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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

It is intentionally naiive to dismiss the concept that your actions, however small, have societal impacts.

Whether you intend them to, or are aware of the extent that they do, is a function of your personal curiosity and ability/data to analyze the causal impacts of your actions on broader outcomes.

I always see a lot of "I'm just a cog trying to make ends meet" responses, to these kinds of challenges. This is a willfully ignorant cop-out. Which is different from embracing some form of existential nihilism.

It might sound trivial but the quote from Socrates applies:

"The unexamined life is not worth living"

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My strategy is to mentally amplify my decisions to the space of all the other people who might be in my same situation, facing the same decision. I ask myself if it would make the world better for all of those people make a given choice, and if so, I do it on the faith that they will.

It's not about whether or not they actually will; obviously my individual decision will rarely have any kind of causal impact on others' decisions. It's about having a mental tool for weighing collective action; circumventing the psychological effect of the knowledge that, yes, your individual drop in the bucket probably won't make a meaningful difference on its own. At an individual level that logic is sound, but at a collective level it makes it impossible to create change.

This strategy also works for voting, making donations, etc.

What about if I just don't care?

I totally understand if you think less of me for this perspective but at least I am honest.

I legitimately do not care.

That's sad friend. Your community failed you when growing up. This makes me want to weep.

Outside of people with severe psychotic disorders, I have yet to meet anyone who had no consistent desires.

So I'd say you likely just don't know what you actually care about. Much like the vast majority of humanity since forever. So, you're in good company!

Honestly, the majority of people feel the same as you, they just won't admit it.

Most do care but about other things. For example they might care a lot that their company has a diversity policy and blacks out their Twitter avatar but not that their company helps overseas regimes kill journalists and opposition politicians.

Or they might care about their family, parents in care homes and their neighbours and church but not where their wage comes from a company that doesn't hire equally.

I would say its practical. That's basically people with nuclear families without support structures. Single people most likely will quit unless they are planning to get married. People would also most likely quit in functional countries as opposed to dysfunctional countries.

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