virtues.

In terms of large-scale aims and projects, we already mentioned a few in the section on positive and constructive goals. These include building a healthy community aimed at reducing suffering, advancing our knowledge on decision-relevant issues, and creating resources that convey the horror and moral importance of suffering.

Likewise, there are many personal traits and virtues that seem worth developing and continuously embodying. These include moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and integrity, as well as epistemic virtues like humility, curiosity, and self-scrutiny. Given the many uncertainties we face, it can be helpful to know that we have good reasons to consistently adhere to such virtues. (I will say more about beneficial traits and virtues in Chapter 9.)

Recommendations like these can provide a lot of meaningful guidance, yet they might be easy to overlook if we focus exclusively on our uncertainties and thus make our doubts disproportionately salient. We may strike a more productive balance if we make these practical proposals at least as salient as our uncertainties, even if we only treat these proposals as tentative best guesses.

6.5.4 Keeping Our Options Open

When we are highly uncertain, it makes strategic sense to keep our future options open. In particular, we want to avoid betting everything on irreversible decisions that risk locking us into a dead end. We can still take action and make substantial investments in specific interventions. Yet in doing so, we generally want to choose paths that preserve a wide range of options in case we later find reason to change course.

The strategic value of keeping our options open lends some support to building general skills and capacities that can be useful across many future paths. More fundamentally, it highlights the importance of staying healthy and protecting our potential to reduce suffering.

6.5.5 Reducing Our Uncertainty

A productive way to deal with our vast uncertainty is to focus on specific ways to reduce or otherwise address it. Helpful strategies in this regard may include reading about relevant topics, consulting knowledgeable people about key points of uncertainty, and pursuing our own reflections.

Such efforts to reduce our uncertainty can at times feel intractable, yet we may have reason to place some trust in our ability to improve our views: if our views have improved significantly in the past, we are arguably justified in expecting further improvements in the future, provided that we keep searching for them.

6.5.6 Meeting Our Uncertainty with Self-Compassion

If we are overwhelmed by uncertainty, it may be helpful to meet this uncertainty with self-compassion. This can be especially helpful if we are paralyzed by worries about taking counterproductive actions that end up making things much worse.

To be sure, there is a real risk that certain actions that seem beneficial will ultimately cause a lot of harm. This is a good reason to proceed with caution and to ensure that our decisions are well-informed. It is not, however, a good reason to beat ourselves up and be harsh toward ourselves. On the contrary, harsh self-criticism generally makes us worse at dealing with demanding challenges, whereas self-compassion tends to make us better.

6.5.7 Aiming for a Golden Range

A specific source of worry and self-criticism might be the idea that we need to follow some narrow optimal path, whereas straying from that exact path amounts to a complete moral failure. Yet this is neither an accurate nor productive way to think about compassionate impact.

There is rarely some razor-thin optimum that we must hit with perfect precision in order to make progress toward our aims. Instead, it is more accurate and helpful to think in terms of a “golden range” of action, where being inside that approximate range usually matters far more than does our exact position within it. After all, for most aims, the difference between “roughly optimal” and “perfectly optimal” will be tiny compared to the difference between “roughly optimal” and “far from optimal”.

For example, when it comes to habits such as diet and sleep, it is generally better to aim for a healthy range than to chase some singular optimum, and whether we fall within or outside the healthy range is typically much more important than where exactly we fall within that range.

Thus, we will often waste our limited resources if we spend a lot of energy trying to follow exactly the right narrow path, as opposed to focusing on being within the right range and going in roughly the right direction.

Finally, it is worth keeping in mind that deliberate efforts to optimize can themselves be overdone. That is, deliberate optimization also has a golden range that we can overshoot, after which our efforts move us away from real-world effectiveness. Partly for this reason, it is helpful to temper rigid optimization with a heuristic of psychological flexibility: rather than overthinking and overoptimizing our every move, we often do better by practicing adaptive flexibility in everyday life.

6.6 Dealing with Empathic Distress and Weltschmerz

Empathic distress refers to the distress and pain we may feel when confronting the suffering of others. Similarly, the term “Weltschmerz” refers to the pain and sadness we may feel over the evil and suffering in the world at large. Empathic distress and Weltschmerz can be challenging to both our mental health and our overall effectiveness in the world, and hence they merit careful attention.

6.6.1 Awareness of Suffering as Helpful and Healthy

It is worth being clear that awareness of suffering is not a bad thing, let alone something to pathologize. On the contrary, a certain awareness of the suffering of the world is instrumental to compassionate impact. Moreover, there is a sense in which having a firm awareness of the world's suffering is positively healthy and attuned, in that it does not involve an escapist denial of this unpleasant yet all-important aspect of reality. Awareness of suffering is not the problem, but the challenge is to make our awareness of suffering less painful and more helpful.

6.6.2 Compassion-Based Motivation

One of the most effective tools in this regard is to shift toward a more compassion-based outlook and motivation. That is, we can cultivate a strong desire and motivation to alleviate others' suffering without trying to feel their suffering, which evidence suggests is a less painful and more sustainable source of motivation. This topic of compassion-based motivation is too extensive to be covered in a single section, which is why I have devoted the entire next chapter to it.

6.6.3 Turning Weltschmerz into Compassionate Action

Feeling disturbed by the suffering of the world can be a burden, yet it may also serve as fuel for an unwavering compassionate purpose. In particular, a visceral sense of the horror and seriousness of ongoing suffering can be a powerful reminder of the importance of reducing suffering, provided that we frame it that way.

Building on the idea presented in the previous chapter about leveraging our suffering for compassionate ends, we can apply the same principle to challenges associated with empathic distress and Weltschmerz. As a result, we can shift our focus toward taking concrete actions in pursuit of our aims, which may be beneficial both for our effectiveness in the world and for our ability to deal with the world's suffering.

Imagine someone who has just watched a documentary about horrific animal abuse taking place on a massive scale every single day. The screen has gone dark, but one image stays: a pig screaming in a gas chamber. This person feels deeply for the animals, pained by their tragic fates, and weighed down by the sickening heaviness of mass torment met with indifference.

Yet in this pain, they also find undeniable evidence of the importance of taking action. They see a direct connection between the depth of their own pain and the importance of their purpose. And so they take the next concrete step they can.

6.7 Reaching Out to Like-Minded People

Being dedicated to reducing extreme suffering can at times feel isolating, especially if we do not have any close peers who share this priority. Yet it is worth remembering that we are not alone. There are many people who share the priority of reducing suffering, and the internet makes it easier than ever to connect with them.

Reaching out to like-minded people can be helpful in various ways, even if we only connect with them online. For one, it can help us feel less alone in our priorities, and thereby give us a greater sense of community and shared purpose with others. Such connections can help strengthen our commitment to reducing suffering.

Another advantage is that we can voice our common challenges and discuss productive ways to deal with them. For instance, we may share advice and offer consolation about Weltschmerz, and thus help each other transform it into compassionate action.

There are many ways to get in touch with other dedicated people. For example, one can get involved with movements and groups that share a focus on reducing suffering, such as the broader animal rights movement and groups focused on effective suffering reduction. One can also directly reach out to like-minded individuals who seem friendly and willing to connect.

To be clear, the suggestion to connect with those who share a strong dedication to reducing suffering is not a suggestion to disconnect from those who may not (yet) share such a firm dedication. On the contrary, isolating ourselves from the people around us is hardly helpful — neither for us, nor the people around us, nor the beings in the wider world whom we are trying to help. We can still have deep and supportive relationships with people who may not fully share our priorities. Moreover, we can probably be more effective catalysts for change if we interact with a broader group of people than just those who share our priorities most strongly.

6.8 Overcoming Guilt-Based Hurdles

On a Saturday afternoon, Nadia lies on the couch. She had planned to rest, but she cannot settle into it. She scrolls through the news on her phone, reading about ongoing tragedies, feeling fraudulent for not working. “How can I allow myself to take a break when others need help? How can I be okay when others are in pain?”

6.8.1 Guilt About Taking a Break

For some people, taking a break from direct efforts to reduce suffering can trigger guilt due to a sense that we can always do more to prevent suffering. However, while this sense of guilt is understandable at some level, the truth is that taking a relaxing and restorative break is nothing to feel guilty about.

On the contrary, prioritizing rest is healthy and essential for our ability to help others in a sustainable way. Sometimes, doing a bit of exercise or taking a peaceful break really is the best thing we can do. Indeed, a meta-analysis found that even taking a micro-break of 10 minutes or less between work tasks can help reduce fatigue and boost our vigor. Such breaks may also boost our cognitive performance, especially if they involve some physical exercise.

How can we reduce guilt about taking breaks and give ourselves space for proper rest and self-care? One way might be to better internalize the need for breaks. If we remind ourselves that rest and self-care are healthy and worthwhile activities that merit priority, both for our personal wellbeing and for our capacity to help others, we may come to realize that it is unhelpful to feel guilty about resting and taking care of ourselves. Sometimes we perpetuate this guilt through the conviction that we should feel guilty.

Another suggestion is to fully allow ourselves to relax while we are taking a break. That is, when having downtime, we can allow ourselves a space where we do not have to do anything that is directly useful or deliberately aimed at some higher end. When taking a break, the rest itself is the aim, and hence any impulse we might feel to do something that is more useful than pure rest can ironically end up being less useful.

6.8.2 Guilt About Being Okay While Others Are Not

A similar form of guilt that may block rest and self-care is guilt about being okay while others are experiencing extreme suffering. Such guilt is sometimes a symptom of secondary trauma, which is trauma that is caused by witnessing cruel or otherwise deeply disturbing events. Yet the guilt can also simply stem from knowing that we are much better off than others in significant ways.

The thoughts underlying this guilt might be that it is unfair or unacceptable that we ourselves are doing relatively okay while others are experiencing horrific torment. “Shouldn't I feel very bad as well, or at least much worse than I currently do?”

Again, while this is in some ways an understandable sentiment, it is ultimately not helpful for the tormented beings who need our help. These beings do not benefit from our self-flagellation. On the contrary, it is in their interest that we become healthy and effective advocates for a better future.

Constructive ways to deal with this guilt resemble the suggestions listed above: to internalize the insight that guilt about being okay is not helpful, to refrain from perpetuating the belief that we ought to feel worse, and to simply try to allow ourselves to be okay.

Granted, there is some value in being deeply bothered by the suffering of the world. Yet being bothered by others' suffering need not entail the conviction that we ourselves ought to feel worse, or that we should feel guilty about being okay. We can be bothered by suffering and be committed to its alleviation while also being supportive rather than harsh toward ourselves. As we have seen in previous chapters, we have good reasons to adopt this kind of self-supportive attitude, not least since harsh self-criticism is a key predictor of altruistic burnout.

Lastly, it is worth stressing that actions to reduce suffering do not always have to be unpleasant or effortful. Difficult as it can be, work to reduce suffering can also be highly motivating and even enjoyable. And there is, of course, nothing wrong with enjoying activities that contribute to the reduction of suffering. While it might feel off to enjoy such activities, it is nevertheless helpful if we are to stay consistently motivated. Indeed, it is strategic and necessary.

6.9 Cultivating Realistic Hope for Compassionate Impact

There is a lot of evidence suggesting that hope is beneficial to motivation and wellbeing, even to the degree that humans can be said to have a strong need for hope. Of course, a pessimist might rush to object that hope is a wishful notion that is out of touch with the most severe horrors of reality. Yet such a hasty objection overlooks the many varieties of hope that one could potentially hold. After all, there are forms of hope that do not deny the overwhelming urgency of extreme suffering, but that instead actively affirm this urgency and motivate us to act on it. Such hope is worth cultivating.

To be more specific, what I am referring to is a realistic hope to reduce extreme suffering. We may think of it as the hope to actualize the higher ends of our potential to help sentient beings: an ambitious yet clear-eyed hope about the difference we can make.

What would be the benefit of having such hope? Research suggests that having a sense of hope can be protective for our mental health in the face of difficult and stressful circumstances. Beyond this protective role, hope is also strongly associated with life satisfaction. For instance, one study explored 24 different character strengths and found that hope had the strongest association with life satisfaction, ahead of other key predictors such as gratitude and self-regulation.

Moreover, hope has been found to predict academic performance beyond measures of intelligence, personality, and previous academic achievement, suggesting that a sense of hope can support sustained effort in challenging endeavors.

The realistic hope invoked above may also have direct motivational benefits for our pursuit of compassionate impact. For example, it may help us feel inspired and energized to make a difference, and in turn foster greater dedication and perseverance while still keeping us realistic about the difficulties involved.

How, then, can we cultivate this kind of hope? One way might be to deliberately frame our outlook in terms of this realistic and compassionate hope, and to perhaps simply allow ourselves to feel inspired by it. After all, some of us may instinctively believe that we cannot permit hope or inspiration of any kind in a world that contains so much suffering. If we harbor such hope-resistant beliefs, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that there is nothing unrealistic or frivolous about the hope in question, and that there are good reasons to allow and actively cultivate it.

A complementary approach might be to draw hope and inspiration from individuals who fought to alleviate grave suffering despite low odds and immense difficulties. For example, we may think of the triumphs of abolitionist activist Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery and helped liberate many enslaved people. Or we may reflect on the efforts of Lewis Gompertz, who in the early 19th century argued against animal exploitation and devoted his life to reducing animal suffering when almost no one else would.

To be clear, the point is not to idolize such people or to think of them as moral saints, but rather to see their examples as vivid proof that we can strive to reduce suffering even when it seems hopeless.

The kind of hope outlined here might not feel inspiring right away, yet this does not prevent us from cultivating it and finding it increasingly motivating over time. There is great plasticity in the types of aims we can be hopeful about, and we can also find genuine hope and inspiration in the aim of reducing suffering.

7 Compassion for Others

Developing compassion for others can make our efforts to reduce suffering less painful and increase our drive to help. This chapter will review the benefits of other-oriented compassion and explore ways to increase it.

7.1 What Is Compassion?

Compassion is commonly defined as sympathy for others' suffering combined with a desire and motivation to alleviate it. This can broadly be understood in two distinct ways: as a momentary emotional state of wanting to alleviate suffering, or as a sustained commitment to alleviating suffering.

These are related yet distinct: one can experience a momentary desire to alleviate suffering without necessarily having a sustained commitment to this end, and one can likewise hold such a sustained commitment without (always) experiencing a directly felt desire to alleviate suffering. Yet emotional states of compassion and a sustained commitment to compassion can also coexist and mutually support each other. When I talk about compassion in this chapter, I generally refer to both these senses of the term, though with a primary emphasis on compassion as a sustained commitment.

These definitions of compassion are essentially about motivations to reduce suffering. In contrast, there are also uses of the word that relate more to outcomes. For example, the term “compassionate impact” is not chiefly about our motivations, but rather about an objective impact that is aligned with our motivation to reduce suffering.

This is a crucial distinction. After all, compassionate motivation is not itself the ultimate end: what matters most is compassionate impact — the real-world reduction of extreme suffering. Thus, we arguably do best by cultivating the kind of compassionate motivation that is most conducive to such impact, as opposed to trying to maximize compassionate motivation for its own sake.

However, as we shall see, there are good reasons to think that a significant level of compassionate motivation is helpful for reducing suffering.

7.2 Compassion versus Empathy

Compassion is often used interchangeably with empathy, yet in psychology and related fields, these are usually seen as distinct concepts.

Empathy itself is typically divided into two distinct types: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy (the latter is also known as affective empathy). Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand the perspectives and mental states of other people. Emotional empathy, in contrast, is the ability to share and emotionally relate to others' feelings. It involves having an emotional response that in some sense matches the feelings of others, such as feeling pained by the suffering of a friend.

When compassion is contrasted with empathy, it is usually contrasted with emotional empathy in particular. The difference between them can roughly be summarized as the difference between feeling for someone and feeling with them. That is, compassion involves feeling sympathy for the distress of another, and wanting to relieve that distress, but unlike emotional empathy, it does not necessarily involve sharing the distress of another.

7.3 Against Empathy?

In his book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom makes a case against the use of emotional empathy in the moral domain. Bloom argues that emotional empathy is prone to various biases, such as causing us to pay too much attention to individual cases and thus lose sight of the bigger picture. He argues that we should instead rely on a rational compassion that allows us to reason carefully about the costs and benefits of our moral decisions.

Bloom's case in favor of rational compassion is not particularly controversial. What is more controversial is his case against emotional empathy, which many critics have argued is not supported by the psychological evidence. To be clear, the claim that unfettered empathy has various pitfalls of favoritism and short-sightedness is quite well-supported, and is thus not the point of contention. The controversial aspect is mainly Bloom's strong claim that “if we want to make the world a better place, then we are better off without empathy”.

For example, neuroscientists Christov-Moore and Iacoboni argue that there is “considerable evidence showing that affective empathy is a precursor to compassion”, and hence that people with affective empathy are more likely to develop compassion and behave in prosocial ways. Indeed, some studies have found that empathic distress predicts increased charitable donations.

The mere fact that emotional empathy has serious pitfalls if left unchecked does not imply that we would on balance do better without it. Emotional empathy may still play a beneficial role in the right amounts and if used properly.

Reducing our empathy probably makes sense in certain contexts, such as when it impedes rational deliberation or when it causes us excessive empathic distress. However, a blanket recommendation to block it altogether seems unwarranted and potentially even dangerous. What seems better supported, and thus safer to recommend, is to cultivate greater compassion.

7.4 The Benefits of Training Compassion

Modern research has documented a number of benefits associated with compassion training. For example, meta-analyses have found that compassion meditation decreases self-reported depression, reduces anxiety, and increases compassion for both self and others.

Moreover, studies suggest that compassion training is effective at increasing prosocial behavior. For instance, compared to controls, people taking part in meditation-based compassion training have been found to be more likely to engage in costly helping behavior in a cooperative game, more likely to help an injured person, and more inclined to make sustained charitable donations. A meta-analysis covering the broader literature likewise found that compassion meditation can increase both prosocial motivations and behavior.

There is also evidence that compassion meditation can improve our social cognition and empathic accuracy. In particular, a randomized controlled study found that subjects who had been assigned to a compassion meditation program were better at reading other people's mental states based on facial cues, and they likewise had increased activity in brain areas associated with understanding and processing others' emotions.

A distinct advantage of cultivating compassion is that it tends to be a less painful and more sustainable motivation for helping others as compared to emotional empathy. Specifically, compassion is less likely to be accompanied by overwhelming feelings of empathic distress and is thus less likely to lead to disengagement or burnout.

For example, one study found that empathy training increased unpleasant affect in response to suffering, yet subsequent compassion training reversed this increase in unpleasant affect while still maintaining a similarly high level of self-reported empathy for those in distress.

These differential effects make sense from a theoretical perspective: when training compassion, we are essentially training our desire to see suffering relieved, which need not involve any attempt to actually feel that suffering ourselves. In contrast, when training and engaging in empathy for suffering, we are largely training ourselves to share that suffering. Finally, while empathic distress predicts increased charitable donations, compassion seems to be a stronger predictor of such donations.

Taken together, the evidence reviewed above suggests that we will generally do better by focusing mostly on the cultivation of compassion. Not only is compassion considerably less painful and more sustainable, but it also seems more effective at motivating helping behavior. Loosely speaking, between cultivating compassion and emotional empathy, we might do best by aiming roughly for a 70/30 split in favor of compassion.

7.5 The Insufficiency of Compassion

Although compassion is helpful, it is by no means sufficient for compassionate impact. By itself, it has a number of pitfalls that are worth actively avoiding and compensating for.

7.5.1 Biases of Compassion and the Importance of Deliberation

A useful starting point for understanding the pitfalls of compassion is to realize that it evolved in large part to motivate us to care for our offspring. In light of this evolutionary origin, we should not expect our compassion to be remotely impartial by default, and both research and everyday observations confirm as much. That is, the parochial biases associated with unbridled empathy are also associated with unbridled compassion: both these capacities are more attuned to the suffering of those who are close to us, and both tend to be largely insensitive to the scope of suffering.

This highlights the need to combine compassion with reasoned deliberation and related ideals of impartiality and consistency. To be sure, it is possible to expand the scope of our immediate sentiments of compassion, which is among the aims of compassion training. Yet rational deliberation is still a helpful shortcut to broadening the scope of our moral concern. For example, efforts to adhere to principles of impartiality need not always involve strong feelings of compassion, but can instead rest on more cerebral processes guided by reflective values that are less subject to emotional fluctuations.

Of course, the point is not that cerebral deliberation alone is sufficient either; that would be tantamount to the cerebral misconception critiqued earlier. Rather, the point is that we need both a healthy motivation that consistently drives compassionate action and a keen faculty of reasoned deliberation that can guide our motivations in well-informed directions. Both of these dimensions merit attention and development.

7.5.2 The Motivational Insufficiency of Compassion

Another reason to think that compassion is insufficient for optimal impact is that compassion alone seems suboptimal even at the motivational level. After all, compassion is not the only motivation that can drive efforts to reduce suffering, and it is likely that some of our many other motivations can play complementary roles toward this end.

For example, we have already seen some reasons to supplement our compassion with a measure of emotional empathy. In addition, it seems plausible that curiosity-based drives can serve important functions, such as by facilitating easier and better learning. Specifically, learning about topics that are relevant to compassionate impact may feel more engaging and effortless if it involves an intrinsic sense of curiosity about those topics, as opposed to relying purely on instrumental drives for learning.

In terms of motivations that can stimulate moral action more directly, there are reasons to think that motivations based on guilt or a sense of duty can also be useful. While an overreliance on guilt- and duty-based motivations has rightly been criticized, it seems that the critics sometimes go too far by claiming that we would do better by not relying on such motivations at all. This is akin to Bloom's sweeping case against empathy, in that it is a strong claim that does not seem supported by the available evidence and is arguably contradicted by it.

For instance, many studies suggest that a proneness to guilt can help motivate us to treat other people well and avoid transgressions, and that it can generally help foster prosocial and moral behavior. Indeed, there is evidence that guilt can be a strong driver of compassionate action. Thus, it may be helpful to maintain at least a moderate proneness to guilt, while still avoiding excessive and unhealthy guilt of the kind that undermines self-care and our long-run capacity to help. After all, there need not be a conflict between feeling some guilt about specific behaviors that fall short of our standards while also being supportive and kind toward ourselves.

In sum, we can benefit from drawing on a wide range of motivations, even if we have good reason to give special priority to the cultivation of compassion as a core motivation.

7.5.3 Pitfalls of Reflexive Compassion

We can have too much of virtually everything, and compassion, if understood as an emotional reflex, is no exception. For instance, unchecked compassion can make us vulnerable to manipulation by people who seek to exploit our sympathy. In particular, some people may try to evade responsibility for bad behavior by invoking a victim narrative that targets our impulses of compassion and leniency. This is often described as playing the victim, and a hostile variant is known as “darvo” (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender), where an offender aggressively claims to be wronged by those holding them accountable.

In this way, people who are temperamentally high in compassion may be at increased risk of exploitation, at least if their compassion is not coupled with a strong sense of boundaries and self-compassion. Indeed, the problem described here is not too much compassion per say, but rather an indiscriminate and unbalanced compassion that overlooks the bigger picture, including those who may be harmed when we enable bad behavior.

Thus, the upshot is hardly that we need to reduce our overall level of compassion, but instead that we need to use our compassion in skillful ways so as to ensure that we act in alignment with deeper values of compassion for everyone, including ourselves. We want to avoid the pitfall of accommodating external demands to the point that we neglect our own needs and deeper values.

Despite all the caveats listed above, it still generally seems helpful to cultivate greater compassion. This is especially true for those who are overwhelmed by empathic distress and for those who are struggling to find motivation to reduce suffering.

7.6 How to Cultivate Compassion

Compassion is to a large extent trainable, and various techniques have been found to increase it. The following are some of these techniques along with suggestions for cultivating compassion with an eye toward optimal impact.

7.6.1 Compassion Meditation

One of the most widely studied and best-supported techniques for cultivating compassion is compassion meditation. There are many varieties of compassion meditation, but they tend to involve roughly the following steps:

- First, some mindful grounding where you observe your breath.

- Next, you bring to mind a person you care deeply about, and repeatedly affirm the wish that they be free from suffering: “May you be free from suffering. May you be free from anxiety, pain, and despair. May you find ease and tranquility.”

- You then turn your attention to yourself: “May I be free from suffering. May I be free from anxiety, pain, and despair. May I find ease and tranquility.”

- Turning outward, you bring an acquaintance to mind and affirm the same compassionate wishes toward them.

- As a more challenging step, you bring to mind a person whom you might dislike. This step may provoke some resistance, but the point is to push through and send them compassionate wishes regardless. (And the task is often easier than one might expect, plausibly because our circuits of compassionate caring are already activated at this point.)

- Finally, you broaden your compassion to include all sentient beings. That is, you include all human beings everywhere, all the chickens stuck in cages, all the fish in the oceans, all the invertebrates in the air, soil, and water. All beings of the future, whatever form they might take. “May you all be free from suffering. May you all find ease and tranquility.”

As hinted by this last step, one of the aims of compassion meditation is to expand the scope of our compassion, which is often a key bottleneck to our compassionate motivation. After all, if someone close to us were suffering, most of us would feel a strong sense of compassion and make significant efforts to help. In contrast, when it comes to the suffering of other sentient beings, we tend to feel less compassion and make much less of an effort to help.

In this sense, the problem is not necessarily that our compassion is too weak per say, but rather that it is extremely restricted in terms of its motivational scope. Importantly, this may hold true even if we endorse values of universal compassion at a more cerebral level. Those values in themselves are of little value if they do not motivate us to take action. Hence the need to also directly train our motivations.

One can find many good compassion meditations for free online. An example of a YouTube meditation that I would recommend is “Guided Compassion Meditation” by Mark Pifer (the scope of its final step is restricted only to humans, yet one can readily expand it oneself).

7.6.2 Reducing Our Internal Blocks to Compassion

In addition to boosting our compassion through meditation, it may be helpful to reduce our internal blocks and resistances to compassion, such as by challenging inaccurate beliefs about it. For example, a common belief is that compassion must be weak and submissive, and acceptance of this belief, even if just at an unconscious level, may prevent us from fully adopting compassionate motivations and behaviors.

Yet the truth is that compassion need not be submissive. On the contrary, compassion can be courageous and assertive, such as when it motivates us to speak up for and defend suffering beings, regardless of what people might think of us. Indeed, various scholars have argued that courage is a necessary feature of compassion, as genuine compassion involves the courage to face suffering and to act to relieve it.

For example, it may take courage to dare to stand out and be kind to a homeless person, or to help a non-human animal who is injured — not turning away from their struggles and not being fazed by judgmental onlookers. Likewise, it may require courage to be willing to take a stand and do activism on behalf of suffering beings everywhere, including all the animals who are tormented in slaughterhouses, factory farms, and nature.

By challenging hidden beliefs and fears that block our compassion, we may open ourselves up to developing a truly assertive and fiery compassion that entails both kindness and strength.

7.6.3 Developing Sustainable Compassion

Another important aspect is to develop our compassionate commitment in such a way that it remains sustainable. In particular, it may be helpful to reassure ourselves that we will couple our compassion for others with self-compassion and self-care.

Beyond reducing the risk of burnout, such reassurance may have the benefit of further reducing our internal blocks to compassion for others. After all, studies suggest that reservations about costs to ourselves are often a key reason why we reduce or shut down our compassion for others. Honestly promising ourselves that our commitment to compassion also includes proper self-care may prevent such disengagement and thereby help sustain a strong compassionate motivation.

7.6.4 Cultivating Impact-Focused Compassion

It is worth developing an impact-focused compassion that motivates us to reduce suffering in the most effective ways we can.

The importance of this focus follows directly from compassion itself: to not have a strong focus on optimal impact is to fail to compassionately connect with all the suffering that we can realistically reduce if we choose an effective path over a less effective one. This might sound rather abstract, yet for the future beings who will — or will not — endure extreme suffering depending on our actions, it is anything but abstract. It is all too horrifically real and intensely felt.

Of course, it may be difficult to connect with this suffering given that we cannot directly observe it in any identifiable being. Yet this is where our rational faculties and our moral imagination play a crucial role: even if we cannot readily see or feel the difference made by more versus less effective approaches, we can still rationally know that there is an enormous difference. We can still know that this difference is worth internalizing and being moved by.

7.6.5 Choosing Compassion

There is a lot of evidence suggesting that compassion is not something that just passively happens to us, but that it is to some degree a motivated choice. In other words, both as an attitude and a behavioral orientation, compassion is often something we can actively choose. This seems especially true of our compassion toward strangers, who constitute the vast majority of beings we can benefit.

This insight has significant implications. It suggests that in addition to training our baseline propensity toward compassion over time, we also have a choice moment-to-moment as to whether we embrace and act on compassion — perhaps more of a choice than we realize. This gives us further reason to actively choose compassion.

8 A Candid Understanding of the Human Mind

Few aspects of the world are as important for us to understand as the human mind itself. My aim in this chapter is to explore some key findings about how the human mind works so that we can better navigate its strengths and pitfalls.

As a preliminary note, it is worth emphasizing that the unflattering aspects of our minds explored in this chapter are not something we should blame ourselves for. As many psychologists have stressed, we all have tricky brains with certain frailties and mischievous tendencies, and none of us chose to be born this way. What we can choose, however, is to courageously face up to any inconvenient truths we may uncover about our tricky brains, and to take responsibility for how we use our minds going forward.

8.1 A Mind of Many Parts

A key fact to appreciate is that our minds are composed of many parts, and these parts often have conflicting aims. Such internal conflicts are familiar to all of us in the struggles between our immediate impulses and our long-term goals. Yet our internal conflicts are not just a polarized struggle between two parts, but rather an ongoing competition and bargaining among many parts.

To mention just a few, we have parts that are driven by motives of compassion, curiosity, mating, social belonging, and reputation enhancement. Of course, these drives and motives are not altogether independent of each other, but they are still distinct, as evidenced by the fact that they can sometimes come into conflict with one another.

A crucial implication of this diversity of motives is that even if some parts of our minds are genuinely driven by high-minded ideals of helping others and reducing suffering, there are still other parts of our minds that are not. This may seem like a trivial point, yet it nevertheless contrasts with the way we usually talk about ourselves, as though we were a unified blob of singularly focused aims and ideals. Even when we do acknowledge that we are composed of many parts, we still tend to present ourselves as though we have a fairly high level of internal alignment toward the same overarching aim. But this simple narrative obscures the true level of tensions and divergences inside our minds.

When we say things like “I am aiming to help sentient beings as much as I can”, we are really (at most) speaking on behalf of a rather limited part of ourselves. Of course, it may be helpful to speak in this way, as we might give this part of ourselves greater power by actively affirming its goals. Yet even as we rightly affirm and elevate our more ethical and compassionate goals, it is still worth being aware that there are many other parts of ourselves that have decidedly different motives.

Why is it worth being aware of these other parts? A major reason is that we will otherwise have a false view of our own mind and its motivations, which risks derailing our compassionate aims. In particular, if we believe that our compassionate motives reign unchallenged within our own minds, we are unlikely to be sufficiently vigilant toward the influence of our more self-serving motives.

Indeed, our self-serving motives may even dictate our behavior under the guise of compassionate motives, such as by prompting us to pursue actions that make us appear compassionate, yet which are not that effective at actually helping others. Given such risks, it is worth being skeptical about our own motives.

To be clear, the point is not that one set of motives must win out by forcefully beating all others, which is hardly realistic in any case. Rather, the point is to aim for a pragmatic balance in which our different motives work together such that they each add whatever helpful contributions they can. For example, as noted in the previous chapter, our curiosity-based drives probably have unique advantages that are worth harnessing, and the same can likely be said about a healthy concern for our reputation. The challenge is just to prevent any of these drives from becoming excessive such that they undermine our impact.

Beyond being aware of the various parts of our minds, we may also benefit from appreciating and respecting our different parts, including the many parts that are not primarily concerned with reducing suffering. After all, running our minds like a tyrannical government that forces all its constituents into strict submission to a singular goal, without any room for compromise, is probably not a sustainable way to function, let alone an optimal one. Instead, it seems more sustainable to make compromises that properly respect the needs and burdens of our intrapersonal parts, just like we would make respectful compromises and concessions in our interpersonal relations.

For example, when it comes to our protective and anxious parts, we may at times feel like these parts do little more than burden us with too much vigilance and worry. Yet from another perspective, we can see that these parts serve crucial functions in terms of keeping us safe. In the spirit of internal family systems (I.F.S) therapy, we may find greater inner cooperation and self-appreciation by giving some credit to these parts.

8.2 Hidden Motives

Our minds not only have many distinct parts, but many of these parts are also largely hidden from our own awareness. In particular, our minds appear to hide our more selfish and competitive motives: the kinds of motives that are commonly discouraged by our social norms, and which it is therefore in our self-interest to downplay.

But why would we downplay these motives to ourselves? Why not just downplay our selfish motives in our communication with others while being fully aware of them in our own minds? A plausible reason is that we can better convince others of our noble and cooperative motives — and of the relative weakness of our selfish and competitive motives — if we sincerely believe in such a noble and cooperative picture of ourselves. As evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers writes: “We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.”

For example, when we engage in behavior that helps others, we might tell ourselves that our behavior is purely driven by a motive to help others, in effect downplaying any motive we may have to boost our own reputation and status in the eyes of other people. It is not that we deny that our reputation might get a boost from our altruistic actions, but we generally do deny — or at least refrain from admitting — that this is a significant motive driving our actions. That, after all, would appear more selfish and less praiseworthy than if we were driven purely by the goodness of our hearts.

Consequently, if we are aiming to appear altruistic and praiseworthy, we have an incentive not to admit that we are aiming for that appearance to any meaningful extent. And plausibly the best way not to admit to such status-seeking motives is to internally downplay these motives and to sincerely believe that our altruistic motives alone are driving our behavior.

Yet the truth is that we do possess strong competitive and selfish motives, and these motives often greatly influence our behavior, including our altruistic behavior. We evolved in an environment marked by competition for mates and alliances, and the only way our ancestors were able to reproduce was by succeeding in those competitions — even if that was often best achieved by competing to be the most admired do-gooder. In other words, our ancestors faced an intense selection pressure to be effective competitors in the social world, and this selection pressure has greatly shaped our basic drives and motives.

8.3 Social Status: A Key Hidden Motive

Perhaps the most prominent of our hidden motives is our drive for social status. It can be difficult to pin down what social status is exactly, yet we can broadly understand it as our social standing and esteem in the eyes of other people.

The empirical literature suggests that the desire for status is a fundamental and universal human motive. Moreover, studies reveal that our status drives are deeply competitive in nature. That is, we are not content to merely gain recognition and regard from others, but we specifically want to gain more recognition and regard than other people get, so much so that we often prefer having higher status than others even if it means that everyone will have lower status or fewer resources in absolute terms.

This also appears true in the context of altruistic and moral behavior. For example, studies suggest that our altruistic behavior is often motivated by reputation enhancement — not just so that other people see us as altruistic, but specifically so that they see us as more altruistic than other potential cooperation partners whom they could choose over us.

In line with the claim that we hide our unflattering motives, studies suggest that we tend to conceal our status motives, both from others and from ourselves. For instance, we have a strong tendency to believe that we are less motivated by status-seeking than other people. We are quite aware that status-seeking is a powerful motive for humans in general, but we typically deny that this applies to ourselves. This suggests that we cannot simply trust our internal sense of how strongly we are driven by status motives versus more flattering motives. If we are motivated by both compassion and status-seeking, our mind is inclined to greatly accentuate our compassion while downplaying our status motives.

Another key feature of social status is that it is context-dependent. For example, in some communities, the way to increase one's status is by wearing a suit and tie, while in others it is by wearing goth clothes with images of skulls. The same goes for accomplishments: in one kind of community, high status may be associated with climbing the corporate ladder, while another community may confer status on those who create anti-corporate indie music. The ways in which we seek status can vary greatly, yet the drive for status itself is remarkably consistent.

8.4 The Distorting Influence of Status Motives

The points reviewed above have significant implications for our efforts to reduce suffering. Our hidden drives for social status can bias our priorities toward activities that gain us social status instead of helping others most effectively.

This tension is shown in the figure below, which illustrates the potential tradeoffs between reducing extreme suffering and increasing our social status. Specifically, the figure shows a tradeoff frontier that represents the maximum degree to which our actions can simultaneously reduce extreme suffering and increase our social status. The small arrows symbolize the pull that our status drives tend to exert toward increasing our status and away from effectively reducing suffering. (The arrows point somewhat down rather than straight to the right because there are typically tradeoffs between increasing our social status and reducing suffering.)

Image summary: A graph shows a tradeoff frontier between reducing extreme suffering (y-axis) and increasing social status (x-axis). Arrows within the graph indicate a pull towards increasing social status, suggesting a tension between these two goals.

8.4.1 Examples of Status-Driven Distortions

Consider John, who genuinely wants to help reduce suffering and is trying to figure out how. One day he comes across a neglected path that could likely spare many beings significant suffering, yet this path is hard to explain to others and involves behind-the-scenes work for which someone else gets the credit. He feels no real pull toward it. Then he notices a more visible path whose impact is less clear, yet which lets him engage with impressive ideas and earn recognition from people he admires. He finds himself energized by the prospect. Without quite realizing it, he begins to build a case for the visible path and eventually convinces himself that it is the better one.

This kind of drift is common. Status motives often pull us toward prosocial actions that are highly visible and that make us look better than other people, rather than toward more helpful actions that fail to make us look impressive.

Further examples of plausible status distortions include a pull away from strong impartiality toward all sentient beings (since it goes against partiality toward our human audience) and a tendency to focus on popular topics at the expense of urgent problems that most people are ignoring (because we can often better gain attention and recognition by reading and talking about the more popular topics). In general, our status motives may bias us to shy away from endorsing unpopular views and priorities, and to adopt widely approved and admired positions.

Additionally, there may be a bias to pursue altruistic actions that show off our intelligence and knowledge, such as by doing work that involves advanced and hard-to-grasp ideas. This might make us reluctant to pursue relatively simple actions and priorities that could perhaps help more overall, yet which fail to show how smart and sophisticated we are.

Relatedly, our drives for social status may push us toward adopting the stance of a teacher, even when it would be more appropriate for us to humbly learn as a student. Being a humble student can be seen as more submissive and lower in status, whereas a teacher is commonly seen as an authority and someone of higher status. (Yes, this point about assuming a teaching or guiding role should absolutely give me pause and make me reflect on my own motives for writing this book.)

Status motives can also bias us toward viewing altruistic endeavors from a single-player perspective that is aimed at individual heroism and leadership, and toward neglecting perspectives that are centered on collective action and collaboration. The single-player hero mentality aligns well with individual status-seeking, whereas being an effective helper in a larger multi-player effort may feel less rewarding for our status drives, even if it is ultimately more helpful.

8.4.2 A Golden Opportunity

Confronting our hidden status motives may feel challenging and uninviting, yet it is worth keeping in mind that there is a lot to gain in this area. Specifically, the fact that our status motives tend to be both strong and hidden suggests that the distortions they create are often both large and unlikely to be corrected by default. In this way, the distorting influence of our hidden status motives can be seen as an exciting opportunity to discover large inefficiencies in our efforts to help others, and thus an opportunity for making large improvements.

When searching for such inefficiencies, it is tempting to mostly look for status distortions in other people's behavior, and perhaps even to point fingers. Yet as tempting and satisfying as it may be to look elsewhere, it is often more helpful to seek out and reduce these inefficiencies in ourselves.

After all, pointing at other people's apparent status distortions is likely to trigger defensiveness. Conversely, each of us may be the only person who can shine a light on our own status distortions without triggering a wall of defensiveness — or at least we might be the person best able to minimize our defensive reactions. Moreover, by being humble and open about our own status distortions, we may encourage others to engage in the same self-reflection.

8.5 Status Drives Are Not All Bad

The previous sections have explored how our status drives can distort efforts to reduce suffering. Yet these drives can also be beneficial in some contexts.

For example, if we find ourselves in a community that cares about effective suffering reduction, following our drives for status might sometimes be helpful. In such a community, increasing social status and reducing extreme suffering may be correlated, and hence our status drives may often pull us toward actions that reduce suffering rather than away from them, as illustrated by the upward-pointing arrows below.

Image summary: A graph shows that increasing social status and reducing extreme suffering are correlated, as indicated by upward-pointing arrows.

The stark contrast between situations in which our status drives pull us away from rather than toward reducing suffering hints at the importance of creating communities with good incentives. To be sure, there will always be some divergences between the respective aims of reducing suffering and maximizing status, yet moving toward communities and incentives that are at least more aligned with compassionate impact still seems highly beneficial.

There are also strategic reasons to think that our status motives can be worth following to some extent. For better or worse, people tend to judge us based on our perceived social status, and these judgments often influence people's willingness (or lack thereof) to listen to our perspectives and support our priorities. This does not mean that we should seek to maximize our social status in order to gain greater influence, but it does suggest that it would be a mistake to dismiss social status as altogether irrelevant. Some level of sensitivity to social status is probably helpful.

Yet even if our status drives can be helpful, we should still be careful not to underestimate how these drives can be a powerfully distorting force in our minds, all while hiding from our awareness. Are we using our status drives to advance our compassionate impact, or are these drives using a veneer of compassionate impact to advance our social status?

8.6 A Coalitional Mind

Beyond our drives for individual status, we also have drives aimed at forming and maintaining effective coalitions. In the words of psychologist John Tooby, we humans have strong “coalitional instincts” that enable us to navigate social alliances and that make us quietly obsessed with coalitional success.

For example, in politics, we often focus more on supporting our own group and outdoing other groups than on creating better outcomes in impartial terms. Likewise, we often seem highly concerned with signaling loyalty to our own political groups and coalitions — thereby increasing our intra-group status — while being less concerned with improving policies, even when we claim to mostly care about the promotion of better policies.

Moreover, studies suggest that our minds tend to process groups and group members in an emotionally charged manner. In particular, we instinctively paint our political outgroups in an unfavorable light and process them with negative affect, whereas we paint our own groups in a favorable light. A critical point about these emotionally charged processes is that they tend to occur automatically and unconsciously. Before we can form a reflective thought about a given group or person, our minds will already have colored our thinking based on our own coalitional relation to them.

We also tend to show greater empathy toward people in our ingroup. For example, one study scanned people's brain reactions to a painful stimulus applied to a hand labeled with their own religion (which could include “no religion”) compared to a hand labeled with a different religion. Even with this minimal marker of group status, the researchers found a significantly stronger empathic response when the hand was labeled as belonging to the ingroup. Similar empathy biases have been found in the context of other group identities, including national and racial identities.

In short, our minds are deeply coalitional in ways that influence many aspects of our emotions and cognition. Importantly, this orientation does not require any awareness or effort on our part: our minds automatically shape our perspectives along coalitional lines. Thus, what requires effort is to become aware of our coalitional instincts and to reduce their biasing influence.

8.7 Coalitional Distortions

Just like our individual status drives can distort our efforts to help others, so can our coalitional instincts, and hence we likewise have good reason to reduce such coalitional distortions.

A helpful first step might be to reflect on which groups and coalitions we instinctively perceive as our own, as well as which groups we perceive as our rivals. For example, we may naturally feel a stronger sense of group identity with people who share our geographical location, belong to our social circle, or agree with our moral and political views.

Having gained greater clarity on our instinctive allegiances, we may seek to actively control for the ways in which our minds skew our outlook in favor of our own coalitions and against rival coalitions. For instance, it might take effort to be able to see the mistakes and misdeeds of our fellow group members, let alone to be willing to criticize them. Similarly, it may require effort to see the potential merits of the views and activities of our outgroups, and not least to be willing to openly acknowledge these merits. In general terms, our coalitional distortions suggest a heuristic of trying to be more critical toward our ingroups and more charitable toward our outgroups.

A related distortion to control for is our tendency to focus too much on gaining prestige and power for our own coalitions, as opposed to focusing on how we can create better outcomes in impartial terms. To be sure, increasing the prestige and influence of our own coalitions can sometimes help create better outcomes, but as tribal creatures, we probably tend to overestimate how convergent these aims are.

The same applies to our instinctive tendency to signal loyalty to our coalitions. For example, when engaging in polarized discussions, are we trying to create better outcomes on behalf of all sentient beings, or are we trying to signal our loyalties and increase our personal status among our allies?

In general, it may be helpful to be aware of our tendency to be strongly interested in group-related labels and identities, while being less interested in more identity-neutral questions about how we can best reduce suffering. To our coalitional brains, such questions may feel boring by comparison. It may thus be helpful to dampen the sense of importance that we naturally assign to group-related labels and identities, while increasing the importance we give to questions about how we can create better outcomes from an impartial perspective.

Another coalitional distortion is excessive conformity with our peers. Specifically, our coalitional minds may have little motivation to question core assumptions that are shared among our allies, and we might also copy the behavior of our peers without giving it much thought. This can result in echo chambers and groupthink, limiting our thoughts and actions to an unduly narrow range, and it might even lead us to copy unethical behavior due to a lack of critical reflection.

Such patterns of conformity and imitation also apply to perceived thought leaders. For instance, if we come to see a given intellectual as being part of our coalition, such that we in some sense identify ourselves as being on their side, we may instinctively jump to their defense when their views get criticized and generally be less open and fair-minded toward critiques of their views. This is a potential downside of having intellectual heroes: we may become blind to their shortcomings.

Lastly, similar to how our drives for individual status are not all bad, it is worth noting that our coalitional instincts can also serve helpful functions. After all, skillful coalition-building is key to creating a healthy and effective community aimed at reducing suffering, as well as for gaining support for compassionate policies among the broader population. The challenge, again, is to use the advantages of our coalitional instincts while reducing their potential distortions.

8.8 The Many Functions of Beliefs

Our beliefs form the map by which we steer. This makes it crucial that we get our beliefs right. A problem, however, is that our beliefs often serve functions other than just the epistemic function of representing the world: they can also serve as badges that signal certain features about ourselves.

A helpful analogy is to think of the many functions of clothes. Our clothes serve the functional purpose of keeping us warm and covering our bodies, yet they also tend to serve social functions. For example, someone who wears a sports jersey may show loyalty to their team, while someone who wears merchandise from an obscure band may signal a unique and discerning taste.

The point of the analogy is that our beliefs often serve similar social functions. For instance, in contentious discussions, we may express beliefs that serve as clear signals of our coalitional allegiances, while withholding beliefs that could be construed as expressions of disloyalty. Similarly, to sound impressive in intellectual discussions, we may express an opinion on the promise of string theory, or on the consequences of a given economic policy, even if we barely understand the basics of these topics.

Unfortunately, the social functions of beliefs can cause severe distortions in their accuracy, in ways that we are often unaware of. We may just feel a strong urge to endorse beliefs that align with those of our group, or which portray us as smart and virtuous individuals. We rarely have an internal red flag that warns us that our urge toward socially desirable beliefs likely pulls us away from accuracy.

A natural recommendation is thus to become more aware of these social pressures on our beliefs. Even if we imagine that we are uniquely rational and that we belong to the “rational tribe”, we are still human and hence still subject to these pressures. In particular, it is useful to become alert to the potential divergence between beliefs that are socially desirable and beliefs that are factually accurate.

One of the key social functions of beliefs is that shared beliefs can promote affiliation and mutual support. For example, studies have found that we perceive people who share our moral and political views as being warmer and more competent. Indeed, even sharing trivial labels of social categorization, such as being randomly labeled as an “underestimator” or “overestimator” in an estimation task, can be enough to elicit ingroup favoritism.

This may help explain our eagerness to signal shared beliefs with our peers: if shared beliefs are a path to ingroup support and cohesion, we might instinctively fear losing out on this resource if we fail to publicly affirm those shared beliefs. Moreover, this affiliative function may help explain cases in which people suddenly change their beliefs and start criticizing the views they used to hold after falling out with their peer group: if a person is no longer socially bound to a given group, the pressure to conform to the defining beliefs of that group may disappear, and the person might even start criticizing those beliefs as a signal of defiance and opposition.

8.9 Conclusion

The human mind evolved to succeed in domains that were relevant to reproductive success in our ancestral environment. We did not evolve to be effective at reducing suffering in an impartial manner, but rather to elevate our personal status and navigate coalitional struggles, among other parochial aims. It is thus to be expected that our minds possess strong biases that work against the aim of reducing suffering, and that serious effort is needed if we are to reduce these biases.

This may seem like a daunting task. Yet by becoming more aware of our drives for status and coalitional success, there is hope that we can temper these drives and orient ourselves — at least to a greater extent — toward compassionate impact.

9 Virtues for Compassionate Impact

When seeking to create a better world, it is often suboptimal to focus directly on outcomes. Rather than trying to calculate the best action on a case-by-case basis, we will generally do better by embodying simple virtues.

My goal in this chapter is to review some of the reasons why it makes sense to adopt a virtue-based approach when trying to reduce suffering. Following that, I will go over some specific virtues that seem helpful to cultivate.

9.1 Preliminary Clarification

To say that certain virtues are beneficial for reducing suffering is not to say that this is necessarily the only reason to cultivate moral virtues and character traits. After all, one may hold that the reduction of extreme suffering is generally the most important priority, while also maintaining that certain ways of being and behaving are important for their own sake, or because they are conducive to the prevention of other harms, such as injustice or violations of autonomy.

My point below is simply that the moral aim of reducing suffering is in itself sufficient to justify a strong focus on the development of moral virtues, even if such a focus can be further strengthened and expanded based on other reasons.

9.2 Why Virtues Are Helpful for Reducing Suffering

There are many reasons to adopt a virtue-based approach to reducing suffering, and the following are just some of them.

9.2.1 Bounded Rationality: Simpler Is Often Better

The study of bounded rationality concerns decision-making given real-world constraints, such as limited time and knowledge. A key finding from this field is that we often do better by following simple decision heuristics than by engaging in elaborate efforts to calculate the optimal decision.

In everyday decisions, we typically lack the time to go through an extensive comparison of all our options. Indeed, calculating the consequences of different options is often so difficult that it is practically impossible to beat a simple decision heuristic. This is especially true when outcomes are highly uncertain and we have little information about the likely consequences of our decisions.

Moreover, even when it is possible for calculations to beat simple heuristics, it may still not be worth it given the opportunity costs. The time we spend optimizing relatively minor decisions is time we cannot spend optimizing the most consequential ones.

This suggests an approach of using simple heuristics in most of our decisions, such as by firmly adhering to sound and widely esteemed virtues, while reserving elaborate deliberation for higher-stakes decisions, such as when deciding which projects to pursue.

Furthermore, it makes sense to combine both these decision styles in our approach to virtues themselves. That is, we can take a step back to deliberate on which virtues are optimal to follow, and then make swift use of this analysis in our everyday decisions. In this way, we can readily tap into well-considered heuristics that compress a lot of useful information.

Additionally, some have argued that a key advantage of a virtue-based approach is that much work has already been done on virtues, and that many sensible virtues are already well established in our moral intuitions and social norms. This means that we have a lot of accumulated knowledge and customs that we can cheaply tap into, and which can help inform and support a virtue-based approach. Such an approach has more historical support and greater battle-tested credibility than any radical revision of our decision procedures.

9.2.2 We Can Generally Be More Confident About Virtues

While it may be difficult to say which particular decision is optimal in a given situation, it is often easier to identify general traits and virtues that are likely to be helpful on average, when embodied across a large number of situations and decisions.

This is somewhat analogous to the law of large numbers: while any individual data point may be next to impossible to predict, the average outcome of a large number of data points is usually more knowable. The same plausibly applies to decision rules and virtues: we often have a better chance of predicting the average effect of embodying a given virtue, as compared to predicting the effect of a single act. This means that the case for deviating from a generally sound virtue in any particular instance is usually on weaker epistemic footing than the case for adhering to it.

9.2.3 Virtues Can Be Easier and More Motivating

Another reason to adopt a virtue-based approach is that it can be easier for us. Trying to calculate the best decision moment-to-moment is draining: it constantly presents us with an explosion of possible actions to consider, and it can leave us perpetually confused and uncertain about almost everything, never giving us much of a break from this process of hyper-deliberation.

In contrast, adhering to virtues is typically more concrete, simple, and doable. Being guided by virtues can help narrow down our options, not in a way that tightly constrains us, but in a way that points toward a promising range of actions: those that lie within the realm of virtuous action.

Since this approach is much simpler and less likely to leave us perpetually uncertain and overwhelmed about our decisions, it is apt to be more sustainably motivating. Indeed, there is evidence that a focus on concrete aims and actions can help strengthen our motivation and improve our mood, especially if we continually focus on the next small virtuous action we can take toward our larger goal.

Of course, acting in virtuous ways may still require effort. Yet the considerations above suggest that a virtue-based approach may ultimately be less demanding and more viable than approaches that rely mostly on explicit calculations of consequences.

9.2.4 The Downstream Effects of Virtue and Vice

Our actions not only have immediate consequences, but they also have downstream effects on our future actions and attitudes. For example, experimental studies suggest that small acts of lying and cheating increase our risk of engaging in more serious and more frequent acts of dishonesty. Likewise, studies have found that we are inclined to excuse and rationalize our own moral transgressions, but not those of others.

Beyond these effects on ourselves, how we act also influences the attitudes and actions of other people. In our immediate social environment, a more virtuous way of being may serve to inspire and nudge others toward better behavior, whereas unvirtuous behavior can be demotivating and nudge others toward acting worse.

At a societal level, how we act effectively serves as a vote for some social norms over others, and even if no single action has much of an effect on our collective norms, the cumulative effect of consistent adherence to virtue by a single individual may still have a meaningful impact.

Lastly, our vulnerability to escalating transgressions and rationalizations highlights yet another reason why we cannot usually rely on case-by-case calculation: the human mind is too biased for such an approach to be workable. If we drop any commitment to virtues and instead always calculate on a case-by-case basis, our calculations are likely to be distorted by self-serving rationalizations, even when we try to be unbiased. Such an approach gives our biases too much wiggle room and thereby risks leading us down a self-reinforcing path of vice rather than virtue.

9.2.5 Virtuous Behavior Facilitates Trust and Cooperation

Consistent virtuous behavior is also helpful in that it enables people to trust us. Building social trust is important partly because it opens the door to fruitful cooperation with others, and partly because it makes people more open to giving a fair hearing to our views and priorities. Conversely, if we fail to be virtuous and trustworthy, we may undermine our potential to cooperate with others, and we might even make people actively opposed to our priorities.

A firm adherence to virtue also finds some support in game-theoretic work on cooperation. Across a range of game-theoretic models, strategies that follow simple precepts that recommend transparent and predictable behavior tend to create better outcomes overall. These may include precepts like “avoid aggression”, “reciprocate cooperation”, and “aim to be transparent”. In contrast, case-by-case calculation can undermine predictability and thereby lead to weaker coordination and worse outcomes, even when the calculated decision is meant to achieve the opposite.

All in all, we have good reasons to adopt a virtue-based approach to reducing suffering: an approach where we treat virtues as robust defaults, even if they are not exceptionless rules. Of course, this case for a virtue-based approach does not say much about which specific virtues are worth adopting. That is what we turn to next.

9.3 Turning to Specific Virtues

We have already covered a number of specific virtues in previous chapters, such as compassion and perseverance in the face of adversity. The virtues and character traits explored below complement those examined in other chapters.

Some key criteria for evaluating whether a virtue is worth cultivating include whether it seems consequential and easy to cultivate, and scoring high on just one of these criteria may be sufficient reason to prioritize it. For example, if a virtue is highly consequential, it may be worth prioritizing even if it is difficult to cultivate. These criteria have informed the selection of virtues included below.

Note that the following virtues might not all be considered distinctly moral virtues in a traditional sense, yet they nevertheless all seem helpful for reducing suffering.

9.4 Personal Safety and Self-Preservation

If we are to work for a better world, we need to stay alive and safeguard the capacities that enable us to have a beneficial impact. This involves taking proper precautions in matters of safety as well as taking proactive steps to support our future health and wellbeing.

This virtue is consequential, since it protects our future capacity for impact. It is also quite easy to develop. For example, it does not take a lot of effort to learn about the main risks to our personal health and safety, and to take some steps to markedly reduce these risks.

In terms of specific mortality risks, cardiovascular disease and cancer are the two main causes of death for people worldwide. Other major causes of death, especially among younger people, include suicide and road traffic injuries.

Some of the greatest risk factors for mortality include high blood pressure, smoking, obesity, alcohol use, and a diet high in sodium. Several of these contribute substantially to both cardiovascular disease and cancer. The ways to address these risk factors are often fairly straightforward, such as avoiding smoking and limiting the consumption of alcohol and sodium. Indeed, most of the major mortality risk factors can be significantly reduced with healthy lifestyle choices. (More on healthy lifestyle choices in the next chapter.)

To reduce the risk of suicide, we can be aware of our state of mind and take seriously any signs of poor mental health. For example, we can seek support from other people, including mental health professionals, and make lifestyle choices that reduce the risk of suicidal depression, such as exercising more and improving our diet.

With respect to avoiding road accidents, it may be helpful to be aware of some basic statistics regarding the relative safety of different vehicle types. For example, in terms of fatalities per passenger-kilometer, E.U data from 2012 to 2021 show that buses were more than ten times safer than cars, while trains were almost three times safer than buses. By far the most dangerous class of vehicles is powered two-wheelers such as scooters and motorcycles: these are at least several times more deadly than all other types of vehicles per passenger-kilometer. Of course, it is not advisable to obsess over statistics like these, but it is sensible to let them inform our decisions when relevant.

More broadly, it is worth developing a greater respect for the dangers of traffic than we intuitively have, and the same goes for the dangers of smoking and alcohol. The intuitive concern we have about various dangers often has little connection with the actual statistics about what is most likely to harm us. As a result, some effort is likely required to recalibrate our sense of risk based on the relevant statistics.

Overall, if our aim is to contribute toward a better world, we have good reason to develop a strong drive to preserve our individual existence, along with a drive to safeguard our capacities for compassionate impact.

9.4.1 Financial Security

Financial security is a key pillar of protecting and developing our capacities. After all, financial burnout can diminish our wellbeing and effectiveness just as surely as emotional burnout. Conversely, being financially secure can support our health, free up cognitive bandwidth, and increase our freedom to choose and sustain impactful paths.

A common rule of thumb is to build a personal runway of 6 to 12 months of basic living expenses to provide a safety net. Following this rule would mean limiting non-essential spending, risky investments, and heroic altruistic donations until we have built that foundation, after which we can invest and donate more ambitiously from a place of greater security.

Importantly, this heuristic does not imply underinvesting in our health or productivity. On the contrary, judicious spending on our health and productivity is itself a critical investment that likely pays off even from a purely financial perspective, as it enables us to save time and money in the future. Such investments generally increase our long-term safety and capacity for impact.

9.5 Honesty and Integrity

Honesty and integrity are widely acclaimed virtues, and for good reasons. Honesty involves being truthful and sincere, and thus excludes lying, deceit, and cheating. Integrity is even broader, as it involves a consistent adherence to moral values, including values such as honesty and fairness.

It involves a wholeness and consistency of character, acting in a way we can stand by and that we would not need to hide from others. Importantly, integrity is not all-or-nothing: it admits of degrees, and we can deepen our integrity by adhering more consistently to moral values over time.

Integrity also involves a willingness to speak one's mind, especially about important moral issues, even when doing so may be unpopular. People of integrity are willing to forgo praise and admiration, and are prepared to work on issues that are ignored and disliked — just as they are willing to work on popular issues, if necessary.

Why are honesty and integrity important? Some of the main reasons were already gestured at in the previous section on trust and cooperation. Honesty and integrity are among the virtues that are most conducive to trust, while dishonesty and failures of integrity, such as glaring hypocrisy, can be uniquely corrosive to trust.

The effects of these failures may be irreversible, or at least difficult to reverse. For example, if someone catches us lying, this person's perception of us will rightly take a lasting hit, and they may need to see a lot of evidence of personal change before they will consider us trustworthy again. That a single act of low integrity can have such long-lasting effects is a good reason to avoid it.

Another important consideration is how dishonesty and low integrity affect our future behavior. As noted, there is evidence that lying and cheating can make us more likely to lie and cheat in the future. Indeed, one study found that our brains seem to become increasingly desensitized to dishonesty the more we engage in it, and this desensitization in turn predicts greater dishonesty over time.

Dishonesty also imposes the burden of having to keep track of one's lies and deceptions, a burden that can grow increasingly complicated and heavy over time. Moreover, studies suggest that lying generally requires greater cognitive effort than does truth-telling even in the moment. A person who is committed to honesty and integrity is relieved of these burdens. Such a person can simply focus on keeping track of the truth and being honest about their perspective and is therefore more free to just show up and be themselves in life.

A broader reason to avoid dishonesty is that it can spread falsehoods that distort other people's views of reality and potentially harm our public discourse. After all, by lying or deceiving others, we not only mislead the person we are engaging with, but we also risk spreading the deceit through a broader communication network, potentially harming society at large.

In sum, dishonesty and low integrity have many harmful effects. They erode trust, make further lies and bad behavior more likely, impose cognitive burdens, and can spread falsehoods and cynicism far and wide with damaging consequences. Each of these considerations alone gives us good reason to adhere to honesty and integrity, and together they make a robust case.

When acts of dishonesty and low integrity seem convenient, our minds are likely biased toward rationalizing them, suggesting that we cannot trust our immediate evaluations of the harms of such behavior. The risk of such biases and rationalizations is yet another good reason to generally err on the side of honesty and integrity.

How can we cultivate greater honesty and integrity? One suggestion is to internalize the benefits of these virtues and to actively affirm them as self-endorsed values. For example, it may be helpful to occasionally remind ourselves that honesty is crucial for building trust and keeping our lives simple. In addition, we can read texts and listen to speeches that highlight the many hidden costs of dishonesty and low integrity.

Similarly, it is useful to recognize that honesty can be reconciled with care for others. For instance, some researchers argue that an effective approach to difficult conversations is “benevolent honesty”: communicating honestly and directly while aiming to be kind and helpful to the receiver. It may also help to keep in mind that people generally do not appreciate paternalistic lies, and that supposedly prosocial lies often reduce trust.

Another suggestion for strengthening our integrity is to connect with people who display a high level of integrity themselves. Our behavior tends to be strongly influenced by the people around us, and hence being around individuals who practice honesty and integrity is likely helpful for cultivating these virtues in ourselves.

Finally, it is worth highlighting some qualifications. For one, there are cases in which honesty is not the best response. In situations of self-defense, for instance, lying may sometimes be a lesser evil than violence, and potentially a better way to avert danger. However, we should be clear that such situations are quite rare, and the bar for justified deception is higher than we tend to appreciate.

A related qualification is that a general adherence to honesty and integrity is compatible with being strategic and choosing one's battles. For example, we might have a greater impact by speaking out against harmful practices in some venues over others, and focusing primarily on the venues in which we can have the greatest impact is not a failure of integrity. On the contrary, if integrity is understood as a consistent adherence to our deeper moral values, it arguably implies such prioritization.

9.5.1 Integrity and Online Habits

A practical test case for integrity is the ethics of our online habits. Our actions in this sphere are often private, low-friction, and easily rationalized. Yet while we may prefer to ignore the moral implications of our online conduct, integrity also involves critically examining the choices we make behind a screen and considering their broader consequences.

For example, do we interact in a civil manner with people online? Do we inadvertently boost sensationalist or misleading content? Do we succumb to doomscrolling on news and social media sites, thereby wasting our time, fragmenting our attention, and harming our mental health? These concerns are not merely theoretical: a randomized controlled trial found that reducing smartphone screen time to no more than two hours a day for three weeks improved depressive symptoms, sleep quality, and wellbeing among healthy students.

The questions raised above matter in terms of how we live our lives and impact others, yet we often neglect them. In particular, we tend to overlook that our clicks and comments are small votes that help shape both public discourse and our own dispositions. More fundamentally, we often neglect to ask whether our online habits are consistent with our own values.

An especially fraught yet relevant test case for integrity is the issue of viewing unvetted online pornography. For instance, there is strong evidence that major porn sites like Pornhub have repeatedly hosted non-consensual content and child sexual abuse material (C.S.A.M), often causing severe distress for victims who struggle to get the content removed. Moreover, smaller porn sites with weak moderation may have even fewer safeguards against abusive, illegally shared, or non-consensual content.

Is using such websites with unvetted content consistent with integrity? At a minimum, it seems worth reflecting on this question and aligning our behavior with our own considered answer.

Moving beyond reflection, how can we increase our online integrity in practice? For example, how can we curb our doomscrolling in everyday life? One effective strategy is to turn off notifications and use newsfeed and website blockers to protect our attention and make integrity the default. More generally, we can be keenly aware that the very first step into an online time sink is by far the easiest and most consequential one to control: the second scroll or click is chosen by a different mind than the first.

We can also update our implicit beliefs about how useful or urgent various online activities really are. For instance, we might spend a lot of time following the news based on an unexamined sense that we need to stay on top of it all, even if we could in fact be doing far more helpful activities otherwise, such as learning more lasting insights and working to solve the problems we face.

Lastly, we can keep in mind that the way we use our attention is itself a crucial aspect of our character and integrity. How we use our attention largely shapes who we become. In this spirit, we may occasionally ask ourselves: Am I directing my attention where I want it to be? Would I use my attention like this around someone I respect? Is my current use of attention consistent with my own understanding of integrity?

9.6 Being Cooperative

The virtue of being cooperative includes a willingness to collaborate with others toward shared aims, but also a readiness to engage in fruitful compromises with those who do not share our aims. In addition, it involves supporting those who seek to make a compassionate impact and being encouraging toward such people and their work.

The biggest problems we face — from present-day factory farming to risks of astronomical suffering — can only be solved through collective efforts. This suggests that we can generally be more effective if we adopt attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to collective problem solving.

For example, being friendly and cooperative is crucial for creating an inviting community and movement aimed at reducing suffering. It helps build a healthy community in which people feel supported and motivated, and it can also help attract more people to contribute to the cause.

Furthermore, we may often have a greater impact by assisting others in doing important work rather than doing that work ourselves. For example, even if we mostly specialize in our own projects, it may still be worthwhile to spend substantial time supporting and giving feedback on other people's projects. This can offer both the benefits of specialization and the easy gains from outside perspectives and support. Similarly, instead of focusing purely on our own direct impact, we may have an outsized impact by helping others figure out how they can best contribute toward the reduction of suffering.

As noted earlier, many of us are likely biased toward a single-player perspective that focuses mostly on our own personal impact, and which neglects the collective impact of our broader community. Consequently, we may well give undue importance to our own projects compared to those of other people, and we might underestimate the impact we can have by assisting others.

How can we become more cooperative? As in the case of honesty and integrity, it may be helpful to better internalize the benefits of this virtue. At a collective level, we can promote norms in favor of cooperation, such as by creating common knowledge about its advantages and about our plausible bias toward neglecting it.

That said, cooperation also has serious pitfalls when pursued naively. For example, in seeking to be cooperative, we may fail to critique other people's ideas with sufficient candor and depth. This can have disastrous consequences, including the collective persistence of moral blind spots and misguided priorities. Likewise, when considering any high-stakes opportunity for cooperation, it is worth carefully evaluating whether it ultimately serves beneficial rather than harmful ends.

9.7 Curiosity

To be curious is to be driven by a desire to learn and understand. It includes a willingness to consider new ideas and seek new insights.

Curiosity is helpful for various reasons. In general terms, our views of the world are critical for our ability to steer toward better outcomes, and being curious is critical for refining our views. Thus, curiosity is quite foundational for our ability to create a better world.

Moreover, deliberate curiosity is important since we cannot expect our views to be adequately informed by default. We humans tend to feel a strong pull toward conformity and popular topics. Yet what is most popular often diverges from what is most important and worth exploring.

Another reason to practice open-ended curiosity is that we often cannot know in advance which insights we might be missing. Consequently, if we stick to a preconceived plan that specifies exactly what we need to learn and do, we risk missing out on key insights of which we currently have no conception. In this way, the limits of our current perspective lend support to some measure of unguided and open-ended curiosity.

Beyond these considerations, studies have found that curiosity is associated with increased meaning and life satisfaction, greater creativity, and more growth-oriented behavior. Furthermore, curiosity motivated by interest rather than the avoidance of unpleasant emotions is linked to greater open-mindedness and problem-solving confidence. Fortunately, research has also found that we can significantly increase our curiosity.

Perhaps one of the best ways to cultivate greater curiosity is by better appreciating how valuable it is. For example, we might reflect on how curiosity has helped humanity gain unexpected insights that turned out to be extremely important. Or we might reflect on how much we do not know and how much there is still left for our curiosity to uncover.

A related suggestion is to focus on important questions that can help motivate and guide our curiosity. Most obviously in this context, we can devote special attention to the question of how we can best reduce suffering, and try to keep the question alive rather than stifling it with preconceived answers.

This point about focusing on important questions leads us to the potential pitfalls of curiosity. After all, it is also possible to have too much curiosity, or to be overly curious about trivial things. For example, it is clearly suboptimal to be so curious that we lose sight of all other aims, including the aim of reducing suffering. Likewise, it is hardly beneficial to be curious in ways that leave us constantly distracted by a compulsion to check the latest news or social media updates. In short, it is worth striking a balance that reconciles both open-ended curiosity and a strong sense of priorities.

9.8 Self-Scrutiny

Self-scrutiny may be defined as curiosity applied to ourselves. This kind of curiosity deserves special emphasis since we naturally have strong biases and blind spots when it comes to ourselves. Similar to how we in many ways know more about outer space than the deep oceans on Earth, our own minds and actions can be difficult to examine despite being so close.

Some of the key elements of self-scrutiny include a willingness to lower our guard and try to be more honest with ourselves. In particular, it involves a willingness to explore how we might be wrong and how we can do better.

For example, do we have bad habits that we are not being honest with ourselves about and whose effects we are downplaying? Do we have a low level of ambition and self-discipline that could be much greater, yet which we are denying and excusing rather than facing up to and improving? Do we have hidden motives that drive our behavior toward self-serving ends and distort our efforts to help others? Do we shy away from difficult topics and reject unpleasant conclusions merely because they are inconvenient, or because they fail to satisfy our emotional needs?

Self-scrutiny is closely related to humility. For one, it takes some level of humility to realize that we have something to gain from asking self-probing questions. Yet a greater sense of humility also tends to be an important outcome of self-scrutiny. For instance, by reflecting on the gaps in our knowledge and the ways in which we could do better, we may prevent ourselves from becoming arrogant and conceited, and we come to see that we have ample reason to be humble.

In broad terms, self-scrutiny is important because our greatest hurdle to growth is often ourselves. In particular, our confirmation bias and defensiveness are likely key obstacles to our progress, as they often prevent us from gaining more well-considered views and priorities. By applying greater curiosity to ourselves, we may ease these defensive tendencies and thereby make space for greater growth and refinement.

A helpful step toward developing self-scrutiny may be to first admit that we have a problem. That is, we can acknowledge that our views and behavior are flawed — probably in more ways than we prefer to admit — and that we, like all humans, have an inclination to deny and defend our flaws rather than to identify and address them. Without first explicitly admitting that we have much room for improvement, we may have little motivation to pursue self-scrutiny and reap its rewards.

Another way to facilitate self-scrutiny is to ask specific questions about where we have the greatest room for growth. For example: What is the single most significant way in which I can improve my behavior? What is the most critical gap in my knowledge? What is the biggest way in which I have been wrong in the past, and how might I be wrong in similar ways today? Some of our blind spots and areas for improvement may not be so difficult to see once we start systematically looking for them.

Inviting feedback from others can also be helpful, since other people can often see our biases and suboptimal patterns better than we can ourselves. There is no reason for self-scrutiny to be a solitary endeavor, as opposed to being a collaborative project in which we help each other improve.

While we might initially feel defensive when someone suggests ways in which we could improve, it may be helpful to turn this reaction on its head by instead trying to appreciate the feedback. After all, we have no obligation to agree with the feedback: we can simply view it as a hypothesis about how we might improve, and there is reason to appreciate when someone sincerely shares such a hypothesis for our consideration.

Finally, it is worth stressing that self-scrutiny is not harsh self-criticism: it does not involve personal blame or condemnation. Instead, self-scrutiny involves a more impersonal stance of curiosity and reflection, and it is generally more effective when combined with a kind and supportive attitude toward ourselves.

9.9 Personal Agency

The virtue of personal agency is about choosing our own direction and engaging proactively with the world. It is about being aware that we can make a real difference and seeking to make the best difference we can.

This virtue is a core basis for actively informing ourselves and taking effective action in the world. Some people may have compassionate values yet still lack a strong sense of personal agency, which could be the main bottleneck to their impact.

Indeed, facing the scope of world suffering can directly challenge our sense of agency and empowerment, and can even make us feel helpless. Thus, boosting our sense of agency may help counter these challenges and maintain a healthy sense of motivation.

How can we increase our sense of personal agency? One suggestion is to take responsibility for our actions, recognizing that it is through our choices and actions that we exercise what control we have. For example, we can take responsibility for what we follow and consume online, how we are doing in our personal lives, and how we impact the world at large.

We can also boost our sense of agency by making the power of our choices more salient. In particular, we can focus on the actions we can take and the changes in the world we are able to make. Studies suggest that having a clearer sense of the difference we can make for others helps motivate compassionate action.

Another way to strengthen our personal agency is to continually take small actions toward our higher goals, keeping in mind that every small act helps build this capacity. Moreover, it turns out that our sense of agency is closely related to our sense of hope, which suggests that we can increase our personal agency by cultivating a realistic hope for compassionate impact. Finally, we can engage with resources that stimulate our sense of agency, such as motivational books and speeches.

Some qualifications are warranted with respect to personal agency. For example, to emphasize the importance of personal agency is not to deny the importance of broader systemic factors. Such broader factors are clearly important and should not be minimized. However, we can strive to improve both: increase our personal agency and address broader systemic issues, and these efforts can be deeply complementary. After all, we cannot help address broader issues if we lack a sense of agency to change things in the first place.

Yet agency also has its pitfalls. For example, a strong sense of agency can be harmful if it is not coupled with curiosity and reflection, without which we might make hasty and poorly informed decisions. The most beneficial form of agency will also include agency to pursue learning and contemplation, not just outward action.

9.10 Self-Discipline

Self-discipline, or self-control, is the ability to align our actions with our higher values and intentions. It is about adhering to our deeper commitments rather than our immediate urges. This is closely related to personal agency. Yet while personal agency is about choosing our own direction and being proactive, self-discipline is about doing what seems most important, even when impulses pull us the other way.

Self-discipline is valuable for a number of reasons. Most obviously, it is crucial for pursuing our goals: without self-discipline, we are easily derailed from our core priorities. More broadly, self-discipline is often required if we are to choose integrity when alternative options feel more convenient or enticing.

Furthermore, studies have found that higher levels of self-control are associated with a host of beneficial outcomes, including greater life satisfaction, better relationships, and increased prosocial behavior.

Fortunately, there are many evidence-based strategies for improving our self-discipline. For instance, research suggests that it is helpful to set concrete goals with clear success criteria. This approach is especially effective when the goal we are pursuing is seen as personally meaningful and when we have reflected on why it matters to us.

Similarly, there is evidence that we can boost our self-discipline by tracking our progress and building a sense of advancing toward our goals. For example, psychological experiments have found that we procrastinate less and are more willing to take on demanding tasks when we have access to information about our progress.

Another helpful strategy is to use cognitive reappraisal to change our perception of difficult tasks. For instance, an experimental study found that people who were instructed to view a difficult task as a learning opportunity were less prone to distraction, more enthusiastic about the task, and showed better performance in a subsequent test.

We can also enhance our self-discipline by using situational strategies: changing the environment around us such that temptations become less accessible. For example, if we are working on a demanding project, it may be helpful to turn off the internet and put our phone out of reach until we have achieved our daily goals. Other situational strategies include working in low-distraction environments and keeping healthy foods readily available.

Finally, we can improve our self-control by increasing our self-compassion, and perhaps especially by reducing harsh self-criticism. For instance, one study found that people assigned to a two-week self-compassion course experienced less self-judgment, greater impulse control, and enhanced self-efficacy relative to a comparison group.

It is worth clarifying that self-discipline is not about neglecting our needs or never having downtime. On the contrary, proper self-care and downtime are prerequisites for self-discipline. Moreover, as noted in the context of curiosity, it is worth making space for some measure of exploration and creativity that is unconstrained by discipline, lest we get stuck in suboptimal plans and overlook crucial insights. Indeed, rather than being tied to rigid and boring discipline, we have reason to cultivate a sense of fun and playfulness in our lives, as we shall see next.

9.11 Humor and Lightheartedness

It may sound unusual to talk about a virtue of humor and lightheartedness. Yet far from being a novelty, such a virtue in fact has ancient roots. For example, Aristotle wrote about the virtue of “eutrapelia”, which covers having a sense of humor and being pleasant to be around. In other words, even Aristotle did not think virtue required being insufferable at dinner. Admittedly, the word “eutrapelia” does not sound like it was designed to lighten the mood.

The virtue I am exploring in this section is an expanded version of eutrapelia. Beyond humor and ease of manner, it includes not taking ourselves too seriously, adopting what some have called “metamodern irony” or “sincere irony”: an irony and lightness that can coexist with, and even support, sincerity and moral seriousness.

Despite all appearances, we humans are not humorless robots without needs for play and lightness. On the contrary, we are social creatures with deep needs for these things, and we ignore those needs at our peril. For example, people who work to reduce suffering might eventually lose their drive and drop out if they believe in some suffocating requirement to always be serious, and potential contributors might avoid ever getting involved if they harbor the same misconception. After all, few people think, “Yes, I would love to dedicate my life to helping others, provided the fun is kept to a minimum.”

Furthermore, it turns out that humor and laughter are associated with various health benefits. For instance, there is evidence that humor training can reduce stress and increase emotional wellbeing, and laughter likewise appears to reduce stress and benefit our cardiovascular health. Of course, it is important not to pursue too much humor training so as to avoid becoming too funny. Though for some of us, the risk of this ever happening is statistically insignificant.

Having humor and lightness in our lives may also help relieve a sense of overwhelming pressure and responsibility. For example, if we constantly feel like everything we do is utterly grave and consequential, we will likely put undue pressure on ourselves to the point of undermining our effectiveness. In contrast, by entertaining some humor and play in our lives, we can occasionally give ourselves a much-needed break from the heavy aspects of reality, and thus return to them with renewed energy. Personally, I find that putting on a clown suit every other Sunday does the trick.

Humor is not only soothing but also sharp: it can be a powerful means of scrutiny and critique. As satirists and playwrights have known throughout the ages, humor can cut through walls of taboo and defensiveness in ways that pure seriousness rarely can.

This strategy may also work as a means of self-scrutiny. Be me: have the opportunity to accomplish so much, choose to doomscroll instead, feel bad about it, doomscroll about that. If we can sometimes take a humorous stance toward ourselves, we may soften our own defensiveness and self-importance, and thus tease ourselves into greater openness and modesty.

How can we cultivate greater humor and lightheartedness to unironically save the world? For many of us, perhaps the main step is to ease our hidden taboo against these traits. After all, if we assume that there is no rightful place for humor and playfulness of any kind, we will likely suppress them. In contrast, if we recognize that these traits do have an important place in our lives, we can better allow them to blossom, ideally within the bounds of public safety.

We can also draw inspiration from characters and role models who display benevolent humor and optimism. An example from fiction might be Waymond Wang from Everything Everywhere All at Once, who uses a cheerful spirit to fight and persevere in a cruel world. We all have something to learn from Waymond Wang — not least the strategic value of googly eyes.

Similarly, we may at times benefit from reframing our struggles in more playful ways. For instance, we might occasionally laugh at the absurdity of our condition and the enormity of the challenges we face: here we are, a band of confused primates on a spinning rock, armed primarily with existential dread and a Wi-Fi connection, trying to make things less bad with questionable results at best. This may help ease the pressure and provide a restorative shift in perspective.

An obvious qualification is that humor is often not appropriate, as there are surely times when pure seriousness is called for. In truth, it must be conceded that it is in some sense utterly absurd to ever laugh and be playful when there are always countless instances of unbearable suffering taking place on the planet. Philosopher Wendell O'Brien has in this spirit questioned whether it is ever permissible for us to smile and be glad.

Yet we can acknowledge the deep validity of a negative answer to this question while also acknowledging the pragmatic reality of the human need for humor and laughter, and how meeting this need can serve critical roles toward the alleviation of suffering. As strenuous as it may be, we sometimes have a pragmatic obligation to crack jokes for the greater good.

9.12 Better, Not Perfect

We all have conflicting drives and demands in our lives that pull us away from perfect virtue. This is to be expected. After all, we humans did not evolve to be deeply virtuous by nature, even if we did evolve a basic capacity to reflect on and improve our character over time. The aim is not perfection — which is unrealistic in any case — but rather to do better. Again, instead of aiming for some singular golden mean of ideal virtue, it is more helpful to aim for a “golden range” of virtue that is ambitious yet achievable.

10 Healthy Habits

Our habits are the cornerstone of our productivity. Good habits can support our goals and wellbeing, while bad habits can actively undermine them.

This chapter will present some general ways to think about and approach habits, and then cover some specific habits and lifestyle practices that may be worth adopting.

10.1 Habits Are Overrated and Underrated

In one sense, habits are greatly overrated. When it comes to having a beneficial impact, it is generally more important to pursue the right aims than to optimize our habits. After all, if the specific aim we are working toward ultimately has little effect on the reduction of suffering, pursuing that aim with perfect habits and productivity will still be highly suboptimal. A person who pursues the most impactful causes with mediocre habits may thus have far greater impact than someone who pursues less impactful causes with perfect habits.

Furthermore, there are tradeoffs between focusing on our personal habits and focusing on how we can improve the world. While devoting some attention to our personal habits is surely helpful, it is also possible to focus so much on our habits that it detracts from our impact. Time spent thinking about how we can optimize our personal habits is time not spent thinking about how we can best address other issues. And as the self-focused creatures we are, it can be easy to rationalize an inordinate focus on our personal habits compared to addressing broader problems.

These points notwithstanding, if we have paid little attention to our personal habits, they may well be a major bottleneck to our impact, and the worse our habits are, the more likely this is to be true. In this sense, habits are frequently underrated: we often fail to appreciate just how much better we could do if we replaced bad habits with better ones — even if getting our broader aims right is generally more important.

Moreover, studies suggest that the reason people with high self-control see better outcomes in terms of health, wellbeing, and goal achievement is in large part because they have better habits in their daily lives.

10.2 Reducing Personal Bureaucracy

A pitfall when trying to practice healthy habits is that we end up with too much personal bureaucracy. For example, before we can start working, we have to run 10 kilometers, do an hour of yoga, have a cold shower, eat a large breakfast, do three types of meditation, journal about what we are grateful for, and finally journal about why we again somehow failed to get anything done yesterday.

In contrast to such a bloated checklist, we will likely do better by aiming for a limited and manageable set of habits. In other words, we may do best by adopting a system of minimal personal bureaucracy that gives us ample freedom to actually accomplish things in the world.

This is not to say that we should stop aiming for healthy habits, but it is simply to acknowledge the need for balance and the consequent value of putting limits on our habits. The mere fact that a habit can provide some benefit is not in itself a sufficient reason to adopt it. We also need to consider the costs in terms of the time and effort a habit requires, as well as what we could be doing otherwise.

This broader point about the value of reducing personal bureaucracy is worth keeping in mind throughout this chapter. When I speak of healthy habits below, I am not recommending an unwieldy set of habits, and I am not suggesting that we ignore the significant costs of adding more. We want to preserve our precious freedom to accomplish things beyond our habits.

10.3 Taking Small Steps and Tracking Our Progress

A helpful way to create better habits is by taking small steps in the right direction. For example, instead of going from rarely reading to suddenly trying to read a book a week, it is better to start by reading just 5 pages a day and then gradually add more over time. This gradual approach is highly doable, which makes it more motivating.

In addition to progressing in small steps, it is helpful to set specific and measurable goals to aim for. By clarifying exactly when, where, and how we are going to make progress toward our goals, we greatly increase our chances of achieving them and building better habits.

As mentioned earlier, it is useful to track our progress and consistency. For example, if we are aiming to go to bed at a regular time, it may help to write down when we go to bed each night. Similarly, if we are trying to exercise more, we can log the exercises we did or how far we walked or ran. This can give us an honest sense of how we are doing, help build a sense of progress, and promote goal achievement.

Finally, while it is generally advisable to progress in small steps when building desired habits, this does not seem to apply to overcoming undesired ones. For example, a study among people who wanted to stop smoking found that those who were assigned to quit abruptly were significantly more likely to stop compared to those who were instructed to quit more gradually.

10.4 Sleep

Sleep is essential for virtually all aspects of health and mental functioning. For example, adequate sleep is crucial for self-control, and intervention studies have found that better sleep can help improve our mental health, especially when it comes to depression and anxiety.

How can we improve our sleep? A key suggestion is to aim for consistent bedtimes. Regular sleep schedules are associated with better health outcomes across various measures, including better cognitive function and cardiovascular health.

Notably, a recent study of more than 60,000 people found that sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration. The authors suggest that aiming to fall asleep and wake up within one-hour windows may be a practical strategy for improving sleep regularity. For example, we might aim to fall asleep between 10 and 11 pm and wake up between 6 and 7 am.

Beyond consistency, research has found that going to bed relatively early in the night is linked to better health outcomes. For example, a study in the U.K found that people who fell asleep between 10 pm and 11 pm had the lowest cardiovascular disease incidence, compared to those who fell asleep before 10 or after 11. Additionally, going to bed after 1 am is associated with worse mental health outcomes regardless of self-reported chronotype.

In terms of sleep duration, various studies have found that getting around seven to eight hours of sleep a night is associated with the best health outcomes. For example, compared to those who either sleep more or less, those who get seven to eight hours of sleep have the lowest risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. Likewise, a study that included almost half a million adults found that getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night was linked to better fluid intelligence, better reaction times, fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression, and greater wellbeing compared to other sleep durations.

To be sure, most of the studies cited above are correlational in nature, and correlation does not imply causation. Nor do these general trends capture individual variation in optimal sleeping patterns. Yet taken together, the findings reviewed above are still suggestive, and they arguably lend some support to using a “10 pm, seven to eight hours” schedule as an informed starting point for exploring one's optimal sleep schedule.

In terms of sleep environment, evidence suggests that a room temperature around 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) may on average be optimal for sleep and immune function. With respect to air quality, there is evidence that we sleep better if we open a window to prevent carbon dioxide from accumulating. Noise levels are also relevant: noise has detrimental effects on sleep, and hence noise reduction strategies such as wearing earplugs are recommended for better sleep. (Anecdotally, sleeping with earplugs is among the greatest lifehacks I have ever found.)

Another ingredient for good sleep is physical exercise. Studies have found that those who were randomly assigned to follow an exercise program had better sleep quality and fell asleep faster compared to controls. Indeed, even just increasing our daily number of steps appears to improve sleep quality.

There are also nutrition-related strategies for improving sleep. For example, it is generally helpful to avoid both caffeine and alcohol several hours before bedtime, as they can disrupt sleep. Adequate magnesium intake is likewise beneficial.

Experimental studies have found that magnesium supplementation can help reduce the time until sleep onset by more than 15 minutes in older adults. Magnesium bisglycinate in particular has been found to modestly improve insomnia severity in a placebo-controlled trial.

In terms of wind-down practices, avoiding phone use for 30 minutes before bedtime appears to improve sleep. Thus, if we go to bed at 10 pm, we may benefit from putting away our phone and other online devices at 9 30 PM and instead reading a book.

This could be combined with relaxing music: a meta-analysis found that listening to relaxing music before bedtime is effective at reducing sleep problems among patients with insomnia. Other wind-down practices that can improve sleep include taking a warm bath or shower, or simply taking a warm footbath for 10 minutes or more.

For people with persistent sleep problems, a well-supported form of therapy is C.B.T for insomnia, or C.B.T-I. This usually involves keeping a sleep diary, limiting time in bed to match actual sleep, and getting up at the same time every day. The cognitive work may focus on questioning or disengaging from stressful thoughts like “I'll never fall asleep” or “I must get eight hours”.

10.5 Diet

Diet is a huge topic, and I will not try to cover it in depth. Instead, I will mostly emphasize some healthy food groups that can serve as reliable staples and help us keep things relatively simple. Note that I often refer to findings that concern mortality risk, not just because it is important to avoid fatal outcomes, but also because mortality risk serves as a rough indicator of overall health.

10.5.1 Core Food Groups

In general terms, a strong default is to regularly eat whole grains, legumes, cruciferous vegetables, nuts, and berries.

Whole grains appear to be a healthy staple for most people. For example, a study that explored 12 different food groups found that intake of whole grains predicted the greatest reduction in mortality risk: eating just 100 grams of whole grains a day was associated with around a 20 percent lower mortality risk (compared with eating no whole grains). Oat consumption in particular has been associated with notable health benefits, such as reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

Another healthy food group is legumes, such as lentils, black beans, and chickpeas. Consuming 100 grams of legumes a day is associated with around a 10 percent reduction in mortality risk, and higher intakes are associated with still lower mortality. Furthermore, legumes are among the foods that provide the most nutrition per dollar; other high-ranking foods include white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and carrots.

There are also many benefits associated with eating cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. For instance, broccoli consumption is linked to lower all-cause mortality, reduced inflammation, and improved immune function. Moreover, meta-analyses have found that the broccoli-derived compound sulforaphane may help reduce social difficulties among people with autism.

Nut intake has likewise been linked to lower mortality risk, and eating around a handful of nuts a day is associated with the lowest risk. Similarly, a study in China found that those who consumed more than 70 grams of nuts a week had a 17 percent lower risk of cognitive impairment compared to those who did not eat nuts on a weekly basis (after controlling for confounders such as family income, smoking status, exercise, and vegetable intake). Walnuts may be especially healthy, as the consumption of walnuts is associated with lower mortality risk compared to other nuts (as a combined category).

Additionally, there are many benefits linked to the consumption of berries. For example, blueberry consumption is associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, improved insulin sensitivity, and reduced inflammation. Moreover, there is evidence that eating blueberries can meaningfully improve memory and cognitive performance.

Other foods associated with notable health benefits include mushrooms, garlic, onions, flaxseeds, and extra virgin olive oil.

Finally, on the much-debated question of macronutrient ratios, observational studies generally find the lowest all-cause mortality among those who get around 45 to 55 percent of their total energy from carbohydrates, 30 to 35 percent from fats, and 15 to 20 percent from proteins. A common challenge in reaching roughly these ranges is to get enough fat: we often consume too many carbohydrates and too few healthy fats. When it comes to healthy fats, studies find lower all-cause mortality among those with higher intakes of mono- and polyunsaturated fatty acids. These are the types of fats we can get by consuming extra virgin olive oil, nuts, and seeds.

10.5.2 A Brief Note on Meal Replacements

Replacing one or two meals a day with a meal replacement shake may be a convenient option for those who are busy and sometimes prefer simpler meals. Indeed, for some people, meal replacements may have benefits beyond just convenience, such as supporting weight loss and improving micronutrient status. That being said, even if meal replacements can be worth incorporating, it still seems best to maintain variety in one's diet and to include most of the foods listed earlier, in part because meal replacements typically lack many of the health-promoting compounds found in those foods.

A concern with meal replacements is that they often contain artificial sweeteners. One of the most common sweeteners is sucralose, which has been found to cause gut dysbiosis and reduced insulin sensitivity. In contrast, a 12-week trial of daily stevia consumption found no significant change in gut microbiota.

Moreover, a study running over two years found that the stevia-derived compound stevioside even had beneficial effects in terms of reducing high blood pressure. These findings do not establish that stevia is harmless, but they do suggest that stevia might on average be safer than sucralose.

Thus, if one consumes meal replacement shakes, it might be better to choose varieties that are sweetened with stevia, or varieties that are unsweetened, over those sweetened with sucralose.

10.5.3 Key Nutrients to Watch

The core food groups listed earlier can provide a wide range of nutrients, yet some nutrients they generally cannot provide in optimal amounts are vitamin B.12, vitamin D, and long-chain omega-3s — and potentially iodine and selenium. Because these nutrients are important, and because many people have suboptimal levels of at least one of them, I discuss them in more detail in the appendix.

10.6 Physical Exercise

Physical exercise is associated with myriad benefits. For example, compared to being inactive, doing just 20 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity a day is associated with a substantially lower risk of all-cause mortality. Exercise has also been found to boost immune function, reduce inflammation, and significantly decrease the risk of depression. In addition, physical activity has been found to increase self-control and boost cognitive function more broadly.

Which types of physical exercise are best? The answer depends partly on individual preferences and dispositions. Yet if we look at the data on mortality risk, a pretty consistent pattern emerges: aerobic exercise (e.g. jogging) is associated with greater preventive benefits compared to resistance training (e.g. lifting weights), although both are associated with substantial benefits. Overall, the evidence supports combining aerobic and resistance training for longevity, and aerobic exercise appears to be the component that is worth doing most of. For reducing depression, the best types of exercise seem to be “walking or jogging”, yoga, and strength training, all of which have significant benefits.

A common pitfall when ramping up our exercise is to progress too quickly. Going from virtually no vigorous exercise to doing several hours a week may strain our body and overwhelm our immune system. Indeed, compared to being sedentary, physical overexertion is associated with more than a two-fold increase in the risk of getting respiratory infections, whereas the optimal mid-level of exertion is associated with a 50 percent reduction in this risk.

Therefore, to avoid repeated setbacks, it is advisable to build up our fitness very gradually. Ironically, rushing toward exercise goals can be the very thing that prevents us from reaching them.

10.7 Meditation

There are many varieties of meditation, and different types of meditation tend to have some shared benefits along with benefits that are unique to each type. The shared benefits include greater self-reported focus and energy, as well as reductions in stress, anxiety, and depression. Yet not surprisingly, attention-based meditation is better at training our attention, while compassion meditation seems better at increasing compassion and prosocial behavior. In terms of other benefits, there is evidence that mindfulness meditation (non-judgmental attention to present-moment experiences) can reduce our tendency to avoid painful and unwelcome information.

However, like everything else, meditation can also have downsides. For example, while meditation generally seems to reduce anxiety and depression, some people report experiencing episodes of anxiety and depression as a result of meditation. Thus, just as certain physical exercises may be unhealthy for our particular bodies, some meditation practices may likewise be unsuitable for our particular minds.

When it comes to duration, research suggests that a little meditation may go a long way. For instance, a study among people with limited mindfulness experience found that 5 minutes of mindfulness meditation twice a week for two weeks seemed more beneficial than 20-minute sessions on the same schedule. Both durations reduced measures of depression, anxiety, and stress compared to controls, yet the 5-minute group saw an even greater reduction in stress, and their depression and anxiety levels seemed marginally lower as well.

While this is just a single study, these findings are consistent with other studies suggesting that brief sessions can yield meaningful benefits and that longer sessions are not necessarily better, perhaps especially for beginners and people with busy lives.

There is limited evidence as to which type of meditation best improves wellbeing. That said, a study among undergraduates found that 5 minutes of self-compassion meditation twice a week for ten weeks led to greater improvements in wellbeing than did a similar amount of focused attention meditation.

10.8 Replacing Bad Habits

It is generally more effective to focus on replacing bad habits rather than avoiding them. In other words, when seeking to build better habits, goals that involve “doing more” appear easier to follow than goals that involve “doing less”.

A practical upshot of this insight is to identify specific replacement habits we can pursue in place of our bad habits. For example, rather than focusing on the goal of avoiding unhealthy foods, we may focus on the positive goal of eating healthy foods. Or rather than focusing on the goal of avoiding late bedtimes, we can focus on the positive goal of winding down with a book by 10 pm. This positive approach to habit change may take some practice, but it does seem more effective.

In concrete terms, it might be worth doing the following three-part exercise with pen and paper, trying to clarify: (1) What is your worst habit? (2) Which replacement habit could effectively substitute for that habit? (3) When, where, and how can you pursue that replacement habit?

10.9 Key Virtues and Habits as a Solid Foundation

Just as we can be quite confident about relying on key virtues, we can likewise be confident about relying on healthy habits and lifestyle practices such as proper sleep, diet, and exercise. That is, maintaining a healthy lifestyle generally supports our ability to achieve our goals. So if we are deeply unsure about other things, it may be helpful to at least hold on to this: to practice the basics of healthy living, along with the key virtues explored in the previous chapter.

11 Healthy Social Life and Relationships

Social connections can be a key source of safety and support. At the same time, they can also be a major source of challenges and even misery, and having a strong compassionate purpose may introduce a unique set of social challenges.

In this chapter, I will review some findings on the value of social connections, along with some general strategies for improving our relationships. Following these general points, I will explore some of the key challenges — and opportunities — of reconciling healthy relationships with a strong commitment to reducing suffering.

11.1 Social Connection Protects Health and Wellbeing

Many studies find that social connection and social support are key predictors of health and wellbeing. This association extends to longevity: social support is linked to lower all-cause mortality, plausibly in part due to its beneficial effects on cardiovascular and immune function.

Not surprisingly, the quality of our social relationships matters. Poor relationship quality is associated with various negative effects, including greater stress and worse health outcomes, whereas good relationship quality, including in friendships, is associated with increased wellbeing. In other words, social relationships are not automatically beneficial. We want to invest in relationships with people who respect and support us and whose presence genuinely enhances our wellbeing.

The constructive influence of good relationships can also ripple outward to benefit other beings more broadly. For example, a multi-method study found that receiving social support predicted a greater sense of security — a sense of being safe and cared for — which in turn predicted greater prosocial behavior. Indeed, prior social support was linked to prosocial behavior even a decade later.

In short, having a good social life and social support is not frivolous. If we neglect good social relationships, whether in terms of finding or maintaining them, we may be doing a disservice to ourselves, our social circle, and our broader aims.

11.2 General Suggestions for Better Relationships

While the specifics will vary from person to person, the following suggestions may serve as a practical foundation for building and sustaining healthier connections.

11.2.1 Prioritizing Relationships

A basic but important step is to make healthy relationships a real priority. After all, people close to us will generally feel more supported and appreciated when we make them a genuine priority and show it sincerely. Likewise, we may enjoy our relationships more if we allow ourselves to prioritize them and be fully present in them — as opposed to always feeling like we should be doing something else, such as doing direct work to reduce suffering.

Given our social nature and the importance of social connection, the notion that there is little room for enjoying and being fully present in our social relationships is highly dubious, even from a purely impact-focused perspective.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that we all need to have a highly active social life that involves a large social circle. Prioritizing good relationships is also compatible with having a small social circle and enjoying considerable alone time, if one prefers that.

11.2.2 Having Healthy Boundaries and Being Considerate

Another suggestion is to maintain healthy boundaries while at the same time being considerate toward others. These twin virtues can seem at odds, and hence we might at some level feel like we need to choose only one of them. Yet it is in fact possible to both have firm boundaries and be highly considerate.

Having healthy boundaries means respecting our own needs and being willing to say no. Meanwhile, being considerate involves being polite and thoughtful with regard to the needs and preferences of others. Put differently, having healthy boundaries means respecting ourselves, while being considerate means respecting others. Thus, to think that we cannot both have healthy boundaries and be highly considerate is akin to thinking that we cannot be respectful toward two different people at the same time.

Sure, there can be occasional conflicts between these two ideals, and there is no doubt a place for asserting our boundaries without apology. Yet maintaining our boundaries and being considerate can also be complementary. For example, when engaging with people who want to respect our needs and boundaries, we can often be more considerate by clearly and kindly communicating our needs and limits.

How can we cultivate healthy boundaries for ourselves and become more considerate toward others? Perhaps a first step is to recognize that these virtues are worth prioritizing in our daily lives. For example, it may be helpful to affirm to ourselves that it is okay and right to stand up for ourselves. Likewise, we may affirm that it is okay and desirable to be highly considerate toward others.

After all, being highly considerate can sometimes make us stand out, and we might at some level be afraid to appear weak or like a pushover if we are unusually considerate. Yet just as we can exercise the courage to be compassionate in the face of social pressure, we can also exercise the courage to be considerate, which is really a display of strength rather than weakness. Indeed, both when it comes to asserting our boundaries and being considerate, courage may be a useful virtue to keep in mind: to see that a given action is worthwhile, and to then pursue it even if it is uncomfortable.

Another helpful suggestion, particularly for those of us who struggle with boundaries when others make demands on us, is to give ourselves the space to ask: What do I really feel about this? What do I really need or want in this situation? For some of us, the main challenge in strengthening our boundaries is simply to create space for such questions before we rush to take action.

11.2.3 Practicing Compassion in Our Relationships

In line with a broader compassionate purpose, it is also worth practicing compassion in our relationships. Beyond feeling care and concern for those close to us, this means being responsive to their needs, meeting them with patience and understanding, and making a sincere effort to ease their burdens.

Indeed, research finds various benefits of a compassionate approach to relationships. For example, compassionate goals toward those close to us predict greater perceived closeness, trust, and attachment security over time. Thus, compassionate relationship goals may also help those with insecure attachment to gradually build healthier and more secure relationships.

Granted, it can seem trivial to say that compassion is key in our relationships. Yet when things get difficult, or when we get complacent in our daily lives, compassion and understanding for those close to us can too often fade into the background, despite our best intentions. Hence the need to actively practice compassion in our relationships rather than assuming it will always come effortlessly. Our compassion is incomplete if it does not also permeate our relationships, even in times of difficulty.

11.3 Suggestions for Better Communication

The quality of our communication can make or break our relationships. Below are three relatively simple suggestions to improve it. Of course, none of us can practice the following communication skills to perfection, but even quite modest improvements might still make a meaningful difference in our relationships.

11.3.1 Active Listening

When we think about communication, we tend to think about what we should ideally say. Yet one of the most important parts of communication does not involve us doing most of the talking.

Active listening means listening attentively to understand rather than to respond. It involves being present and undistracted when others communicate with us, as well as showing that we are genuinely listening, such as by nodding, smiling, and giving verbal affirmations like “mm-hmm” or “yeah” (without overdoing it, of course). It also involves occasionally reflecting back our understanding of what the other person has said.

What are the benefits of active listening? For one, it helps us to actually understand what the other person is saying. We are often quick to assume that we understand, yet other people's views and situations are usually more complicated than we assume. Thus, active listening can help correct our premature and often overconfident assumptions.

Furthermore, studies suggest that people who are met with active listening feel more understood in their communication and find it psychologically rewarding. Similarly, when explaining personal stress to a romantic partner, being met with active listening is linked to better coping behaviors and greater relationship satisfaction.

There are many suggestions for becoming better at active listening. First, and perhaps most important, we can make an effort to avoid the main obstacles to active listening, such as interrupting others or being distracted by a screen. Beyond that, it may be helpful to sometimes hold back when we feel the urge to respond, so as to give the other person proper space to express themselves and get to their main point. Indeed, we may find that it can be satisfying and enriching to get deeply curious about the other person's situation and outlook without being derailed by our own internal commentary.

Another suggestion is to practice the body language of active listening: to make appropriate eye contact and to show sincere engagement and warmth. Finally, we can ask clarifying and thoughtful questions that help us better understand and connect with the other person.

11.3.2 Emotional Validation and Concrete Requests

Emotional validation involves acknowledging a person's feelings and experiences. For example, we might validate someone's feelings with expressions like “I can totally understand that you're feeling that way” or “it makes a lot of sense that you are experiencing this”.

To be clear, healthy validation does not involve pretending to agree or condoning bad behavior. To honestly acknowledge that we understand how someone feels is not the same as agreeing with their beliefs or approving of their behavior. We can strongly disapprove of someone's behavior while at the same time validating their feelings and needs. After all, feelings and needs may be perfectly legitimate even if the actions taken to address them are not.

Emotional validation is important because it makes people feel seen and heard. It can thus effectively make us more supportive of others and make communication feel safer and more connected. Furthermore, emotional validation may enable us to defuse conflicts, or at least allow us to manage them better. Studies suggest that emotional validation can reduce negative affect in the person who receives it, whereas invalidating responses often increase negative affect and physiological stress.

Another helpful suggestion when others need our support and validation is to avoid shifting the conversation too quickly toward ourselves. This is sometimes referred to as a “shift response”: someone shares their problem, we notice a parallel to a problem from our own lives, and we then start talking about that.

While there surely is a place for sharing our own problems and experiences, shifting the conversation toward ourselves when someone else has just shared a problem can leave the other person feeling less heard and less supported, even when we mean well. We will likely be more helpful to the other person if we keep the focus on them until they feel genuinely understood.

Finally, when we would like the other person to make a change, rather than criticizing or invalidating anyone's needs, we can seek to turn our concerns into clear and constructive requests. Instead of saying “you never listen to me”, we might say: “When I talk about work, I would really appreciate it if you could put your phone away for a few minutes and just listen.” Such specific requests give others something clear to respond to and make it easier to find a workable path forward.

11.3.3 Sharing Positive Feedback and Appreciation

Sharing positive feedback and appreciation has many benefits. For example, positive performance feedback has been found to increase the recipient's sense of self-efficacy. Similarly, expressing appreciation for others appears to increase the perceived strength, closeness, and quality of our relationships, with such effects being found both in the expressers and the receivers of appreciation.

Moreover, studies suggest that we greatly underestimate the degree to which other people value receiving positive feedback and appreciation. As a result, we are likely much less inclined to share positive feedback and appreciation than would be optimal. Holding back from sharing such feedback is akin to leaving a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk that we could simply pick up and give to someone. We can close this gap by making a deliberate effort to share genuine positive feedback and appreciation.

11.4 Social Challenges in Reducing Suffering

Having explored some general suggestions for improving our relationships, this section will focus on some of the social challenges that tend to arise when reducing suffering is a core purpose in our lives.

11.4.1 Common Challenges

A common challenge is to feel socially isolated and not fully understood. For example, when it comes to our values, we may feel like we are not on the same page as the people around us, both in society at large and in some cases in our close relationships.

Even if those around us do understand our values and outlooks, we might still have markedly different priorities from theirs. This is, of course, a normal part of life, but it can nevertheless be challenging to continually make tradeoffs and compromises on issues that matter deeply to us. For example, in our closest relationships, we might have different perspectives on how to best spend time and resources, and it can be painful to feel like we are often making tradeoffs between being there for the people we love and trying to reduce extreme suffering.

Beyond these practical tradeoffs, while it can be somewhat taboo to acknowledge, we might feel disappointed that those around us do not seem to care more about suffering or do more to reduce it. For instance, we might feel disappointed and demotivated by what we perceive as moral passivity or even indifference in other people, especially when we feel like those people are in a position to know and do better.

Consider Elena, who sits with her childhood friends around a dinner table on a Friday evening. They are all laughing about the annual vacation they are planning together. Elena laughs along, but she also feels a distance. She cannot help thinking about what the trip would cost and what her time and money could do elsewhere. She wonders whether she can justify the trip. But she holds back from sharing: she expects it would only lead to awkward silence, and she has no desire to ruin the atmosphere for little gain.

Her unspoken qualms feel isolating. On the drive home, she feels a heaviness on her shoulders, and finds herself wondering, “Do they not see it? Do they not care?”

11.4.2 Validating Our Social Difficulties

Before we explore ways to address these challenges, it is worth acknowledging that they can be quite significant. It is one thing to confront suffering and try to reduce it, but it is another to pursue this endeavor while feeling largely alone and without support.

For social creatures like us, it can hurt to feel isolated and like we are not fully understood by those closest to us. Similarly, it can cause a lot of distress when we face tradeoffs between our values and our relationships, as well as when we feel disappointed about other people not displaying more care and action.

Some of us might be so habituated to these challenges that we suppress and deny them. If so, it is worth asking whether we have allowed ourselves to admit how difficult and unpleasant these social challenges can be. The purpose of such self-honesty is not to paint ourselves as overly fragile or to make these problems greater than they are, but rather to stop being in denial about them so that we can address them more productively going forward.

At the same time, it is worth considering that, for at least some of these challenges, there may not be any truly satisfying solutions. While we might implicitly assume that a satisfying solution to a given social problem must exist, the reality is that this assumption could well prove unrealistic. Life does not guarantee any satisfying solutions.

So the following might both be true: we may be able to address the social challenges in reducing suffering better than we currently do, and it may be worth managing our expectations about how satisfying even the best solutions could ultimately be, at least for certain problems.

In a more general vein, it is worth recognizing that challenges arise in all close relationships. We all face some measure of social problems, and we all sometimes fail to communicate as well as we would like. In short, none of us have it all together, and we are all stuck together in a crazy world. So it is to be expected that relationships will at times be difficult, especially when we add the further challenge of trying to make a compassionate impact.

11.5 Managing Social Challenges in Reducing Suffering

How can we better manage social challenges like these? As noted above, one step is to let go of the expectation that relationships should be easy. Close relationships usually require serious effort to function well, and to assume otherwise is a recipe for repeated disappointments.

In particular, if we want to have close relationships with other people who support us and our mission to reduce suffering, we need to be willing to put in the work of also supporting them and their goals, even when those goals may not be perfectly aligned with our own. That is what it means to have a supportive relationship.

This is not to say that we should sacrifice our values for the sake of maintaining our relationships. The point is simply that we need to be aware of the pitfalls of adopting an overly rigid and morally calculating approach to our social lives. For example, if our partner is in need of support and we start engaging in complex moral calculations rather than being fully present and supportive, then we are hardly taking the optimal approach to social life. Such a hyper-deliberative attitude toward relationships is not the best path to a healthy life that sustains a compassionate purpose.

Another helpful suggestion is to adopt a pragmatic approach in our social lives. Many of us can be quite idealistic in our moral standards and expectations about how other people should behave. And while idealism does have an important place, it is also important to be guided by ideals that are workable in the real world.

A key example of such pragmatic idealism is the willingness to make mutually beneficial compromises in our social relations. Rather than rigidly insisting on a perfect “100 percent solution” or nothing, we may often do better by seeking “70 percent solutions” that are mutually acceptable and still move us in the right direction.

It is also helpful to acknowledge that different social relationships can serve different legitimate roles, and that it is unrealistic to expect that all — or even any — of our social relationships can embody the highest moral ideals. After all, no individual or relationship is morally perfect (or anything close), and so it makes sense to adjust our social expectations accordingly: to be willing to accept and maintain relationships that are less than morally perfect, as long as they are supportive and healthy for all involved.

Furthermore, if we feel a large gap between other people's values and our own, we may find a sense of common ground by focusing on basic values that we do share. For example, we may share basic interpersonal values of honesty and trustworthiness, along with broader societal values like individual freedom and the protection of children. Such common ground is meaningful and worth keeping in mind.

Beyond shared values, it is worth appreciating the people in our lives for their own unique qualities and contributions. For instance, perhaps they are exceptionally kind and generous toward those who are closest to them, perhaps they make those around them laugh and feel energized, and perhaps they add healthy diversity and nuance to other people's outlooks, including our own. Having such qualities in our relationships might ultimately be more important than having strictly aligned values. And, of course, it is important to value and appreciate the individuals in our lives as ends in themselves — as individuals who matter in their own right, regardless of what they may contribute to the world around them.

Finally, we can try to talk about the social challenges in reducing suffering with those close to us who are willing to listen. For example, we can try to express some of the ways in which we might feel isolated and alone, or explain how it can be difficult to make tradeoffs in everyday life. We may assume that these struggles are obvious from the outside, yet they are often less obvious than we imagine.

To return to Elena: the next day, she remembers how much she genuinely values her friends and how much she and her friends do have in common. She calls her closest friend from the group and, without blame, shares some of what she felt the evening before. Her friend listens. They agree that there is no pressure for Elena to join the trip, and that if she does join, it will be okay for her to keep her expenses low. It is not a perfect resolution, but it is workable, and she feels more understood.

11.6 Upsides and Opportunities

When we are highly dedicated to a purpose like reducing suffering, we might sometimes fall into a lopsided view from which we mostly see relationships as posing challenges and obstacles to that purpose. Yet this ignores the many ways in which relationships also provide support and opportunities.

For example, while our relationships may involve real challenges, they can also be a refuge in which we find comfort and relief from the burdens of facing up to suffering. The time we spend with those close to us can be a safe haven where we allow ourselves to simply enjoy social presence and connection. This can dampen our stress response and thereby have a relaxing effect on our minds and bodies, a phenomenon known as social buffering.

Similarly, even if the people in our lives do not fully share our values and aims, there may still be a solid foundation of mutual support and connection. Our relationships can help satisfy not just our need to be supported, but also our need to be supportive and affectionate toward others. By meeting these core human needs, our social lives can bolster our resilience and our commitment to reducing suffering.

Conversely, a strong commitment to reducing suffering can also enrich our social lives. For example, it can add further depth to our existing relationships, such as by giving us a chance to connect and unite around something deeply significant that might make our collective struggles profoundly worthwhile.

Beyond deepening existing bonds, a strong commitment to reducing suffering can open doors to new connections. It is an opportunity to meet thoughtful and sympathetic people with whom we can find mutual support and collaborate toward a better world.

In short, it is true that our relationships and our dedication to reducing suffering both come with significant challenges, and sometimes these challenges compound each other. Yet they also come with significant upsides and opportunities, and these are worth making use of.

Reducing suffering is not just a personal endeavor but also a social one. If we are to find a path toward a better world, we have to find it together. And we have to find it here, in our actual, often messy circumstances, not in some idealized world. We have to find it with pragmatic idealism: with imperfect everyday compromises that gradually move us in a better direction. While we can never create perfect relationships or perfect moral outcomes, we can still cultivate relationships that sustain both our wellbeing and our compassionate purpose.

12 Healthy Self-Transcendence

Many religious and spiritual traditions regard self-transcendence as a core aim, and some even regard it as the highest aim we can pursue. There are various ways to understand self-transcendence, yet in broad terms, it tends to involve going beyond oneself in some sense. For example, it may involve reducing habitual self-centeredness and opening ourselves up to a stronger focus on helping others.

My goal in this chapter is to explore some of the benefits and pitfalls of self-transcendence as it relates to compassionate purpose. I will argue that healthy self-transcendence is a middle way that involves the capacity to step back and observe mental events without identifying with them, as well as the development of a compassionate self-identity. Finally, I will outline some suggestions for how we can cultivate these qualities.

12.1 Two Kinds of Self-Transcendence

At a broad level, we can distinguish two kinds of self-transcendence:

- Inner self-transcendence: Psychological shifts in one's sense of self that may involve ego dissolution, reduced attachment to self, or insights into one's mind and identity.

- Outer self-transcendence: Dedicating oneself to a larger purpose beyond oneself, such as reducing suffering.

The term “self-transcendence” is commonly used in both of these senses, yet they are obviously quite different: one can have a strong sense of ego dissolution without necessarily pursuing a larger purpose. Conversely, one can be dedicated to a larger purpose without having much of a shift in one's sense of self.

This whole book is essentially about outer self-transcendence aimed at the larger purpose of reducing suffering for all sentient beings. In this chapter, I will focus on inner self-transcendence to explore how it relates to that larger purpose.

12.2 The Benefits of Inner Self-Transcendence

The following are some plausible benefits of inner self-transcendence for reducing suffering. (From this point forward, I will simply refer to inner self-transcendence as “self-transcendence”.)

12.2.1 Helping Us Suffer Less

Research suggests that a strong self-focus can negatively affect our wellbeing. For example, a strong self-focus appears to play a significant role in social anxiety, in the form of self-conscious feelings and interpretations that reinforce the anxiety. Similarly, our sense of self plays a critical role in feelings of shame, which are essentially feelings of negative self-evaluation.

There is also research on degrees of self-attachment. For example, researchers have developed a “Nonattachment to Self Scale”, which measures the absence of self-fixation and a capacity to flexibly interact with self-related concepts without trying to control them. Non-attachment to self is associated with lower levels of stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as with greater autonomy, self-acceptance, purpose in life, and better relationships.

A related construct is psychological decentering, which involves observing thoughts, emotions, and sensations without identifying with them. Studies suggest that psychological decentering can reduce anxiety and depression while boosting resilience. Indeed, increased decentering is a key mechanism through which mindfulness meditation and related therapies reduce anxiety and depression. (Mindfulness is non-judgmental attention to present-moment experiences, and mindfulness practices have been found to increase decentering.)

By being less caught up in self-fixation and rumination, we can free up our attention to better focus on other things, such as finding a greater sense of peace, adopting a more expansive outlook, and actively improving our condition rather than just worrying about it.

12.2.2 Helping Us Become More Compassionate

Historically, a key aim of self-transcendence has been to increase compassion and ultimately reduce others' suffering. For example, the bodhisattva ideal in Mahayana Buddhism entails self-transcendence for the sake of developing greater compassion and ultimately liberating all beings from suffering. Similarly, in the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta, the ideal self-realized person is a Jivanmukta: someone who is without “sense of I-ness and mine-ness and without egoism”. It is believed that this ideal person “shares the pain and sufferings of others”, “runs to the rescue of the afflicted”, and is “benevolent, kind, compassionate, merciful and loving to all beings”.

Setting aside this historical context, there is emerging evidence that reduced self-fixation may indeed increase compassion and prosocial behavior. For example, psychological decentering has been associated with greater compassion and a greater willingness to help those in distress. This is consistent with studies finding that mindfulness interventions tend to modestly increase prosociality.

Likewise, general non-attachment — a construct closely related to decentering and non-attachment to self — is linked to greater compassion for others and lower self-oriented distress in response to others' suffering. Moreover, there is evidence that when we actively reduce our self-focus and increase our focus on the mental states of others, we become more compassionate and act in more prosocial ways toward them.

One way in which reduced self-fixation might boost compassion and helping behavior is via the “freeing up” effect mentioned above: by reducing our fixation on ourselves and our narrow self-interest, we create more space for other outlooks and priorities, such as compassion and the endeavor of helping others. In this way, a strong self-fixation may act as an internal block to compassion that crowds out the more caring and altruistic parts of us.

Another plausible mechanism, as hinted above, is reduced self-oriented distress in response to others' suffering. For example, a strong self-fixation in the face of others' suffering may lead to self-shaming thoughts like “I'm a bad person for not doing more”, or it may cause us to dwell on and amplify our own empathic distress. Thus, by reducing our self-fixation and self-oriented distress in response to others' suffering, we may become more willing to face that suffering and more focused on actually reducing it.

This highlights a key connection between the two broad benefits of self-transcendence discussed so far: helping us suffer less and helping us become more compassionate. If we can greatly reduce our own suffering through decentering and non-attachment to self, this can serve as a strong foundation when we turn toward the suffering of the world: to face this unspeakable suffering with some measure of equanimity and resourcefulness, and to take effective action without excessive distress.

Lastly, a key connection between self-transcendence and helping others is that a deeply self-transcendent outlook arguably entails that caring for other beings is equivalent to caring for our future self. From a self-transcendent perspective, there is no deep reason to regard the suffering of other beings as less important than our own, and so if we accept that our own suffering is worth preventing, the same applies to the suffering of other beings. Thus, from this perspective, dedicating ourselves to helping all beings becomes quite obvious.

12.2.3 Helping Us Become Less Attached to Our Views

Self-transcendence practices can also help us be more humble and less attached to our views. For instance, research has found that taking a more self-distanced, third-person perspective on a problem enables people to better recognize the limits of their knowledge and to consider other people's perspectives. Adopting a self-distanced perspective has also been found to reduce anger and aggressive behavior in the face of perceived provocations. More broadly, techniques and experiences that help us decenter our sense of self appear to increase intellectual humility.

If we adopt a less identified stance toward our views, challenges to these views will be less of a threat to our sense of self and identity — the challenges will just be about the views themselves. As a result, we may feel less of a need to deny or oppose these challenges, and instead approach them with curiosity rather than defensiveness. We can then better focus on what is true about the world and how we can best reduce suffering.

12.3 Critiques and Pitfalls of Self-Transcendence

Having explored various benefits, it is also worth exploring some of the critiques and pitfalls of self-transcendence. I consider this worthwhile for a few reasons.

First, it seems to me that the following critiques and pitfalls are too rarely discussed, especially from a perspective that also recognizes the benefits of self-transcendence.

Second, self-transcendence has played a central role in many historical traditions, and it has therefore accumulated a lot of baggage. This includes wishful and superstitious beliefs that have grown up around self-transcendence and eventually become entrenched dogma. I think it is valuable to critique that accumulated baggage.

Third, the idealization of self-transcendence is not limited to ancient traditions. It is alive and well today, including in many secular communities, which is yet another reason to subject it to thoughtful critique.

Finally, if we are to fully realize the benefits of self-transcendence, we need to be aware of and avoid its many pitfalls.

12.3.1 Overstating the Benefits

A common pitfall is vastly overstating the benefits of self-transcendence. For example, one idea is that self-transcendence is sufficient for realizing moral excellence or even moral perfection. That is, if we attain self-transcendence, ideal moral qualities and actions will naturally follow. Similarly, there is the claim that pursuing and promoting self-transcendence is the single best thing we can do to serve the world and to prevent future suffering.

Yet these are extremely strong and dubious claims. First, given the vast number of possible endeavors we could pursue to reduce suffering, it is a priori unlikely that promoting self-transcendence is the single best one. There are many plausible contenders for the best thing we can do, and hence the bar for claiming this title is exceedingly high.

Second, as an anecdotal observation, it seems that the people who most strongly pursue and promote inner self-transcendence are often not particularly committed to reducing suffering. Conversely, in my experience, those who are most committed to reducing suffering tend not to place a central emphasis on inner self-transcendence (even if it might play some role in their outlook). Instead, they mostly seem to focus directly on reducing suffering, often motivated by a keen sense of the severity of others' suffering.

To be sure, these anecdotal observations do not suggest that self-transcendence has no benefits for compassionate motivation. Yet they do cast some doubt on the notion that self-transcendence — at least as understood and promoted in many circles today — is in itself a particularly strong catalyst for compassionate action.

While self-transcendence in the form of decentering and non-attachment to self can be a powerful tool for removing major hurdles to compassionate engagement, it does not automatically fill the resulting space with something better. It is at best a helpful step that still needs to be complemented by continual growth along other dimensions, such as compassion, knowledge, integrity, and so on.

12.3.2 Pitfalls of Passivity

Another pitfall of some forms of self-transcendence is to become overly passive in the face of suffering and to stop engaging with the world. In particular, if we step back into total decentering and non-attachment, we might find a sense of peace and completeness in which there is no salient desire or problem. Such a state may, of course, be an enormous relief for us individually, and perhaps it is even healthy for us to rest in such a state quite often. Yet there is also a risk that we lose touch with the suffering that still exists out there in the world, including the suffering that is within our power to prevent.

There is tentative evidence for such effects. For example, while mindfulness tends to have modestly beneficial effects on prosociality, some studies indicate that it might also reduce people's intentions to make up for and change harmful behavior. Likewise, another study found that mindfulness meditation reduced motivation to complete mundane tasks.

These findings hint at a broader point: we do not necessarily want to change all of the reflexive machinery of our minds. It is not all just mindless chatter and noise. Our natural mental activity also includes many functional and healthy reactions, and hence trying to radically alter or silence our minds can come with serious downsides.

In particular, if we empty ourselves of all striving and desire, we will also remove our desire to reduce suffering. Yet that is not desirable. Ideally, we want to reduce our excessively self-centered drives and distortions while increasing our compassionate drives and engagement.

The same applies to related concepts like effort and attachment: it is helpful to reduce those efforts and attachments that center around petty concerns while deepening those that are directed toward helping all sentient beings. We do not want to be altogether detached from suffering. On the contrary, we want to be in touch with its reality and deeply committed to its alleviation, both in ourselves and in others.

12.3.3 Pitfalls of Anti-Intellectualism

The idea of quieting conceptual thought and intellectual activity is common among proponents of self-transcendence. This idea no doubt has some merit, as there is clearly such a thing as excessive and unproductive thinking. Yet the idea becomes dangerous when it veers into anti-intellectualism: the notion that we should cease all intellectual engagement, or even just the weaker notion that conceptual thought and intellectual activity have no significant value.

A key example of the importance of conceptual thought is ethical reasoning. To have sensible views on ethics requires reflection and critical thinking that draws on a rich conceptual toolkit. For instance, we cannot apply principles of impartiality and make careful assessments of our priorities without conceptual thought.

This is not to say that reasoned thought is by any means sufficient for ethical wisdom, but it does seem necessary. The neglect of ethical reasoning is perhaps the most harmful feature of anti-intellectualism.

Furthermore, abandoning conceptual thought may even be counterproductive for self-transcendence itself. For example, concepts may often be useful for developing skills and traits that reduce self-absorbed and narcissistic tendencies.

One such trait is what is known as “trait Kantianism”, which among other things involves a strong unwillingness to manipulate others along with a preference for honesty over charm. Boosting this trait might help reduce narcissistic tendencies as much as — or perhaps even more than — any meditative practice. And to cultivate that trait, it likely helps to have a good conceptual understanding of the development we are aiming for.

12.3.4 Pitfalls of Self-Negation and Self-Blame

The pursuit of self-transcendence can also lead to self-negation. After all, if there is no real self here, one might assume that there are no real needs or struggles either. In this way, pursuits of self-transcendence can effectively undermine self-compassion, as we may push ourselves to ignore our own needs and struggles, and even become dishonest with ourselves about what we are actually experiencing.

More than that, we may fall into patterns of self-blame in which our pains and struggles are taken as a sign that we “should” be doing better and that it is our own fault if we fail to transcend it all. Believing that we should be more self-transcendent can thus ironically reinforce a shameful sense of self.

Another form of self-negation is “spiritual bypassing”: the use of spiritual ideas and practices to evade unresolved emotional issues. This can prevent us from understanding our own emotions and growing through our difficulties. For example, if we feel sad about a given issue, one approach is to try to avoid the issue by transcending it, but another approach is to seek to better understand it and to gradually improve our beliefs and behaviors around it. To be sure, the transcendent approach can sometimes be helpful, but other times it is merely an avoidance strategy that keeps us from addressing our underlying needs.

12.4 A Healthy Sense of Self

The idea that it is helpful to permanently get rid of our sense of self does not seem well-supported. On the contrary, a diverse body of research suggests that we will do best by developing a clear, stable, and compassionate sense of self.

12.4.1 The Benefits of a Clear Sense of Self

Some of the evidence concerning the benefits of having a clear sense of self comes from research on what is called the “Quiet Ego Scale” (Q.E.S). Importantly, the Q.E.S is not a measure of no-self or an absence of self-identity, but rather a measure of compassionate self-identity. In particular, the scale covers a capacity for detached awareness and non-defensiveness, yet it also captures a sense of inclusive identity and skills in perspective-taking.

Scoring high on the Q.E.S is associated with increased agency, resilience, wellbeing, and prosocial goals and attitudes. As the authors of one study wrote: “Q.E.S measures an identity that strikes a balance between a strong sense of agency (but not egoism) and a strong concern for the welfare of others.”

The literature on the Quiet Ego Scale suggests that we do better by having a strong and non-defensive sense of self that is centered on agency and compassion, not by having no sense of self whatsoever.

Research on moral identity supports this view: having a strong sense of moral identity increases our willingness to engage in ethical and prosocial behavior, as well as to avoid antisocial behavior. Furthermore, a strong moral identity is associated with greater levels of wellbeing and a greater sense of purpose and meaning in life.

There is also a large literature on “self-concept clarity”: the extent to which self-beliefs are clearly defined, internally consistent, and stable. People with greater self-concept clarity tend to score higher on measures of resilience, self-control, wellbeing, and relationship functioning. On the other hand, low self-concept clarity is associated with proneness to immoral behavior such as dishonesty, as well as with stress, anxiety, and depression. Indeed, research suggests that one of the mechanisms through which self-compassion reduces stress and depression is by increasing self-concept clarity.

Similarly, on a measure known as the “Sense of Self Scale”, having a weak sense of self is closely linked to narcissistic vulnerability and antagonism, while having a clear sense of self is associated with greater emotional stability and conscientiousness.

All in all, these findings point to the value of having a clear sense of self and identity, particularly a compassionate and moral identity. With such grounding, we generally do better in terms of both our personal wellbeing and our motivation to help others. Rather than seeking to eliminate our sense of self, what we are aiming for is really a deeper self-connection: an awareness of, acceptance of, and alignment with who we are and what we care about.

12.4.2 Healthy Self-Transcendence with a Clear Sense of Self

The findings reviewed in this chapter can appear to be in tension. On the one hand, it seems beneficial to cultivate self-transcendence through non-attachment to self and psychological decentering — the capacity to step back and observe mental events without identifying with them. On the other hand, it seems beneficial to cultivate a clear sense of compassionate and moral self-identity. Yet while these qualities can seem like opposites, there are reasons to think that they are in fact complementary.

For example, an enhanced ability to step back and observe may enable us to become more aware of our own mental processes, and in turn give us more space to reflect on what we stand for. Indeed, research has found that decentering is associated with greater levels of curious self-reflection. Likewise, a disposition to observe mental events without judgment is linked to greater self-concept clarity.

Conversely, having a strong moral identity and high self-concept clarity may support decentering by alleviating the insecurity that makes us vigilant and defensive about the self. In other words, it may provide a solid foundation of self-identity that operates securely in the background, thereby easing the tendency to get caught up in self-fixation and continually bring self-worries to the foreground.

Psychological studies also lend some support to this hypothesis. For example, low self-concept clarity is linked to self-focused rumination and negative appearance comparisons, suggesting that we might reduce self-fixation and insecurity by increasing our self-concept clarity.

Overall, we have reason to cultivate the best of both worlds: being able to step back and observe our experiences without over-identifying with them while also having a clear self-concept that includes a strong sense of compassionate and moral identity.

12.5 How to Develop Healthy Self-Transcendence

Having gained some clarity as to what healthy self-transcendence plausibly entails, we can proceed to explore how to develop it.

12.5.1 How to Increase Decentering and Non-Attachment to Self

One way to increase psychological decentering is through meditation. Specifically, studies suggest that we can cultivate decentering through focused attention meditation (e.g. focusing specifically on one's breath) and open monitoring meditation (openly observing thoughts, emotions, and sensations as a neutral observer).

There are also cognitive ways to foster a more decentered perspective. For example, we can see unpleasant experiences as learning opportunities — which involves creating some distance from those experiences — and view our personal problems from an external perspective, as if they were someone else's problems.

In general, it can be helpful to create a greater sense of distance and detachment from thoughts, such as by adopting an observing and non-reactive stance toward the mind, seeing thoughts as passing events rather than as facts.

Another strategy is to increase self-acceptance. Empirical studies have found that decentering can be broken into two distinct aspects: distanced perspective and accepting self-perception. Of these two, accepting self-perception somewhat better predicts the absence of depressive symptoms. Similarly, research on the Nonattachment to Self Scale has found that the component of psychological wellbeing that is most strongly linked to non-attachment to self is self-acceptance.

These findings suggest that self-acceptance is central to the connection between self-transcendence and wellbeing, both when self-transcendence is understood as decentering and when it is understood as non-attachment to self. Effective ways to increase self-acceptance include mindfulness and self-compassion meditation.

12.5.2 How to Develop a Moral and Compassionate Identity

An effective way to develop our moral identity is to reflect on our values and how we embody specific moral traits, such as honesty, generosity, and fairness. Studies suggest that writing exercises that involve such self-reflection can strengthen our moral identity, ethical decision-making, and prosocial behavior.

Furthermore, research suggests that our actions shape our sense of identity, including our moral identity. Thus, a key way to build a stronger moral identity is to take consistent action in line with our values, thereby demonstrating and reinforcing to ourselves what kind of person we are.

Other effective strategies include finding moral role models and communities that can help us further build and strengthen our moral identity. Similarly, it is helpful to surround ourselves with cues that activate our moral identity, such as images that represent our moral concerns and ideals, or values statements at the top of our to-do list.

Similar points apply to building a greater sense of compassionate self-identity. That is, we can pursue consistent compassionate action and reflect on the value of compassion, why we endorse it, and how we embody it in our lives. Likewise, we can find individuals and communities that inspire us to build a more compassionate self-identity, such as the Buddhist monk Shantideva and groups dedicated to alleviating suffering.

Finally, we may reflect on the fact that we are one being among trillions of sentient beings, and that the impact we can have in terms of reducing suffering for other beings is inconceivably vast compared to the impact we can have in our own personal lives. This may help orient our sense of mission and identity toward more compassionate aims.

12.6 Conclusion

Self-transcendence in the form of decentering and non-attachment to self can have significant benefits for confronting suffering with strength and resilience. It can help us suffer less, become more compassionate, and hold our views with greater humility. Yet it also carries pitfalls if used unskillfully, including risks of passivity and self-negation.

Rather than eliminating our sense of self, the evidence points toward a middle way: cultivating the ability to observe mental events without self-fixation while also developing a clear and compassionate self-identity. These two capacities can support each other, and together they form a robust foundation for sustained compassionate action.

13 Facing Unpleasant Conclusions

One of the greatest bottlenecks to reducing suffering is our reluctance to face unpleasant conclusions. In this chapter, I will argue for the importance of overcoming this reluctance and explore various views and possibilities that, if correct, would have significant practical implications.

Throughout the chapter, I will use the term “unpleasant conclusions” to broadly cover not only established conclusions, but also unpleasant ideas, possibilities, considerations, and the like that could plausibly lead us to unpleasant conclusions. Some examples of unpleasant conclusions I will explore include the prevalence of extreme suffering, the risk of creating new forms of suffering, and the widespread flaws of human moral character.

13.1 Why Face Unpleasant Conclusions?

The main reason to face unpleasant conclusions is simply that our efforts risk being starkly suboptimal if we ignore them, like missing puzzle pieces that prevent us from seeing the bigger picture.

When searching for important insights, we may prefer to look only under the spotlight of neutral or comforting conclusions. Yet if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that it is unlikely that all crucial insights will be found under this comfortable light. Indeed, given our pervasive tendency to shy away from unpleasant conclusions, it seems likely that the most important and neglected conclusions are found precisely in the cold and uninviting darkness where we prefer not to look. This is likely where the richest reserves of golden insights are buried. Consequently, the ability and willingness to face unpleasant conclusions may be one of the most valuable virtues in our world today.

13.2 Why We Avoid Unpleasant Conclusions

Why do we tend to shy away from unpleasant conclusions? In general terms, the main reason is arguably that the costs feel too high: it does not seem worth the trouble to entertain such unwelcome ideas, and hence we see little incentive to do so.

These costs can take many different forms. For example, there might be significant emotional costs: giving serious thought to an unpleasant hypothesis might take a heavy toll on our wellbeing. More broadly, pondering unpleasant conclusions takes up mental energy that we may prefer to devote to other things.

Beyond individual mental costs, we also potentially face significant social costs. For instance, if we voice or endorse unpleasant conclusions, we may increase the risk that other people will avoid us as associates, friends, or mates, as well as undermine our chances of being hired or elected to certain positions. In addition, we may risk getting into costly disputes and conflicts over unpleasant and contentious issues.

Another reason why we avoid certain unpleasant conclusions is that being ignorant can make us seem less blameworthy and be less demanding. For example, if we drive past a person who is in need of emergency aid, other people will blame us much less for our inaction if we did not notice that person at all. Thus, if helping is deemed costly and if we are concerned with avoiding blame, this would give us an incentive to ignore and pretend not to notice the problem.

It is sadly common to maintain such motivated ignorance. For example, in controlled experiments, people often choose not to learn easily available information about how their actions negatively affect others, and this avoidance reliably reduces altruistic behavior. Likewise, members of elite or dominant demographics appear to willfully ignore unpleasant facts about the lives of marginalized groups.

This dynamic is perhaps most obvious when it comes to the lives and deaths of the non-human animals whom humanity exploits and kills for food. By maintaining willful ignorance about what these lives and deaths are like in any detail, we may hope to both avoid blame and avoid any costs associated with changing our individual habits.

Finally, we are not only inclined to avoid unpleasant conclusions and possibilities, but also to avoid empathy and compassion. Studies suggest that, when given the option, we often suppress empathy and compassion for the same reasons we avoid unpleasant conclusions, namely to avoid psychological, social, and material costs. In this way, our blind spots go far beyond mere propositional beliefs. They extend widely across our emotions and motivations, in turn shaping how much suffering we allow to persist.

13.3 How We Avoid Unpleasant Conclusions

A typical strategy we use to avoid unpleasant conclusions is to come up with rationalizations that superficially deflect the issue. For example, when considering whether a given behavior of ours might be harmful, our minds may throw up knee-jerk responses like “Everyone does this”, “We cannot make a difference anyway”, and “I have no option to do otherwise”.

Rationalizations like these can serve two related functions: socially, they can serve as an excuse in case other people accuse us of wrongdoing or undue neglect, while mentally, they can provide relief from the burden of engaging further with the issue at hand. This makes rationalizations quite valuable to us.

At the societal level, this self-protective value plausibly leads to a market for rationalizations in which we are incentivized to seek out apparent justifications for beliefs and practices that we prefer to maintain. For example, we can buy books and articles that downplay the harms of convenient consumption habits, which gives us apparent support for their continuation.

This point goes much deeper than just modern markets: since ancient times, established institutions and cultural doctrines have provided rationalizations that deflect unpleasant conclusions that could be destabilizing. Thus, when seeking to explore unpleasant conclusions, we are not just going against the tide. It is more like we are going against a full-on cultural avalanche of deeply entrenched rationalizations. And, importantly, these rationalizations will likely also be deeply internalized by our own minds as a result of having been raised in this environment.

Despite its ubiquity and influence, our tendency to rationalize is only part of the picture when it comes to our evasive strategies. Another strategy is to simply repress and ignore the unpleasant issues. This may well be the most common way to avoid unpleasant conclusions.

For example, there is evidence that the way we maintain our sense of being a moral person in the face of our own moral transgressions is less by rationalizing or misperceiving our transgressions, and more by simply looking away and not holding our own behavior up against moral standards in the first place.

Psychologists have studied aspects of our broader strategy of ignoring within various frameworks and under various names, including repression, denial, motivated forgetting, and information avoidance. Studies on information avoidance have found that we are inclined to avoid information across many important domains, and that we do so for diverse reasons such as regulating our emotions, avoiding having to take action, and protecting pre-existing beliefs.

This strategy of repression and avoidance is perhaps the most difficult one to guard against, especially since it hardly leaves any trace — only the silence of turning away. It is therefore worth keeping this strategy top of mind when we seek to uncover important considerations and conclusions: try to look for that which your less conscious mind reflexively seeks to hide.

Similar to our strategy of rationalizing, our strategy of ignoring does not just occur on an individual level. Our broader society and culture generally reinforce our individual tendency to ignore unpleasant issues and conclusions. Public discourse is conspicuously quiet about unpleasant conclusions, and the silence is often reinforced by negative attitudes and judgments toward those who dare to discuss them, let alone defend them.

In these ways, our resistance to unpleasant conclusions is deep and many-layered. We skillfully rationalize and ignore, both individually and collectively, often without conscious effort. As a result, it can require a heroic effort to get our minds to even consider an unpleasant conclusion from a place of genuine openness. This fact about our predicament is itself an unpleasant conclusion that can be difficult to fully appreciate and internalize.

13.4 Psychological Preparation

Before turning to specific unpleasant issues and conclusions, it is worth reviewing some psychological preparation to help us approach these issues in a constructive way.

13.4.1 Mental Health Preparation

This part of the book is not meant to be read in a vacuum. The earlier chapters partly serve as preparation for what follows in this chapter. For example, the tools summarized in Section 5.6 about handling adversity in healthy ways may be useful when exploring unpleasant issues. These include taking a self-compassion break, holding on to our deeper purpose, and seeing a silver lining in the struggles we are facing.

The same applies to tools explored in other chapters. For instance, recall that mindfulness meditation appears to reduce our tendency to avoid painful and unwelcome information. Likewise, we may draw on skills of psychological decentering and non-attachment: the ability to step back and observe without being over-identified or overwhelmed. We can also reaffirm a self-perception of being antifragile individuals who can withstand and indeed grow from difficulties and momentary unpleasantness. In these ways, the previous chapters provide a diverse toolbox for facing these difficult issues.

If reading this chapter starts to feel too challenging or overwhelming, it may be helpful to take a break and instead focus on some of the core mindsets or tools explored earlier. Section 13.5 might be the most difficult part of this book for many readers, and it is obviously fine to skip this section for now, or to read it in small chunks at a time. It is not necessarily meant to be read in one go, and it is certainly not meant to be read in a state of despair.

The issues explored in this chapter are challenging and unpleasant to consider, and it is helpful to keep that in mind when we approach them. That is, we may do well to validate the difficulty: “Yes, this really is a challenging issue; yes, this is deeply unpleasant to think about.” Such validation may already go a long way toward making us better prepared to engage with these difficult topics, and to meet ourselves with self-compassion in the process.

13.4.2 Intellectual Openness Preparation

In addition to preparing our mental health, it is helpful to prepare ourselves to approach these unpleasant issues with intellectual openness. After all, if we just breeze through these issues with robust mental health yet without genuine openness, there will be little point to our “exploration”.

A crucial virtue to emphasize in this context is epistemic humility: being aware that our current perspective is incomplete and that further reflection may greatly alter our views. Such humility also reminds us that our ability to comprehend certain truths about the world may be quite limited, and that hard work might be required if we are to gain more accurate or plausible views.

Relatedly, there is the self-awareness virtue of knowing what we deep down prefer to believe about a given topic. If we are aware that our preferences point strongly in a particular direction, this gives us a clue as to how we could be biased. For example, it may alert us to the kinds of rationalizations and ridicule our mind will reflexively come up with, and highlight the kinds of ideas and considerations it will try to ignore.

Thus, before engaging with a given unpleasant issue, it might be helpful to note — and perhaps even write down — which conclusion we deep down prefer to be true. This can help us stay alert to our own epistemic pitfalls, such as rejecting conclusions mainly because they seem inconvenient or discouraging.

I have noticed this in myself as well: I have often been reluctant to seriously entertain certain conclusions not because the evidence against them was decisive, but because I strongly preferred them not to be true. Simply noticing that preference has sometimes helped me see where I might be rationalizing or looking away.

More generally, it may be useful to notice any signs of defensiveness in how we relate to a given issue, and to lean into our curiosity instead. Indeed, the point here is not to come to a place of simply accepting the unpleasant views and possibilities explored below. Rather, the point is to consider these ideas with genuine openness, and to allow them to linger without adopting premature certainties in any direction.

Lastly, we should remind ourselves that uncomfortable conclusions might be true regardless of how they make us feel. Although it may seem otherwise to some parts of our minds, the fact that we are horrified by a given proposition is not evidence that it is incorrect or implausible.

13.5 Examples of Unpleasant Conclusions

The following are some examples of unpleasant issues and conclusions that seem worth reflecting on. I am not claiming that each of the views and ideas explored below is necessarily correct — some of them are more uncertain and debatable than others. Yet I submit that each of the views presented below might be both correct and critically important, and hence they are each worth reflecting on with courage and fair-minded openness.

To be clear, I do take many of the views and ideas explored below to be quite solid and even certain, such as when it comes to the prevalence of extreme suffering and humanity's moral shortcomings. But regardless of whether one agrees with my particular stance on a given issue, it still seems worth reflecting on these issues in their own right, and on the degree to which inconvenience and unpleasantness might influence our views on them.

The subsections below each contain multiple questions that are meant to prompt reflection. Simply reading through these questions in one go may be of limited value, as that is unlikely to leave room for genuine exploration. Thus, for those who want to reflect on these questions, it might be helpful to skim them initially and then return to them later, especially to the ones that seem most consequential or that provoke the most resistance.

13.5.1 The Felt Awfulness of Extreme Suffering

An issue that we usually shy away from is the one that lies at the heart of this book: extreme suffering. In fact, we shy away from it in many ways.

One way is by disengaging from how bad it feels to experience extreme suffering, such as the suffering experienced by victims of torture. Many of us rarely reflect on this side of reality, much less viscerally connect with it. Instead, we effectively live in a state of disconnection and denial.

Indeed, even those of us who have made a strong commitment to reducing extreme suffering often find ourselves cognitively cut off from it. To be sure, such disconnection and compartmentalization can be useful, yet it is worth asking just how disconnected it is optimal to be.

Even if we grant that it is best to altogether avoid empathic distress — a conclusion that may itself be suspiciously convenient — it still seems plausible that we will be more effective agents of change if we maintain a lasting compassionate connection with extreme suffering.

There are various questions that are worth reflecting on here:

- Do we appreciate how awful it can feel to be in a state of extreme suffering?

- Is it even possible for us to comprehend the awfulness of extreme suffering when we ourselves are in a comfortable state?

- As aspiring change-makers, might we do better if we were more consistently aware of the awfulness of extreme suffering?

13.5.2 The Prevalence of Extreme Suffering

Another aspect of extreme suffering that we may fail to appreciate is its sheer prevalence. Intuitively, we might feel that severe suffering is exceptionally rare — something that mostly happens in a few hotspots. Yet on closer inspection, we find that this is sadly not the case.

Every day, millions of people experience intense pain due to conditions such as cancer and kidney stones; some people undergo torture; numerous children suffer from severe violent abuse; and thousands of children suffer and die from malnutrition.

At any given time, more than 20 billion land vertebrates — mostly chickens — and around 200 billion fish suffer the extreme squalor of being crammed tightly together in factory farms. Every day, newborn male chicks are ground up alive; pigs scream and suffocate in gas chambers; overgrown chickens break their legs and collapse; calves are separated from their mothers; sows in crates chew on metal bars in chronic distress; farmed fish endure extreme crowding and wounds that never heal in water thick with disease.

On a typical day, more than 200 million chickens, 11 million ducks, and 4 million pigs suffer and die in slaughterhouses, while over 3 billion fish are killed by humans in horrific ways, such as by being frozen to death in an ice bath or by being left to asphyxiate, often for a full hour before they die. Put differently, in just three days humanity torments and kills more fish than the total human population.

As horrendous as these numbers are, the number of beings who experience severe suffering in nature is far greater still. There are more than a trillion vertebrates on Earth at any given time, and every day vast numbers of them undergo harms such as agonizing disease, starvation, or being eaten alive. And the number of invertebrates who succumb to similar harms, and who may experience suffering as a result, is at least thousands of times larger. (More on wild animals and invertebrates below.)

The scale of suffering is difficult to grasp. Our attempts to maintain a wider perspective tend to collapse, and our conception of ongoing suffering easily narrows to a handful of salient cases, such as those that happen to be covered by the news.

We are again left with some key questions to contemplate with an open mind:

- To what extent do we grasp the prevalence of extreme suffering?

- To the extent that we do understand the scale of suffering, have we allowed ourselves to direct our compassion toward it (despite the common inclination to withhold compassion in the face of vast suffering)?

13.5.3 The Moral Importance of Extreme Suffering

A related issue that we usually ignore is the moral importance of extreme suffering. For instance, can anything morally outweigh the most extreme states of suffering? Similarly, can creating many extremely happy lives justify creating a smaller number of extremely miserable lives?

Despite their enormous practical significance, questions like these are rarely asked, let alone explored with genuine openness. We mostly seem to acknowledge that, sure, the reduction of extreme suffering is important, yet we avoid delving deeper into questions about just how important it is compared to other aims in cases where tradeoffs arise.

There may be various psychological and sociological reasons why we tend to avoid these crucial tradeoff questions. For example, perhaps we find such questions to be taxing and uncomfortable to even think about, and maybe we are worried about the social consequences of exploring them more deeply and arriving at unpopular conclusions. In addition, we may worry that these questions will leave us with a bleak moral outlook, challenging our emotional needs for an optimistic and uplifting view of the world.

I think questions like the following are worth pondering seriously for each of us:

- Can extreme suffering be morally outweighed or compensated by any intrinsic good?

- Might our social and emotional needs in subtle ways push us toward ignoring such tradeoff questions and toward instead focusing on more comforting and agreeable topics?

13.5.4 Human Moral Character

We humans have significant moral flaws. Indeed, the subject of human moral flaws is vast, and there is a growing literature exploring it. Below, I will merely touch on a small selection of our common moral shortcomings.

A striking moral shortcoming is humanity's general indifference toward the suffering of others. To be sure, people generally do care about the suffering of those who are emotionally close to them. Yet when it comes to beings who are far away or out of sight, the typical human response is sadly one of practical indifference.

Again, one of the clearest examples of this indifference is humanity's practical stance toward the suffering of non-human animals who are exploited and killed for food. Horrific practices are routinely exposed by undercover footage and by animal advocates who inform people about standard practices, yet the typical human reaction is a deafening silence, often followed by defensive rationalizations. It is not just that we are generally incurious about the suffering of non-human animals, but we even tend to look away from and suppress the issue.

Beyond widespread indifference, a major source of moral shortcomings is our tribal and coalitional nature. We habitually sacrifice truth and integrity in order to advance our own coalitions. For example, we accentuate the moral flaws and hypocrisies of other groups while ignoring those of our own. Similarly, we often think about moral issues from the vantage point of a group-based identity or ideology that delivers simple answers, which in turn makes us reluctant to listen to apparent outsiders who may raise valid critiques of our views and actions.

In addition to group-based moral biases, we also display strong self-serving biases and hypocrisies at the individual level. For example, we are more willing to excuse our own moral transgressions than those of other people, and we are inclined to selectively reject or endorse moral principles based on whether we recall ourselves violating them versus hearing about others violating them. Likewise, when taking part in collective efforts, we tend to take credit for successful outcomes while externalizing the blame for bad outcomes.

Similar points apply to altruistic deeds. We generally show little interest in helping strangers unless our name is attached to it, or unless our reputation somehow gets to benefit from it. When helping others does not ultimately serve our reputation, or indeed if it comes at a perceived cost to our reputation, we are disinclined to help to an extent that plausibly qualifies as a vice. We are prone to champion altruistic projects that spotlight us and our allies rather than the projects that are most beneficial for other beings. In effect, we often prioritize our own reputation over helping others, even in efforts that we claim to be about helping others.

Furthermore, alongside our overt moral vices, we have many epistemic vices whose detrimental consequences effectively make them moral vices as well. Some examples include our proclivity toward dogmatism and defensiveness about our pre-existing views, as well as our lack of curiosity regarding how we can better help others. Moreover, our unwillingness to face unpleasant conclusions in general, including our own moral flaws in particular, is plausibly also a serious epistemic and moral vice.

None of us should imagine that we stand above these flaws and biases. It is well-documented that we have positive illusions about our own qualities, believing ourselves to be better than average, and our positive illusions are especially strong when it comes to our moral traits. This is generally where our self-perception is the most inflated, and yet we are reluctant to admit that our self-perception might be biased even when we are made aware of the common bias toward positive illusions.

Indeed, people tend to show little interest in improving their moral traits, in large part because they believe themselves to be highly moral already. Thus, our illusion of moral superiority, coupled with our unwillingness to question this illusion, has real-world consequences: it makes us less motivated to become better people.

Some questions that seem worth reflecting on here include:

- In what ways do we ourselves display the vices reviewed above?

- Might we be in denial about our own moral flaws?

- Might we be inclined to downplay the moral flaws of our own alliances, such as people close to us or people we admire?

- More fundamentally, might we be downplaying the universal moral vices of humanity?

When reflecting on such questions, we should keep in mind that acknowledging our moral shortcomings is not an exercise in blame or self-condemnation, but rather a step toward self-improvement and increased impact. It is about honesty and effectiveness in reducing suffering.

On a clarifying note, it is obviously worth avoiding a one-sided view of human motivations and moral character. After all, it is also possible to go too far in a pessimistic direction and to deny our real capacities for compassion and benevolent action toward other sentient beings, even if it may require continual effort to bring these capacities to the fore.

13.5.5 The Indefensibility of Speciesism

There are few stronger candidates for an ignored unpleasant conclusion than the indefensibility of speciesism — discrimination against sentient beings based on their species membership. Our society is entrenched in an anthropocentric paradigm that draws a sharp moral divide between humans and other animals, a divide that seems to rest largely on historical inertia along with our personal convenience.

A simple argument against speciesism is that species membership is no more a valid basis for discrimination than sex or skin color: we should not exclude beings from moral concern based on such arbitrary criteria. Arguments of this kind are often met with fierce resistance and attempted justifications. For example, it is common to claim that the absence of certain traits justifies discrimination against non-human animals.

Yet a problem with this defense is that we generally do not accept it when it comes to human beings who lack the traits in question, whether it be the ability to speak, pass a cognitive test, or take responsibility for their actions. If it is not a valid justification in the case of humans, it is difficult to see how it can be a valid justification in the case of non-human beings.

The purpose here is not to review the various arguments against speciesism, which can be found elsewhere. Instead, the purpose here is to raise questions for reflection:

- Might we be prone to suppress or ignore the issue of speciesism due to its inconvenience?

- To the extent that we do approach the issue, might we be inclined to rationalize speciesism given the wide-ranging implications of its rejection?

- Alternatively, are we disposed to convince ourselves that we already more or less adhere to non-speciesism, and that there is little further work for us to do in this regard?

13.5.6 The Moral Case Against Eating Animals

The issue of speciesism relates directly to the issue of eating animals. Indeed, the consumption of animals is a key driver of speciesist beliefs, and vice versa.

Many scholars have made a moral case against eating animals. A simple argument in the animal ethics literature is that the consumption of animal products causes unnecessary suffering and death, and it is morally indefensible to cause unnecessary suffering and death; therefore, it is morally indefensible to consume animal products. Similarly, there are arguments that rest on the premise that we should reject speciesism: just as it is morally indefensible to kill and eat dogs, cats, or humans absent an overriding necessity, it is also indefensible — given that we reject speciesism — to kill and eat other animals absent such necessity.

A common objection is that refraining from eating animals involves significant health risks, especially if one avoids all animal products. One reply to this objection is that it overlooks the critical distinction between a vegan diet that is well-planned and a vegan diet that is not. Nutritional research suggests that a vegan diet that is carefully planned and supplemented can be nutritionally adequate and potentially beneficial for health.

Moreover, even if we grant that vegan diets can require significant efforts around dietary planning and supplementation in order to be healthy, this would not by itself justify eating animal products. After all, a reluctance to make significant efforts around dietary planning and supplementation does not seem like a sufficient justification for contributing to practices that cause severe suffering and death for other sentient beings. Such efforts, even if substantial, still pale in comparison to the extreme harms experienced by sentient individuals in farms and slaughterhouses.

- Might we unconsciously ignore or downplay the moral case against eating animals based on concerns about the social and practical costs of changing our views and lifestyle?

- More broadly, might we be inclined to downplay the possibility that the institution of animal agriculture is no less horrific and no more justifiable than the worst atrocities committed against humans?

13.5.7 The Suffering of Wild Animals

The vast majority of suffering beings on Earth are wild animals, and most of them die very young, often by starvation, disease, or being eaten alive. Yet despite its enormous scope and severity, wild-animal suffering remains extremely neglected, even among animal advocates.

We seem to ignore this suffering largely because it is “natural”, as though that which is “natural” must somehow be good. However, on reflection, it is clear that the mere fact that something is natural does not make it good. For example, cancer is natural, and so are natural disasters such as wildfires and earthquakes, yet the suffering they cause is still bad and worth preventing just the same. This is an obvious point, of course, but at the level of our intuitions and our broader culture, we somehow still seem to view “naturalness” as a reason for not caring deeply about the suffering of wild animals.

A basic case for alleviating the suffering of wild animals can again be made based on a rejection of speciesism. If a human individual is suffering due to natural causes, we recognize that we have moral reason to help alleviate their suffering, and a rejection of speciesism implies the same basic conclusion for non-human animals who suffer due to natural causes: we have moral reason to assist them and alleviate their suffering, provided that we can.

How and how much we can safely help wild animals is an open question, yet it is worth noting that many interventions and policies that can help wild animals have already been implemented. These include targeted vaccinations against rabies, wildlife contraception to reduce famine-related deaths, and ambulance services that help injured free-living animals. Notably, a recent survey in the U.K found that most people are supportive of interventions such as vaccinating and healing sick wild animals.

The case for reducing wild-animal suffering and the question of how we can best help wild animals have both been explored at length elsewhere.

- Are we inclined to ignore wild-animal suffering because seeing it as a serious problem would make our lives more difficult, such as by making us stand out from our peers, or by leading us to see life in nature as akin to a perpetual war zone?

- Might wild-animal suffering be the form of suffering that we personally neglect the most relative to its scale (among existing forms of suffering on Earth)?

13.5.8 Invertebrate Suffering

There is growing evidence that various invertebrate species are able to experience pain and suffering. Many scientists have long acknowledged that large invertebrates such as octopuses can likely suffer, and in recent years, further evidence has emerged to support that small invertebrates, including many species of insects and shrimp, may also feel forms of pain and suffering.

When considering the possibility of pain and suffering among invertebrates, it is important not to confuse the complexity or diversity of an experience with its felt intensity, as these may not be closely related. After all, in humans, intensely painful experiences need not involve much complexity or diversity — our most painful experiences may chiefly consist in raw pain itself. As Richard Ryder speculates, this could also be true of invertebrates: “Their experiences may be more simple than ours, but are they less intense? Perhaps a caterpillar's primitive pain when squashed is greater than our more sophisticated sufferings.”

There is arguably a uniquely strong form of speciesism at work in our views and attitudes toward invertebrates. We might call it “invertism”: discrimination against beings and disregard for their interests simply because they are invertebrates. A thought experiment that may shine a light on this form of discrimination is to imagine that we could transplant the nervous system of an invertebrate, such as a bee or a lobster, into a cute-looking mammal, such as a puppy or a kitten. In effect, we would have the nervous system and mind of an invertebrate inside a cute and fluffy mammalian body.

It seems plausible that many of us would be much more inclined to care about this same being when placed inside a mammalian body. Yet the body that a being inhabits should obviously not influence our degree of care or moral concern for that being. Such a difference in concern based merely on invertebrate versus mammalian appearance would be a clear case of invertism.

“Invertism” is an appropriate name for this kind of discrimination, both because it pertains to invertebrates and because it arguably inverts our priorities. In proportional terms, virtually all animals on Earth are invertebrates — more than 99.9 percent — yet virtually all our attention and resources devoted to helping non-human animals — probably more than 99 percent — are focused on vertebrates. Even given substantial uncertainty about the capacity for pain among most invertebrates, this extreme neglect of these beings, including large invertebrates, is plausibly an inversion of priorities relative to the ideal of impartial suffering reduction.

A relevant exercise is to consider how we would respond if we were given the choice of being born as an invertebrate — say, a butterfly or a lobster — who is going to be tortured (e.g. have their limbs burnt or torn off, or have parts of their bodies crushed). Would we be wholly indifferent about being born as an invertebrate in that situation? If not, this suggests that we do acknowledge the possibility that they might experience suffering that is worth avoiding. This thought experiment becomes all the more poignant when we consider the fact that humanity treats and kills invertebrates in brutal ways, such as by crushing or boiling them alive.

How well-placed are we to objectively evaluate the sentience and moral significance of invertebrates? It seems reasonable to claim that we, including our best informed experts, are in a terrible position to do that. For example, scientists routinely experiment on invertebrates in their research, which plausibly influences and even compromises their judgments regarding the capacity for pain among invertebrates. If the possibility of pain in small invertebrates were taken more seriously, scientists might be forced to take costly measures to treat them better, and they could even risk no longer being allowed to do their research. That is a serious conflict of interest.

Yet this conflict of interest is arguably minor compared with those we all face in everyday life. We all stand to face extremely inconvenient implications if we acknowledge even the possibility of invertebrate pain, and this applies across many aspects of our lives, ranging from how careful we are to avoid stepping on ants on the sidewalk, all the way to our large-scale moral priorities.

- Might we underestimate the probability of pain and suffering among invertebrates given the inconvenient and unpleasant implications?

- As a concrete example, are we motivated to dismiss the risk that we may cause intense suffering when we step on a patch of grass and accidentally crush many small insects?

13.5.9 New Forms of Suffering and S-Risks

Beyond existing forms of suffering, there is a risk that we might create new forms of suffering. For example, in the race to create more efficient technology, it is conceivable that we could end up creating new kinds of systems that are capable of suffering, thus potentially creating a virtual suffering explosion.

Note that this risk does not hinge on the possibility of digital suffering in particular. Whatever the physical signatures of suffering turn out to be, there is a risk that we might reproduce it, and that we might even do it at scale for economic or scientific reasons. For instance, there are already computers that use human neurons, such as the C.L.1 computer developed by Cortical Labs, and perhaps future versions of these computers could suffer in silence while being employed at an enormous scale.

More broadly, there is a risk that we might create astronomical amounts of suffering in the future, also known as an s-risk. For example, we might eventually spread suffering to other planets by colonizing them with new kinds of technology that can suffer, or by terraforming them and populating them with animals who have extremely bad lives. Similarly, our civilization could get locked into a state of global totalitarianism that has no regard for suffering, and which eventually expands to a cosmic scale.

While any specific s-risk scenario might have a low probability of materializing, the full range of potential s-risk scenarios is still far from negligible. Indeed, preventing s-risks plausibly deserves substantial priority, especially considering their neglectedness and potential scale. After all, if we currently show such limited concern for suffering, and if we are so bad at reducing suffering here on Earth — even imposing it on other sentient beings on an industrial scale — how can we be confident that we will not eventually spread and greatly increase suffering in the future? It seems that we should not be confident about that.

- Do we dismiss the risk of creating new forms of suffering because it is an uncomfortable prospect?

- Could the potential suffering resulting from s-risks be the most neglected form of suffering (among the forms of suffering we have the capacity to prevent)?

13.5.10 Wishful Solutionism

When considering the prevalence and awfulness of suffering, it is natural to think of ways to definitively solve the problem of suffering for all sentient beings. More than that, it might even be tempting to believe that we are likely to achieve the end of suffering soon. For example, one might believe that artificial intelligence and biotechnology will soon solve all our major problems, including suffering. An excessive level of confidence in such beliefs about the imminent end of suffering may be termed “wishful solutionism”.

The pressure to entertain such beliefs is understandable, especially considering the stark unpleasantness of the alternative: the indefinite continuation of global suffering. Yet we should be careful not to let this pressure lead to motivated reasoning and wishful beliefs about the likelihood that suffering will soon end.

In addition to distorting our beliefs, the pull toward wishful solutionism also risks distorting our priorities. For example, if we assume that our practical goal must be to end all suffering, we might fail to explore alternative goals that could be more beneficial. After all, it is conceivable that we can reduce suffering more effectively by mainly focusing on alleviating suffering on a smaller and more realistic scale. Alternatively, it could be that, in expectation, we can prevent the most suffering by reducing the risk of worst-case scenarios rather than seeking to create best-case scenarios.

- Are we inclined to believe that suffering will soon end for good based on a desire for this to be true?

- Might we suppress or ignore the possibility that the best way to reduce suffering is not by seeking to end all suffering, but instead by focusing on more modest aims, or by seeking to incrementally reduce the risk of worst-case outcomes?

- Are we disinclined to work on small wins because we find it more inspiring to work on grand solutions?

13.5.11 Extraterrestrial Suffering

It is conceivable that suffering exists on other planets. Indeed, given what we know about the number of stars and planets in the universe, it is arguably likely that suffering exists on other planets, even if those planets may be extremely far away. And if suffering does exist elsewhere in the universe, it is conceivable — perhaps even likely — that suffering on Earth constitutes but a tiny fraction of suffering in the universe. In other words, it could well be that all the suffering on Earth is less than a drop in the cosmic ocean of suffering.

If we consider this to be a disturbing possibility, we may be inclined to dismiss it. For example, we might seek to dismiss it as irrelevant to our priorities. Yet this dismissal would be dubious. After all, if humanity develops the capacity to travel to or otherwise influence other parts of the universe, the question of what suffering already exists there — and what suffering we might add or reduce — becomes a practical consideration, not merely a speculative one.

- Do we avoid thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial suffering due to its overwhelming scale, or because it would make our view of reality feel too dark and tragic?

- Do we dismiss the potential practical importance of extraterrestrial suffering because it would add inconvenient complexity to an already complicated picture?

- Relatedly, do we dismiss the possibility that advanced extraterrestrial technology might exist throughout the universe because taking this prospect seriously would feel too strange or socially costly?

13.5.12 Deep Uncertainty and the Risk of Making Things Worse

A fundamental problem we may underestimate is the level of uncertainty we face when trying to reduce suffering. There are countless considerations that complicate our assessments of different actions, and these considerations make it difficult to say whether a given action is overall helpful or harmful, let alone which action is best.

For example, even if a given action seems highly beneficial with respect to reducing the suffering of farmed animals, it might nevertheless seem overall harmful when we consider its effects on other areas, such as the suffering of wild animals or the prospect of reducing s-risks. Or it might be harmful in light of “unknown unknowns” — considerations that we are currently not even aware of.

This highlights a disturbing risk, namely that our actions to reduce suffering might ultimately increase suffering. Although it is tempting to dismiss this risk, we must admit that it is a real possibility, and a deeply inconvenient one at that.

To be clear, acknowledging the risk of making things worse does not imply that it makes no sense to seek to reduce suffering. Yet it does have significant implications in terms of how we approach this endeavor, such as by embracing humility and being careful to consider our uncertainty when weighing our decisions.

- Are we inclined to downplay our uncertainty due to how inconvenient and frustrating it can be?

- Does our personal need for action lead us to underestimate the risk of making things worse?

At the same time, uncertainty and the risk of making things worse can also be convenient in some contexts. For example, one might invoke uncertainty as a way to rationalize inaction or minimal efforts to help others. This pitfall merits reflection as well.

- Might we be inclined to use uncertainty and the risk of making things worse as an excuse for inaction, or as a way to ease our personal guilt and difficulties in reducing suffering?

- Might intolerance of uncertainty ironically make us completely certain that we are bound to remain clueless about how to reduce suffering, thereby giving us at least some sense of relief and closure in the face of difficult questions?

13.5.13 Demandingness and Effort

It is convenient to believe that the most effective ways to reduce suffering are not all that demanding. For example, it is convenient to believe that optimal suffering reduction does not involve seriously stretching ourselves when it comes to how hard we work, how ready we are to explore unpleasant ideas, how willing we are to take an unpopular stand, and so on.

Conversely, it would be inconvenient and implicitly demanding to believe that our own level of effort is the main bottleneck to our impact, or even just one of the main bottlenecks. Yet there are reasons to suspect that it might be.

After all, effort and hard work are key determinants of success in most other domains, so why should reducing suffering be a major exception? Moreover, our level of effort tends to predict other key factors, such as our accumulated insights, skills, resources, connections, and so forth. Thus, if we admit that such other factors are plausible bottlenecks to our impact, this indirectly suggests that our level of effort is as well.

- Are we inclined to downplay how much our impact depends on effort and hard work?

- Are we prone to come up with rationalizations as to why doing what is easy and comfortable is likely the best thing we can do?

- What would we do differently if we were less ruled by our aversion to personal discomfort or social disapproval?

13.6 Concluding Remarks

The point of this chapter is not that we should just uncritically accept unpleasant conjectures as true. After all, unpleasantness and inconvenience are not in themselves markers of truth. Yet they are suggestive of avoidance and bias in our outlooks, and hence it is worth being aware of any “unpleasantness bias” or “inconvenience bias” that might distort our judgment.

At the same time, it is important to avoid the pitfall of one-sided pessimism about everything. For example, one can risk falling into a pessimistic mindset according to which everything is broken and things could hardly get any worse. Yet such a view would clearly be false and lacking in perspective. Things can obviously get much worse than they are today, and many aspects of our societies and institutions do in fact work quite well — or at least they are in many ways much better than they used to be or than they are elsewhere.

As a case in point, there are enormous differences in the degree to which people have free speech in different parts of the world, and it would be a mistake to downplay such differences with simplistic sentiments of “everything is broken”. Likewise, it is worth remembering that humanity has in some respects made major moral and practical progress, such as widening the rejection of torture, expanding basic rights, and eradicating smallpox and rinderpest.

Indeed, it is easy to overlook the degree to which modern and free societies enable us to learn, collaborate with others, and work to relieve suffering — provided that we have the motivation to pursue those ends. These are not minor things, and they are clear examples of how the world is not nearly as broken as it could be. It is worth acknowledging these functional parts of our lives and societies.

Furthermore, it may be useful to recognize that facing unpleasant conclusions need not be all bad and unpleasant, and that it can even have some psychological benefits. For instance, even if a given conclusion is mostly unpleasant to face, we may nevertheless find some relief in no longer avoiding it.

A salient example from my own life was when I finally opened my mind to the possibility that small invertebrates might be able to suffer. I was sitting on a park bench in Berlin, writing a book about speciesism, while looking at firebugs making their way across the ground. I allowed myself a moment of presence to observe their bustling interactions more closely.

The idea that these beings might be able to suffer was a deeply unpleasant and inconvenient notion to consider. Yet there was also a relief in lowering my shield and allowing a genuine openness to this possibility. In my experience, this kind of relief can be even stronger when we allow a 360-degree openness toward any unpleasant conclusion that might be true — a deeper relief in no longer having to maintain rigid defenses.

Additionally, we might gain the benefit of being less disappointed due to having a more honest outlook. For example, adopting a more accurate view of human moral character may prevent the predictable disappointments that occur when people repeatedly fail to live up to popular yet overly flattering views of human moral character. More broadly, by facing unpleasant conclusions, we may gain a clearer understanding from which we are no longer continually surprised by realities that we repeatedly deny to ourselves.

When contemplating or even accepting unpleasant conclusions, we can still maintain a both/and perspective. For example, we can maintain both that human moral character is generally terrible and that the appropriate attitude to adopt toward people — along with all other sentient beings — is one of deep compassion. Similarly, we can acknowledge starkly unpleasant and pessimistic conclusions about the state of the world and maintain that the appropriate response is an insistent and inspired compassion that refuses to give up on easing the suffering of the world. We can still maintain a realistic hope and drive for compassionate impact.

14 Actions We Can Take to Reduce Suffering

To make a compassionate impact, we ultimately need to take action and create concrete improvements in the world. In this chapter, I will outline ways we can do that.

14.1 Keeping the Basics in View

Before we explore further ways to reduce suffering, it is worth emphasizing that the previous chapters have already offered substantive suggestions across many key areas. For example, we have seen why a focus on cultivating virtues is generally beneficial, including a focus on concrete virtues such as integrity, self-scrutiny, and personal agency.

The basics of these suggestions may already provide most of the guidance we need most of the time. As such, these practical suggestions should not be downplayed or glossed over. Indeed, history offers many examples of people who caused serious harm precisely because they neglected basic virtues like integrity and self-scrutiny. We should be careful not to end up in a similar position of neglecting basic virtues due to a desire to find more convenient answers.

More fundamentally, even the simple act of turning toward suffering is itself a significant act — one that stands in stark contrast to the default of merely closing our eyes. Turning toward the problem again and again is the foundational step that moves us to continually explore and address it.

In short, many of the points covered in previous chapters serve as important background to what will be covered in this chapter, and they are arguably a large part of the answer as to how we can best reduce suffering.

14.2 A Focus on Cause Areas

The question of how we can best reduce suffering can be explored at many different levels using various framings. The framing I will use in this chapter is centered around different cause areas. A cause area, in this context, is a broad domain of problems and aims, yet a domain that is still more specific than the general aim of reducing suffering.

For example, reducing the suffering of non-human animals can be considered a cause area, and so can reducing risks of astronomical future suffering (s-risks). As these examples demonstrate, different cause areas often overlap, yet they can still be meaningfully distinguished.

Why frame the exploration in terms of different cause areas? One reason is that it represents the first step down the ladder of generality. If we want to move from the general aim of reducing suffering toward concrete actions, it makes sense to first outline some slightly more specific domains that we can compare and investigate in our attempt to zoom in on the most helpful actions.

Another reason to outline multiple cause areas is that it seems doubtful that there would be a single cause that is optimal for everyone to work on. People usually have different talents and comparative advantages in terms of where they can contribute the most. This naturally suggests specialization and a division of labor.

Moreover, even if nobody had any comparative advantage, it would still make sense for different people to work on different causes, partly because there would be diminishing returns if everyone invested exclusively in the same cause area. Furthermore, given the uncertainty involved in identifying the highest-impact causes, it may be safer to invest somewhat cautiously across multiple areas so as to hedge against estimation error and to learn more about where our efforts are most effective.

14.3 Considerations for Cause Prioritization

How can we decide how much to invest in different cause areas? This is a complicated question that depends on multiple factors, including individual factors such as our personal skills and circumstances.

Beyond individual factors, some important considerations include the scope, neglectedness, and tractability of the respective causes. To assess the scope of a cause area, we can consider how many beings are affected and how severely they suffer. To assess neglectedness, we can consider how much funding exists within a given area and how many people are working on it. To assess tractability, we can explore whether promising interventions are available and the degree to which additional people and funding can help make meaningful progress.

These considerations often point in different directions. For example, reducing the suffering of non-human animals in the near term may score quite well across all three dimensions. By contrast, reducing risks of astronomical suffering scores much higher on potential scope, yet its tractability might be lower or less clear. Prioritization is thus a matter of balancing these different considerations, and there is room for reasonable disagreement depending on whether we place greater emphasis on robust evidence and immediate tractability versus larger but more speculative impact.

That said, rather than treating prioritization purely as a matter of choosing between cause areas, we can also ask whether some initiatives may advance multiple causes simultaneously. For example, projects that increase people's general concern for suffering may benefit a broad range of efforts to reduce suffering.

I will not seek to answer exactly what we should prioritize. Instead, I will outline some promising directions along with pointers for further exploration. After all, what we should prioritize varies not only across individuals, but also across time as we learn more and as new opportunities emerge.

What follows in the next few sections is a non-exhaustive outline of some of the main cause areas that have been prioritized by people working to reduce suffering.

14.4 Reducing Human Suffering

Many instances of human suffering are easily preventable. For example, around 150 million people are infected with schistosomiasis, and there are more than 250 million human cases of malaria annually — two parasitic diseases that can cause severe suffering in critical cases.

Thankfully, there are cheap and effective measures that help prevent each of these diseases. For instance, the organization Unlimit Health supports large-scale deworming efforts against schistosomiasis, while the Against Malaria Foundation distributes bed nets that prevent malaria infections. Supporting organizations like these may thus help reduce human suffering, including severe suffering.

Another class of interventions is to provide pain relief for people who experience intense suffering. For example, terminal cancer patients who endure intense pain often have no access to pain relief in low-income countries. Indeed, around 80 percent of people globally lack sufficient access to pain relief for moderate to severe pain. Yet pain relief is quite inexpensive, and successful initiatives show that we can address this gap, such as by raising awareness about the problem and advocating for better policies.

Similarly, we can seek to alleviate and prevent the intense pain caused by health conditions such as kidney stones, cluster headaches, and trigeminal neuralgia. For example, in the case of cluster headaches — often described as an excruciating stabbing pain around the eye — there is growing evidence that psychedelics such as L.S.D, psilocybin, and D.M.T can significantly reduce their occurrence, and for some people wholly prevent them. Stigma and legal barriers currently prevent people from accessing such helpful treatments, yet we can address this problem by pursuing sensible legislation that does not force people to endure needless agony.

In general, we can seek to address intensely painful conditions by informing people about known ways to prevent and treat them, supporting further research into effective treatments, and promoting policies that help alleviate and prevent these conditions. For instance, in terms of known ways to prevent painful conditions, simply increasing daily fluid intake to around 3 liters more than halves the risk of kidney stone recurrence. Such practical information is worth spreading.

One might object that human suffering is less neglected than the suffering of other beings, and that we can generally reduce suffering more effectively by mostly focusing on the suffering of non-human beings. Yet even if this objection is largely correct, as I believe it is, there may still be many worthwhile opportunities to reduce human suffering.

For example, in both charity and politics, there are large sums of money that are strictly dedicated to helping humans, and there are likely ways to make these resources go much further in terms of how effectively they reduce suffering. One can support increased resources for reducing non-human suffering — and for reducing suffering in general — while also supporting efforts to use human-dedicated resources as effectively as possible.

Even if human suffering is less neglected than other forms of suffering, it is still highly neglected in absolute terms. Moreover, the claim that we can generally reduce suffering more effectively by focusing on the suffering of non-human beings is consistent with having some people focus mostly on reducing human suffering, as well as with everyone devoting at least some of their efforts toward reducing human suffering.

14.5 Reducing the Suffering of Non-Human Animals

Most sentient beings on the planet are non-human animals, and there are many ways in which we can greatly reduce their suffering. When it comes to the animals who are exploited and killed for human consumption, we can support initiatives and legislation that help move society away from exploiting and killing animals.

For example, we can advocate for bans that society at large may be willing to support and that could help build momentum. These include bans on fur farming as well as preventive bans on emerging industries such as octopus and insect farming. Given the difficulty of rolling back an industry once it has gained a foothold, preventive bans might be an especially promising focus area.

We can also advocate against subsidies that effectively support the exploitation and killing of animals, and advocate for policies that promote alternatives to animal products, such as plant-based and cultured alternatives.

Alongside these policy measures, we can support broad outreach efforts. For instance, a meta-analysis of 100 studies found that outreach focused on the experiences and treatment of farmed animals can reduce intended and self-reported meat consumption in the short term. Even if the effects on actual behavior are modest, shifting intentions and attitudes may still be an important early step toward meaningful change.

Similarly, at the level of personal consumption, we can avoid consuming animal products. This both reduces the direct harms we cause to other beings and improves our moral attitudes toward non-human animals. After all, if we regularly eat a group of sentient beings, we are less likely to have compassion for them, and we may be less inclined to actively reduce their suffering.

Note also how taking a firm stance against consuming other sentient beings is consistent with the case made earlier in favor of a virtue-based approach. It is a simple stance whose consistent adherence prevents slippery slopes, reinforces our respect for other beings, and limits the need for continual moral calculation over everyday choices, thereby freeing up resources for potentially more impactful endeavors.

Beyond the plight of animals who are harmed for human consumption, we can also take action to reduce the suffering of wild animals. For example, we can raise awareness about the broader issue, advocate for more research, and promote policies and interventions that benefit wild animals. As mentioned earlier, these policies may include the expansion of vaccination programs that have already been successfully implemented, wildlife contraception to prevent famine-related deaths, and ambulances that help injured animals.

In general, the suffering that is worth preventing when the victims are human is also worth preventing when the victims are wild animals. And sadly, most of the sources of human suffering mentioned above also afflict wild animals, including malaria, schistosomiasis, kidney stones, and cancer. Just as we help humans through large-scale health programs, such as those that prevent malaria and schistosomiasis, so too can we help non-human animals who are similarly afflicted.

At the level of our everyday actions, we can try to reduce the harms we cause to wild animals. For example, as far as is practicable and safe, we can try to reduce the number of animals we accidentally harm when walking or driving, avoid the use of painful traps and poisons, and keep cats indoors to prevent them from harming wild animals. (This also protects the cats themselves from various infectious diseases and traffic accidents.)

As in the case of our consumption choices, pursuing at least some everyday actions to help wild animals both reduces the immediate harms we cause to other beings and reinforces a stronger commitment to helping wild animals in general. Taking such actions is thus also consistent with a virtue-based approach to reducing suffering. It contributes to our development as compassionate moral agents and moves our concern for wild animals from theory into practice.

Finally, as perhaps one of the most impactful ways to contribute, we can support charities that seek to prevent the suffering of non-human animals in cost-effective ways. Examples of such charities include Animal Ethics, the Good Food Institute, and Legal Impact for Chickens.

14.6 Reducing S-Risks

Risks of astronomical future suffering, or s-risks, are extremely neglected despite their vast potential scope. Admittedly, this vast scope and the broad range of possible s-risk scenarios also mean that there is great uncertainty about how we can best reduce s-risks. Even so, I would argue that there are reasonable actions we can take to reduce s-risks.

One strategy is to increase the attention and resources devoted to s-risk reduction. For instance, we can seek to inform altruistically motivated people about s-risks and try to develop a stronger research field around it. This strategy finds some support in our uncertainty about s-risk reduction: given that we are highly uncertain about how to reduce s-risks, it seems valuable to have more people explore that question.

Another broad strategy is to seek to reduce critical risk factors that make s-risks more likely. Some plausible risk factors include ideological fanaticism, totalitarian systems ruled by malevolent actors, high levels of global conflict, unchecked technologies that make it easier to create or spread suffering, and insufficient prioritization of s-risk reduction.

Each of these risk factors represents a broad area in which much work can be done. For example, to reduce the risk of a totalitarian future ruled by malevolent actors, we can seek to strengthen institutional checks and balances, reduce harmful levels of political polarization, and develop better screening procedures for malevolent traits such as psychopathy and sadism among aspiring leaders. Some institutional changes that may reduce the risk of totalitarianism include adopting proportional representation and moving toward parliamentary democracy.

A set of risk factors that has received special attention is the combination of advanced artificial intelligence and large-scale conflict. Indeed, most work on s-risk reduction to date has focused on risks resulting from conflicts involving advanced A.I systems. How to best reduce these risks is an open question, yet a number of sensible proposals have been put forward.

For example, some have argued that it is helpful to build the field of worst-case A.I safety — a subset of the broader A.I safety field that aims specifically at making future A.I systems less likely to contribute to s-risk scenarios. Work to advance this field can take various forms, including advocacy aimed at raising awareness and technical work that directly seeks to make A.I systems safer. Such technical work may involve game-theoretic research aimed at making A.I systems better at cooperating and less likely to create catastrophic conflicts.

A complementary way to reduce s-risks resulting from large-scale conflict may be to promote norms and institutions centered on cooperation. For instance, we can help raise awareness of the benefits of win-win cooperation and support peaceful efforts to strengthen democratic governance. At the international level, we can foster greater multilateral cooperation to address worst-case risks that are in everyone's interest to avoid.

Organizations that work to reduce s-risks include the Center on Long-Term Risk and the Center for Reducing Suffering (disclosure: I co-founded the latter).

14.7 Broad Capacity Building

A complementary strategy to those listed above is to build broad capacity to reduce suffering. That is, in addition to direct efforts to reduce particular kinds or risks of suffering, we can seek to grow our collective capacity to reduce suffering in general.

Capacity building can take many forms. A key part of it is movement building: expanding the movement seeking to reduce suffering while improving its health and competence. Yet capacity building is not limited to movement building alone. For example, if we increase the public budget devoted to reducing suffering, or otherwise improve our institutions in ways that support this goal, we may increase society's capacity to reduce suffering without necessarily expanding the movement of people who are dedicated to this aim.

An upside of capacity building is that it can serve us well across a wide variety of future scenarios. It creates a flexible resource that can be adapted to different future outcomes as events unfold and as we learn more. Under conditions of great uncertainty, this is a strong point in favor of capacity building.

Moreover, capacity building need not be adopted as our primary goal for it to strongly guide us. We may instead adopt it as a key supporting goal. In this way, we can pursue concrete efforts to reduce suffering while also tailoring our efforts to contribute to cumulative capacity building.

How can we contribute to this broader capacity? As noted above, one way is to help build a stronger and healthier movement of people seeking to reduce suffering. For example, we can each seek to embody constructive communal norms and strive to be considerate and supportive.

Beyond such informal efforts, we can pursue more systematic movement building. For instance, we can create structured avenues for people to learn, connect, and find a role in the movement. An organization working in this area is Sentient Futures, which organizes free fellowships and mentorship programs. We can also seek to create resources that are broadly useful to those who seek to reduce suffering, such as helpful essays, books, videos, bibliographies, and so on.

Some promising capacity-building efforts outside the realm of movement building include efforts to increase the priority that is granted to effective suffering reduction in political decisions, as well as to promote specific policies that increase society's capacity to reduce suffering. Another option is to become a researcher who helps advance our understanding of crucial questions relevant to reducing suffering, such as by contributing to the science of compassion, moral psychology, or international cooperation.

Finally, it is worth mentioning money as a highly flexible form of capacity. Financial resources can be converted into many other useful resources, whether that means funding new research, sustaining full-time organizers, or supporting direct interventions to prevent suffering. Consequently, maintaining a steady habit of effective donations, strategically investing to give, or choosing a career to earn to give can be impactful ways to build capacity. However, as discussed earlier, ambitious donations are generally best pursued after establishing a secure personal runway.

14.8 Career Choice

Our career decisions are among our greatest opportunities to benefit others. How, then, can we best approach career choice for reducing suffering?

A reasonable approach is to stay open and curious, exploring our options thoroughly before deciding on a given path. For example, we can explore each of the cause areas mentioned above in some depth, including the arguments for and against prioritizing them.

Based on that exploration, we can write down a few best-guess hypotheses about which career paths might allow us to have the most beneficial impact. To refine these hypotheses, it is often helpful to seek feedback from people who have experience in the relevant areas.

Finally, we can set out to test our hypotheses through small experiments, such as internships or volunteer projects, to see whether any of those career paths is a good fit for us. Such real-world tests of our personal fit are often informative in ways that mere speculation cannot be.

Career choice is rarely a one-off decision but more like a gradually developing path. Hence, there is no pressure to get everything right from the outset. We can form tentative plans, learn as we go, and then gradually update our plans as we become wiser.

Similarly, there is no pressure to commit exclusively to a specific cause area. As mentioned, even if we mostly prioritize a specific cause area over others, we can still keep broad capacity building and other cause areas in mind as guiding considerations.

Lastly, it is worth acknowledging that a career optimized for altruistic impact is not necessarily realistic for everyone. Many people face constraints that limit their options, at least for the time being, and that is a completely understandable reality. Fortunately, compassionate impact is not a matter of all or nothing: even a few hours of altruistic work per week can spare other beings real suffering. We can still live a life guided by compassionate impact even if we are not in a position to fully devote our career to it.

14.9 The Value of Learning and Reflection

When it comes to actions we can take to reduce suffering, learning and reflection may not be the first things that come to mind. Yet they are often the main bottleneck in real-world efforts to reduce suffering.

This point is perhaps easiest to see if we look back on our own past. Many of us can probably recall an early moment of wanting to help and feeling a strong urge to do something right away. Perhaps we found the most visible charity we could think of, or the most salient intervention, and felt ready to pour our resources into it. In such a moment, pausing to read and reflect can almost feel like a betrayal of those who are suffering. Yet if we had decided to bet everything on those early ideas, our bets would likely have been greatly suboptimal in light of our current knowledge.

As we have learned and reflected more, we have come to see that our earlier views were missing key insights and considerations, and that we could have done better if we had been more humble and proactive about seeking out such insights. Rather than being a betrayal, the steady work of refining our views was among the most valuable things we could do. Yet why should we assume that our current situation is fundamentally different in these respects? Why should we assume that we are now finally at the end of history when it comes to crucial learning and reflection?

In short, we should not. We still have a lot of critical insights to gain.

One of the areas where it is especially important to learn and reflect is the domain of values: what do we consider most valuable and worth prioritizing, and which moral standards and considerations do we steer by? Beyond that, it is helpful to explore specific issues related to suffering reduction, such as which interventions seem most promising and what the strongest arguments for and against them might be.

It is also useful to gain fundamental insights about the world in general, as it may refine our worldview and improve our thinking across many domains, including how best to reduce suffering.

Granted, at the level of our intuitions, the idea of giving strong priority to learning and reflection might feel off. The aim of reducing suffering intuitively prompts an orientation toward immediate and direct action. This is not surprising.

After all, our compassionate drives did not evolve to reduce suffering on a large scale, but rather to alleviate it in the here and now — for instance, to help a crying baby or a wounded sibling. Moreover, evolutionary considerations aside, there is indeed a lot to be said in favor of taking direct action to reduce suffering: it can bring about real-world improvements, it can help us develop valuable skills, and it can build motivation and momentum.

Even so, these valid reasons in favor of pursuing direct action do not undermine the point that we likely have a strong bias to neglect learning and reflection, and that many of us plausibly have an “eagerness bias” toward immediate action. (Of course, some people might have the opposite bias of being too focused on gaining critical insights for reducing suffering, yet in my experience this bias seems much less common.)

Our drive to take immediate action may in part stem from an emotional need to simply do something. Having such a need to act is perfectly understandable and can even be a great strength. That being said, we should avoid the pitfall of allowing this need to distort our priorities and prompt ill-considered actions. Two complementary strategies may help us avoid this pitfall.

First, we can seek to address our legitimate emotional needs in ways other than rushing to take action. For example, we can support ourselves with self-compassion while recognizing the importance of gradually increasing our capacity to reduce suffering. The point of such psychological grounding is not to try to escape from real-world action, but rather to ensure that we are in a position to pursue well-considered and effective action.

Second, we can keep in mind that learning and reflection are themselves extremely important actions. They are actions that can inform our future efforts and help us move in the right direction, and we therefore have reason to pursue them with dedication and a sense of priority.

14.10 Conclusion

We have many candidate answers as to how we can best reduce suffering. At a general level, there is a wide range of virtues, habits, mindsets, and so on that seem beneficial, as explored in previous chapters. In addition, there is a range of cause areas that each represent a major opportunity to reduce suffering. The question of which cause areas are most worth prioritizing does not have a single answer that applies to everyone. It is an open question that we can each seek to clarify based on our personal fit and our assessment of the relevant evidence and considerations.

We will always have significant uncertainty about which exact path is optimal. That is simply an inevitable feature of life. Yet we can learn to deal with and accept this uncertainty — rather than be paralyzed by it — and then still go on to read, reflect, and act on our best judgment. As Brian Tomasik reminds us: “We have enormous opportunity to reduce suffering on behalf of sentient creatures.”

15 Ambition, Drive, and Inspiration

Ambition and drive can be powerful forces for creating positive change. When directed toward compassionate aims, they help us overcome obstacles, sustain our efforts, and expand the scope of our impact. In this final chapter, I will make a case for the value of ambition and drive, and then offer some parting inspiration for pursuing compassionate purpose.

15.1 The Value of Being Ambitious

To be ambitious is to aim high in terms of what we can achieve. When seeking to benefit others, there are good reasons to be ambitious about our skills, career, and impact. One reason is simply that low expectations tend to become self-fulfilling: if we aim low, we will most likely achieve little.

Another reason to be ambitious is that our efforts and contributions can go unusually far when it comes to helping others. For example, the difference between having a comfortable personal income and having an extremely high income is not that consequential for our personal wellbeing — we will be quite well off either way. Yet when it comes to helping others, the difference between a modest and a vast contribution can be enormous: it can mean the difference between a beneficial change reaching a large rather than a small number of beings. Thus, our default intuitions about the value of ambitious aims are likely to be unreliable in altruistic endeavors.

Empirical studies also find benefits associated with ambition. For example, in domains ranging from exercise to academic performance, higher levels of ambition are linked to higher levels of achievement. Furthermore, experimental research suggests that having more ambitious goals in life can increase our support for personally costly aid to others, perhaps in part because being more ambitious makes us feel like we have greater capacity to contribute such aid.

However, these points in favor of ambition also come with significant qualifications. When aiming for compassionate impact, we want to make sure that our ambition is indeed guided by compassion rather than self-serving ambitions. Of course, we all have some self-interested ambitions, which can be perfectly fine and healthy. But we want to develop an ambition for compassionate impact that is imbued with integrity and not compromised by self-interest.

To that end, we may do well to be ambitious in adhering to the virtues reviewed earlier. Even when we are uncertain about the best ways to help others, we can still strive for moral excellence in our character, embodying virtues such as honesty and compassion to a high standard. This kind of ambition makes us less prone to harmful behavior and can guide our actions constructively while we continue to learn and refine our understanding.

15.2 Motivation and Drive

Even if we have ambitious aims, we will not get far unless we also have the motivation and drive to realize them. While ambition is about the scope of our aims, motivation and drive are about the immediate spark and relentless force behind our pursuits.

As a striking example, Polish social worker Irena Sendler displayed extraordinary drive in her efforts to help save hundreds of children from the Holocaust. At great risk to herself, Sendler helped smuggle children out of the Warsaw Ghetto in creative ways, such as by hiding them in ambulances and briefcases. But suspicion grew and she was eventually arrested by the Gestapo. She was tortured, suffered broken bones in her legs and feet, and narrowly escaped execution. Even after all that, her drive remained unbroken, and she continued to coordinate further rescue operations.

While few of us will ever face such extreme circumstances, we can still cultivate a strong drive for helping others. Some effective ways to boost our motivation may be to look at images and videos of beings whose lives were greatly improved through compassionate action, or to read testimonials from individuals who have been helped. Likewise, we may think of the concrete difference we can make in terms of preventing suffering for sentient beings: the difference between unbearable pain and complete relief in a real conscious subject like ourselves. Internalizing that our actions can make a positive difference for other beings is a key driver of compassionate action.

Another way to improve our drive is by updating our implicit beliefs and attitudes about it. For example, strongly identifying as a lazy person is unlikely to enhance our drive and may even undermine it. While genetic factors likely influence our base level of drive, we can still seek to stretch ourselves toward the upper reaches of our potential — and choose to identify as a person who does that.

For a more immediate boost, we can listen to energizing music. For instance, listening to music while exercising can reduce our perceived exertion and enhance our physical performance. Moreover, evidence suggests that energizing music can boost our drive for compassion when paired with compassion-focused practices, such as visualizing oneself among a compassionate community that seeks to help others.

We have explored many additional ways to strengthen our motivation and drive for compassionate impact throughout this book (especially in Chapters 3, 6, and 7), and these naturally complement the strategies discussed above. Taken together, we have many tools at our disposal for developing a healthy and sustainable drive to reduce suffering.

15.3 Harmonious Passion

The previous remarks about motivation and drive might seem to recommend an unhealthy obsession at the expense of having a healthy balance and perspective in life. Yet this need not be the case. It is possible to have an exceptionally strong drive while also finding a sense of balance and even harmony in our lives.

One way this has been expressed in Buddhism is through the idea of “joyous perseverance”, or “joyful effort”: a committed enthusiasm for acting virtuously and reducing suffering. Rather than viewing compassionate work as a burden or a duty, this perspective invites us to see it as a fortunate opportunity that we get to pursue based on our own sense of what matters most.

That we can have both a strong drive and harmonious balance also finds support in the psychological literature on having a passion in life. Researchers have identified two broad types of passion: harmonious and obsessive. Harmonious passion generally involves greater autonomy and enjoyment when pursuing one's passion. It involves a sense of control over one's passion and a basic harmony with other activities in one's life.

In contrast, obsessive passion is characterized by compulsive engagement and a lack of control over one's passion, along with a tendency to tie one's self-esteem to its pursuit. Individuals with this engagement style tend to feel emotionally dependent on their passion and feel like they need to engage in it to be okay.

Harmonious passion is associated with increased wellbeing and greater immersive flow and concentration. It also predicts greater resilience and a lower risk of burnout. For instance, one study found that harmonious passion predicted lower levels of exhaustion and burnout among health care workers, and this association remained when controlling for the number of hours worked. Additionally, studies have found that harmonious passion is a better predictor of work performance than is obsessive passion.

To be clear, the point is not that all forms of obsession are undesirable. After all, harmonious passion can itself be seen as a kind of obsession, albeit one pursued with a sense of agency and control, and it is also compatible with long and intense work hours. The problematic and defining aspect of so-called obsessive passion is really the compulsive or uncontrolled aspect, which can lead to harmful imbalances and overextension.

Having a fiery drive is extremely helpful, yet sustained impact still requires balanced motivation and action, not mere compulsive effort.

15.4 Role Models

Having role models can inspire us to be and do better. In particular, moral role models can evoke moral elevation — the uplifting emotion sparked by witnessing moral excellence — which has been found to increase altruistic behavior. More generally, studies show that role models can motivate us to do better across many areas of life, including in education and career achievement.

Thus, we may benefit from connecting with people who have experience in the field we are considering. Such connections can provide ongoing motivation and access to valuable and hard-earned lessons that may be difficult to find elsewhere.

Fortunately, when seeking out people to draw inspiration from, we do not have to limit ourselves to any one person or even to people in our own field. Instead, we can draw inspiration and lessons from people who are exceptional in a particular skill or domain. After all, no single person is likely to be the best or most inspiring across all relevant domains, suggesting that we may find greater inspiration and excellence in a collage of specialized role models.

For example, we can aspire toward the expansive compassion of Shantideva, the perseverance of Helen Keller, the curiosity of Leonardo da Vinci, the courage of Malala Yousafzai, the drive of Irena Sendler, the listening skills of Deeyah Khan, and the principled pragmatism of Nelson Mandela.

Learning and drawing inspiration from such exceptional individuals may leave us in a state of inspired awe that shifts our perception of what is humanly possible. In turn, we may expand our sense of what we ourselves might be capable of. What could we contribute if we set out to combine the highest expressions of compassion, courage, and determination toward reducing suffering for sentient beings?

15.5 Beginning Where We Are

Even when aiming high, we can only begin by working with what we have. Our starting point may include fatigue, confusion, and a tangled mix of selfless and self-interested motives. Such mundane factors, familiar to all of us, are part of the reality we have to work from.

Fortunately, we do not have to wait for optimal conditions or perfect certainty before taking the first step. The endeavor of reducing suffering is inherently messy and will always be pursued under imperfect conditions, including our own ordinary limitations.

Compassionate purpose begins with the next honest and practical step, and taking many such well-chosen steps is how we realize serious ambition. Rather than relying on unsustainable leaps, we generally do best by focusing on the steady growth of our capacities and our contribution.

In this spirit, what are the next steps we can take now? To answer that, it is often helpful to ask more specific questions. At the level of our individual development, it may be fruitful to ask: What is the most critical domain in which my patterns currently fall outside the golden range?

In other words, what is my greatest personal bottleneck to impact? For example, it could be irregular bedtimes, doomscrolling, or harsh self-criticism. Inviting outside feedback may be helpful here.

Once we have identified our answer to that question, we can ask: How would I ideally like to change in this respect? What is the most effective step I can realistically take to address this bottleneck? We can then go ahead and take that step.

Similar questions can help clarify our broader priorities and outward actions. What is currently my main strategic bottleneck to taking effective action to reduce suffering? This could be uncertainty about which cause or intervention to pursue, a lack of relevant connections, or a lack of domain knowledge. Seeking outside feedback may again be useful.

Once we have identified that bottleneck, we can ask: What is the most effective step I can realistically take to address it? Specifically, what is the best step I can take to address my key uncertainty, build the right connections, or acquire the relevant domain knowledge? Finally, we can pursue that step.

15.6 A Shared Vision for a Better World

Beyond identifying actionable next steps, it can be valuable to develop a shared vision for the kind of world we are working toward.

For example, we can imagine a world in which humanity increasingly endorses the core value of reducing extreme suffering for all sentient beings. Similarly, we can aspire to a world where more people have the freedom and the conditions to choose to live a life guided by compassionate values.

We can envision a world in which we have built a vast and growing repository of resources for effective suffering reduction, and where we proactively use our knowledge and tools to this end. In that endeavor, we can strive to be guided by curiosity and humility, willing to learn from mistakes and to adapt as we discover better ways to reduce suffering.

We can ground our vision in a strong norm of “relief with respect”: interventions should be consent-sensitive where possible, proportionate to the harm they address, and accountable. Our commitment to reducing suffering would be accompanied by strong guardrails against unjustified coercion and other forms of harmful overreach.

We can envision a future in which we steer our technological progress with greater prudence and foresight. In particular, we can imagine a future in which the reduction of suffering guides our technological development to a much greater extent, in everything from new technologies that can help wild animals to non-coercive tools for increasing compassion.

Interpersonally, we can envision a society in which we display greater care and take a sincere interest in one another, not just by caring about the wellbeing of everyone, but also by trying to understand each other's perspectives and by finding a deeper sense of solidarity. For instance, we may cultivate a stronger sense of unity in the struggle against suffering, while also being curious about how others understand and seek to address this struggle in their own ways.

We can envision a world in which we have developed institutions that robustly support the alleviation and prevention of suffering. For example, imagine having educational institutions that support people's development as autonomous and reflective moral agents across all major dimensions, from the emotional to the conceptual, from the personal to the political.

Likewise, we can imagine having an entire ministry devoted to the reduction of involuntary suffering, and even shifting toward a form of government that represents the interests of all sentient beings — a sentiocracy that gives consideration to all who can suffer.

Beyond formal institutions, we can develop a richer cultural ee-thoss: one that boldly faces suffering while also embracing playfulness, humor, and inspiration to uplift us in our pursuit of compassionate purpose. We can see ourselves building a wiser culture that empowers us to address unpleasant realities with harmonious passion and joyous perseverance. We can find common direction through a shared vision for a more reasonable and compassionate world — a world that we can gradually work toward, one constructive step at a time.

15.7 Parting Inspiration: Let Us Rise

Let us rise with clarity of purpose and seek to create a world where no sentient being suffers needlessly. Let us embrace a will to compassion at the core of our being, a will that does not require any external permission or approval.

Whatever may be true about the universe and the challenges we face, we can insist on compassion for all sentient beings and work to make a compassionate impact. Even if we may have pessimism of the intellect, we can still have optimism of the will, continually striving toward a better world no matter how difficult things might seem.

Let us acknowledge the profound common ground we share with every sentient being: no being wants to undergo extreme suffering. Let us align ourselves more closely with this common ground and act from it with courage and humility.

Let us keep in mind the many beings whom we can help. Let us keep in mind those who endure intense physical pain and those in severe mental anguish. Let us keep in mind the billions of chickens who are kept in tiny cages, the trillions of fish who are left to suffocate, and the countless wild animals who every day suffer agonizing disease and deprivation. May we keep all suffering beings in mind and do what we can to prevent their torment.

Despite the urgency of suffering, we can still approach compassionate action as a path that is open for us to choose — not as something imposed from outside, but as an active and self-endorsed choice. When helpful, let us approach this endeavor with inspiration and enthusiasm, in a spirit of joyful effort that elevates and energizes us.

Let us find gratitude in the fact that, unlike so many other beings, we are not stuck in a tiny cage or in conditions of starvation. Let us find gratitude and motivation in the many opportunities and resources we have available to us, and in our power to create change for ourselves and others. Let us find gratitude in our capacity to meet suffering with compassion, and to act on that compassion toward a lighter world.

Let us recall that there are many people seeking to reduce suffering with great dedication, people with whom we can join forces and find mutual support in our shared compassionate purpose. Let us collaborate to reduce suffering, recognizing that what none of us can do alone, we may yet accomplish together.

Let us embody a realistic hope for compassionate impact. Let us each carry a living hope for becoming a better person — with greater insight, agency, and care — and for ultimately creating a better future. Let us be inspired by such hope and continually act to fulfill it.

Let us remember that we can make a significant difference. We can alleviate and prevent unspeakable suffering. Each choice we make, each step we take toward greater compassion and growth, has the potential to move us toward a world of greater relief for sentient beings.

So let us strive to follow the highest path.

Let us dare to care. Dare to help. Dare to stand for compassion.

Let us dare to be honest. Dare to ask difficult questions. Dare to listen.

Dare to answer the cries of suffering beings.

Let us live well and bring relief to those in the deepest agony.

Let us never lose heart.

Even if suffering were to be infinite in scope,

so too shall be our commitment.

Let us begin exactly where we are.

Appendix: Addressing Key Nutrients

A.1 Vitamin B.12

Vitamin B.12 is essential for healthy nerve function and the formation of red blood cells. Supplementing with 50 micrograms a day is generally enough to reach basic B.12 adequacy, yet a higher dose may be required to achieve optimal levels, plausibly around 150 micrograms a day. Likewise, older adults with mild B.12 deficiency may need 500 micrograms a day or more.

There are different forms of vitamin B.12, with the two main types being methylcobalamin and cyanocobalamin, and there is no consensus on which form is better — it might be subject to individual variation.

In terms of what to aim for, the optimal B.12 serum level appears to be above 400 picograms per milliliter (295 picomoles per liter). Relatedly, a study concluded that elite athletes seem to have the best red blood cell parameters when their B.12 levels are around 400 to 700 picograms per milliliter.

A.2 Vitamin D and Sun Exposure

Several observational studies suggest that vitamin D levels around 28 to 40 nanograms per milliliter (70 to 100 nanomoles per liter) are associated with the lowest all-cause mortality risk. In addition, levels of vitamin D below that range have been linked to an increased risk of anxiety and depression, and meta-analyses have likewise found that vitamin D supplementation can help reduce symptoms of depression, especially among people with low vitamin D levels.

How much vitamin D should we take to get roughly within that range? Unfortunately, this question does not have a simple answer, since individuals vary greatly in terms of how efficiently they absorb vitamin D. However, most people will likely need to take roughly 400 to 2,000 I.U (10 to 50 mcg) a day. Some factors that influence one's needs include age and B.M.I: older people and people with higher B.M.I generally need a larger dose.

A further complication is that our bodies can produce vitamin D when our skin is exposed to sunlight, and there is evidence that sun exposure has unique benefits not obtainable from oral vitamin D intake alone. For example, the vitamin D generated from sun exposure is released more gradually in the body and is not prone to cause vitamin D toxicity.

Sun exposure also has benefits beyond raising vitamin D levels. For instance, studies have found that sunlight can reduce high blood pressure independently of its effects on vitamin D. Indeed, increased sun exposure is associated with lower all-cause mortality, plausibly in part due to its beneficial effects on high blood pressure. (High blood pressure is the leading risk factor for human mortality worldwide.)

However, getting adequate vitamin D from sun exposure alone may be difficult, especially during the winter at northern latitudes. Hence, a combination of non-burning sun exposure and oral vitamin D intake may be optimal.

When it comes to vitamin D supplementation, it seems preferable to use vitamin D.3 over D.2: vitamin D.3 is more effective at increasing vitamin D levels, its effects last for longer, and a meta-analysis of randomized trials found reduced all-cause mortality with vitamin D.3 supplementation but not with vitamin D.2 supplementation. (Note that vitamin D.3 is often derived from sheep's wool, but vegan sources of D.3 are easy to find.) Vitamin D is absorbed best when consumed with a fatty meal, and it seems better to take a frequent and moderate dose, such as 800 I.U a day, rather than taking an infrequent megadose.

Since individual requirements for vitamin D and vitamin B.12 can vary greatly, it makes sense to occasionally get one's levels checked to ensure that they fall roughly within the optimal ranges.

A.3 Omega-3 E.P.A and D.H.A

What is the optimal intake of omega-3 E.P.A and D.H.A? One way to approach this question is by looking at the omega-3 index, which is a measure of E.P.A and D.H.A in our red blood cells. Studies find that an omega-3 index above 8 percent is associated with lower all-cause mortality and fewer cardiovascular events. Similarly, people whose omega-3 index approaches that range have the lowest risk of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, as well as greater brain volume in old age.

Reaching this higher range may also benefit our mental health and cognitive function more broadly. For example, a recent meta-analysis found that supplementing with E.P.A and D.H.A improves attention, memory, and global cognitive abilities. Another meta-analysis found that it reduces affective dysregulation and impulsiveness among people who struggle significantly with these issues.

How can we get our omega-3 index above 8 percent? A common idea is that we can get enough long-chain omega-3s by eating omega-3 A.L.A, as obtained from walnuts and flaxseeds. Yet while A.L.A is important for our health, studies find that it is not effective at raising our omega-3 index to the healthiest levels, suggesting that we need to consume E.P.A and especially D.H.A directly. To achieve optimal levels, studies suggest a daily consumption of around 200 to 400 milligrams of E.P.A and 400 to 800 milligrams of D.H.A, depending on one's baseline level.

From both an ethical and a health perspective, there are good reasons to think that the best way to supplement with E.P.A and D.H.A is to take an algae-based supplement. From an ethical perspective, it avoids contributing to the extreme harms of the fishing industry. From a health perspective, it avoids toxins such as P.C.B's that are sometimes found in fish oil. Moreover, there is evidence that algae oil is less prone to becoming rancid.

A.4 Iodine

Iodine is required to make thyroid hormones, which help regulate metabolism, energy levels, and many other aspects of normal bodily function. To get enough iodine, one can use iodized salt or take a supplement that contains a daily dose of around 150 micrograms of iodine. However, in many countries, the levels of iodine in iodized salt are so low that it cannot be relied upon as an adequate source, in which case it is better to opt for a supplement or fortified foods.

A.5 Selenium

The recommended daily intake of selenium is 55 to 90 micrograms for basic adequacy, and a daily intake of around 100 to 140 micrograms appears to be associated with the lowest all-cause mortality. Moreover, there is evidence that selenium supplementation can enhance immune function even among people who fall within the standard reference range. Likewise, a small meta-analysis found that selenium supplementation helped reduce depressive symptoms compared to placebo, even though the subjects' selenium levels were generally within the standard reference range at the outset.

Selenium can be obtained from foods like Brazil nuts, green lentils, and portobello mushrooms. Yet since the selenium content of foods can vary greatly depending on their origin, it might often be safer to take a selenium supplement (while avoiding chronic intake above 255 micrograms a day). For example, the selenium content of Brazil nuts has been found to vary by more than three orders of magnitude (from 0.2 to 512 mcg/g), and hence relying on Brazil nuts for selenium could lead to either selenium deficiency or toxicity depending on the batch.

You've reached the end of the book.