I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for almost 20 years now. I’ve been a restless vagabond and started dozens of different entertainment careers including setting up my own entertainment related company (several times). It’s been an adventure but also an experience full of trials and various hilariously inventive failures.
I don’t think it’s a shock for anyone to hear that entertainment is full of hopelessly miserable people whose only purpose in life seems to be making others miserable while they stack their money pile even higher. There are so many successful people who are also world class jerks that you might say to yourself “maybe there is something to this whole being an unrepentant asshole thing” and then you start yelling at a production assistant about why your salad is too cold and where-is-that-thing-I’m-pretty-sure-I-asked-for-5-minutes-ago anyway?!?
I tried on a lot of personalities over the years in an attempt to fool the gods of success into convincing them I was one of their tribe. It became a sort of religion to me. Maybe today if I wear this anger mask and dance around the fire the gods will believe I am also one of their spirit minions and shower me with riches. This did not work.
Eventually I went to therapy, spent more time in a state of both physical and emotional sobriety and learned to “let go and let god” to some degree. The thing I came to realize is that being of service to others made me feel better. I don’t mean like “I feel like a good person” but I felt more physically rested, I seemed to have less need for the waterfall like doses of pepto bismol and I started experiencing random feelings of joy just sitting at the park or wherever.
Making real attempts at being good has been important to my journey and has been a literal life saver. If you are struggling with purpose or meaning in your life try it out. People spend years in therapy or church or whatever and still live with a terrible emptiness that often leads to tragedy. The old Bible verse “faith without works is dead” is something I often think about. I used to feel dead inside but now I feel alive.
That’s been my experience and how giving has helped me realize a purpose I struggled to find for years. Nothing else worked as well or has sustained my spirit in the same way. I am joyful but I don’t take it for granted, it takes work and giving is part of that work.
> I do think of this as part of an ethic of trying to be a not-awful person, but it’s really just about being a cooperative member of society — someone who doesn’t free ride — rather than being a truly other-directed gesture.
There’s a lot in this article that I like and agree with, yet this point in particular resonated with me. Opposition to free riding seems like a right-coded belief, and despite that, I as a progressive liberal believe this is an essential foundation of society.
At some level, I think all people have an intuitive disgust of freeloaders. We might disagree about who are the worst offenders: are they billionaires living opulent lives from the proceeds of other’s labor or welfare cheats who live off the largess of the government? Yet, at a deep emotional level, everyone is offended by the idea of free riders in our society.
Further, the psychological hardware that opposes mooching seems essential to human cooperation and flourishing society. When people begin to believe that others are gaming the system for unjust rewards, then they lose trust in institutions and society at large. For example, look at how tax evasion has become endemic in south Europe, which only adds to their fiscal and economic problems.
I believe it would be productive for all of us across the political spectrum to accept and even embrace this aspect of human psychology. For example, Democratic politicians could recognize freerider aversion as a challenge to address in welfare policy design. We’d likely have more success in persuading voters to support welfare expansion if we communicate our concern about gaming the system, and further explain how we’ll defend against cheaters, including punishing them. Similarly, Republicans might have more success in generally lowering taxes on the rich if they are willing to call out and prosecute the worst cases of tax evasion by the wealthy.
Prior to Slow Boring's existence, I volunteered many hours to forming a local organization to help manage development in a neighborhood and community that was getting an influx of new transit. Local progressive groups sought to throw sand in the gears because they wanted impossible things ("the city just needs to prevent displacement and should just take this land and build 100% affordable housing"). Local NIMBY groups wanted to protect their own interests. The City had real needs because come ~2027 bond payments for a lot of great infrastructure work they had done would starting hitting for real, but the city had a bad habit of holding meetings to get community feedback and then ignoring it all in favor of being steamrolled by a developer who just wanted to build luxury studio condos. There were solutions, but the needle was VERY hard to thread and everyone was speaking a different language, including the developers. This is a skillset and a mode of thinking that not many people have (detached, meta-cognitive, non-reactive to just "scoring a win for my side"). The Slow Boring community has it. If you have time and live in a place where this makes sense, offer your services to help mediate these types of challenges. This match with Slow Boring's thinking is THE major reason why I subscribed when I first heard it was starting up!
> This means not just someone who meets de minimus standards of acceptable conduct but someone who tries to be of some real use to the world
I think this philosophical point might the key gulf between Matt and many of his critics. So much of the online left seems singularly focused on what you feel and say rather than the impact you have.
I don’t think we should give to panhandlers, whether or not we give elsewhere. It is, in essence, a job, which produces unpleasantness for other people. If we all did not give, people would just shift to actually productive jobs instead, and everyone would be better off for it.
My sister literally spends days planning, purchasing for, baking, and packaging baked goods for her kids' school bake sale. Now, she LOVES baking- loves every step of it and loves to admire the finished product. But I can't help but think how much more cost-effective it would be to just cut a damn check. But that's me!
"...a kind of crisis of meaning generated by the waning of religious faith paired with a culture that has come to weirdly valorize victimhood to the extent that people are incentivized to sort of wallow in their miseries and complaints."
Really insightful and well summarized, Matt. Absent a religious revival, I wonder where these cultural trends will go over time. Because the path over the past 25 years hasn't been very good in my view.
I really think acting locally is underrated. There's nothing wrong with having a normal middle-class job and, say, volunteering at the local soup kitchen. You get the emotional satisfaction, you're part of the community, and you can directly see that your effort is helping people. Not everything needs to be a cold calculation of where your dollar is best spent.
I don't actually do this – I'm lucky enough to be able to work on more global problems, though I still make sure to engage locally as much as possible to make sure they're working. But that's not inherently more noble in any way than just doing something in your own neighbourhood.
For Matt and my other DC neighbors, I can't recommend DC SCORES (https://www.dcscores.org/) enough as a local charity worthy of your donations. They run afterschool programs that keep kids engaged in both soccer and writing 5 days a week at high poverty schools, for free. I lived across the street from a school that had a SCORES program and I could see first hand how effective it was in providing activities and a safe, positive space for vulnerable kids.
It serves a huge gap in programming for kids with limited options otherwise. 4 Stars on Charity Navigator, lean admin dedicated to helping kids and not fattening the non-profit industrial complex, etc etc. They have expanded the program to other cities through SCORES America, and though I can't comment on how effective it is elsewhere, it's worth seeing and donating to if you have a local branch.
My suggestion for this field is to acknowledge that many people give to their old university. Rather than denounce this, I think it would be better to determine how to do it more effectively. For example, should I give money to my department, to the “area of greatest need,” or something else?
This is all to say that there is a large untrammeled field for the application of GiveWell-type evaluation methodology.
Question for the comment section—What percentage or HHI or net worth are people giving annually? I’ve got pretty high HHI and no real debt outside a mortgage but came from a family that struggled financially and can acknowledge it’s sort of turned me into a cheap ass in terms of charity. I currently give $1000/year to a local children’s hospital and $1000/year to a local food bank, and I try to be very generous with gofundme’s for causes that hit close to home and my wife does similar amounts but we’re still only giving like 1-2% away
If you are looking locally, please consider donating to of volunteering with your area Big Brothers Big Sisters. Pairing youth who have Adverse Childhood Experiences with adult mentors who show them new parts of the world is very high impact. Big Brothers Big Sisters has been around a long time and has real, validated impacts on life outcomes for these kids which translates into real impacts on your community. They are locally operated so program quality varies.
I've been thinking about this lately, exchanging my former apathy-based charitable inaction for wealth-of-options based inaction. I have heard EK and MY defend EA over the years, and even gave to GiveWell at some point. I felt a little good, but not all that good really.
The classic EA example of the child drowning in the pond is instructive for me. Not giving 20 dollars to a 3rd-world child is made equivalent to not personally jumping into the muck to save a local child. But if I'm being honest, the local child's life is of much higher value to me, and for self-serving reasons. A statement I would not make is, "I want to maximize the amount of human life on Planet Earth." What I would say is, "I want to live in a community that I value and respect, and that value and respects me." To that end, giving to local charity seems much more productive, even if in an absolute sense it is less productive. Not only would my local giving help someone I might rub shoulders with at the grocery store, it might have a secondary effect of making people in my community think I'm good. Those people might be more inclined to treat me with kindness or to extend career opportunities to my child.
I could be easily convinced that EA is overly cosmopolitan, full of rich, overly-rational men that buy a feeling of being good while allowing their local communities to fester and rot through neglect and disinterest. And that might be the rational thing for them to do. They have enough money that they can go to their literal and figurative bunkers ensconced in their walled gardens. I, however, don't enjoy that luxury. I have to live in and interact with my community. (MY says here he helps both locally and globally, so we'll give him a pass. I'm not writing this to attack Matt.)
I don't have a conclusion. I'm still trying to work through this stuff.
I’ve been a Slow Boring paid subscriber for over a year. I’m a small government/personal freedom guy (fiscal conservative/libertarianish). I very often disagree with your general direction (though I’m 100% in with your hyper YIMBYisum), but I always appreciate your logical approach.
I don’t have the time to comment very often, but I had to say something this morning because I think this is one your best posts yet. Good job!
"...weirdly valorize victimhood". When the dynamic and message in society is "you're either the oppressed or the oppressor; the victim or the victimizer", It's not surprising that many people would rather be the former. Victimhood also provides all kinds of excuses for why you're not happy and/or successful, and makes you "special".
The narrative in entertainment for decades has been the underdog, the victim, the sufferer is the hero, with that suffering directly tied to their hero status. Effectively, they are the hero because they suffer, because of things that happen to them, rather than things they do.
I think the "crisis of meaning" is much less about the "waning of religion" and more about the relentless centering of wealth (at all costs) rather than any kind of reasonable focus on being a good person. Society gives far too much play to wealth and the wealthy. Chasing the dollar at the expense of all else is a surefire recipe for a meaningless life.
I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for almost 20 years now. I’ve been a restless vagabond and started dozens of different entertainment careers including setting up my own entertainment related company (several times). It’s been an adventure but also an experience full of trials and various hilariously inventive failures.
I don’t think it’s a shock for anyone to hear that entertainment is full of hopelessly miserable people whose only purpose in life seems to be making others miserable while they stack their money pile even higher. There are so many successful people who are also world class jerks that you might say to yourself “maybe there is something to this whole being an unrepentant asshole thing” and then you start yelling at a production assistant about why your salad is too cold and where-is-that-thing-I’m-pretty-sure-I-asked-for-5-minutes-ago anyway?!?
I tried on a lot of personalities over the years in an attempt to fool the gods of success into convincing them I was one of their tribe. It became a sort of religion to me. Maybe today if I wear this anger mask and dance around the fire the gods will believe I am also one of their spirit minions and shower me with riches. This did not work.
Eventually I went to therapy, spent more time in a state of both physical and emotional sobriety and learned to “let go and let god” to some degree. The thing I came to realize is that being of service to others made me feel better. I don’t mean like “I feel like a good person” but I felt more physically rested, I seemed to have less need for the waterfall like doses of pepto bismol and I started experiencing random feelings of joy just sitting at the park or wherever.
Making real attempts at being good has been important to my journey and has been a literal life saver. If you are struggling with purpose or meaning in your life try it out. People spend years in therapy or church or whatever and still live with a terrible emptiness that often leads to tragedy. The old Bible verse “faith without works is dead” is something I often think about. I used to feel dead inside but now I feel alive.
That’s been my experience and how giving has helped me realize a purpose I struggled to find for years. Nothing else worked as well or has sustained my spirit in the same way. I am joyful but I don’t take it for granted, it takes work and giving is part of that work.
> I do think of this as part of an ethic of trying to be a not-awful person, but it’s really just about being a cooperative member of society — someone who doesn’t free ride — rather than being a truly other-directed gesture.
There’s a lot in this article that I like and agree with, yet this point in particular resonated with me. Opposition to free riding seems like a right-coded belief, and despite that, I as a progressive liberal believe this is an essential foundation of society.
At some level, I think all people have an intuitive disgust of freeloaders. We might disagree about who are the worst offenders: are they billionaires living opulent lives from the proceeds of other’s labor or welfare cheats who live off the largess of the government? Yet, at a deep emotional level, everyone is offended by the idea of free riders in our society.
Further, the psychological hardware that opposes mooching seems essential to human cooperation and flourishing society. When people begin to believe that others are gaming the system for unjust rewards, then they lose trust in institutions and society at large. For example, look at how tax evasion has become endemic in south Europe, which only adds to their fiscal and economic problems.
I believe it would be productive for all of us across the political spectrum to accept and even embrace this aspect of human psychology. For example, Democratic politicians could recognize freerider aversion as a challenge to address in welfare policy design. We’d likely have more success in persuading voters to support welfare expansion if we communicate our concern about gaming the system, and further explain how we’ll defend against cheaters, including punishing them. Similarly, Republicans might have more success in generally lowering taxes on the rich if they are willing to call out and prosecute the worst cases of tax evasion by the wealthy.
Prior to Slow Boring's existence, I volunteered many hours to forming a local organization to help manage development in a neighborhood and community that was getting an influx of new transit. Local progressive groups sought to throw sand in the gears because they wanted impossible things ("the city just needs to prevent displacement and should just take this land and build 100% affordable housing"). Local NIMBY groups wanted to protect their own interests. The City had real needs because come ~2027 bond payments for a lot of great infrastructure work they had done would starting hitting for real, but the city had a bad habit of holding meetings to get community feedback and then ignoring it all in favor of being steamrolled by a developer who just wanted to build luxury studio condos. There were solutions, but the needle was VERY hard to thread and everyone was speaking a different language, including the developers. This is a skillset and a mode of thinking that not many people have (detached, meta-cognitive, non-reactive to just "scoring a win for my side"). The Slow Boring community has it. If you have time and live in a place where this makes sense, offer your services to help mediate these types of challenges. This match with Slow Boring's thinking is THE major reason why I subscribed when I first heard it was starting up!
> This means not just someone who meets de minimus standards of acceptable conduct but someone who tries to be of some real use to the world
I think this philosophical point might the key gulf between Matt and many of his critics. So much of the online left seems singularly focused on what you feel and say rather than the impact you have.
I don’t think we should give to panhandlers, whether or not we give elsewhere. It is, in essence, a job, which produces unpleasantness for other people. If we all did not give, people would just shift to actually productive jobs instead, and everyone would be better off for it.
My sister literally spends days planning, purchasing for, baking, and packaging baked goods for her kids' school bake sale. Now, she LOVES baking- loves every step of it and loves to admire the finished product. But I can't help but think how much more cost-effective it would be to just cut a damn check. But that's me!
"...a kind of crisis of meaning generated by the waning of religious faith paired with a culture that has come to weirdly valorize victimhood to the extent that people are incentivized to sort of wallow in their miseries and complaints."
Really insightful and well summarized, Matt. Absent a religious revival, I wonder where these cultural trends will go over time. Because the path over the past 25 years hasn't been very good in my view.
I really think acting locally is underrated. There's nothing wrong with having a normal middle-class job and, say, volunteering at the local soup kitchen. You get the emotional satisfaction, you're part of the community, and you can directly see that your effort is helping people. Not everything needs to be a cold calculation of where your dollar is best spent.
I don't actually do this – I'm lucky enough to be able to work on more global problems, though I still make sure to engage locally as much as possible to make sure they're working. But that's not inherently more noble in any way than just doing something in your own neighbourhood.
For Matt and my other DC neighbors, I can't recommend DC SCORES (https://www.dcscores.org/) enough as a local charity worthy of your donations. They run afterschool programs that keep kids engaged in both soccer and writing 5 days a week at high poverty schools, for free. I lived across the street from a school that had a SCORES program and I could see first hand how effective it was in providing activities and a safe, positive space for vulnerable kids.
It serves a huge gap in programming for kids with limited options otherwise. 4 Stars on Charity Navigator, lean admin dedicated to helping kids and not fattening the non-profit industrial complex, etc etc. They have expanded the program to other cities through SCORES America, and though I can't comment on how effective it is elsewhere, it's worth seeing and donating to if you have a local branch.
My suggestion for this field is to acknowledge that many people give to their old university. Rather than denounce this, I think it would be better to determine how to do it more effectively. For example, should I give money to my department, to the “area of greatest need,” or something else?
This is all to say that there is a large untrammeled field for the application of GiveWell-type evaluation methodology.
Question for the comment section—What percentage or HHI or net worth are people giving annually? I’ve got pretty high HHI and no real debt outside a mortgage but came from a family that struggled financially and can acknowledge it’s sort of turned me into a cheap ass in terms of charity. I currently give $1000/year to a local children’s hospital and $1000/year to a local food bank, and I try to be very generous with gofundme’s for causes that hit close to home and my wife does similar amounts but we’re still only giving like 1-2% away
If you are looking locally, please consider donating to of volunteering with your area Big Brothers Big Sisters. Pairing youth who have Adverse Childhood Experiences with adult mentors who show them new parts of the world is very high impact. Big Brothers Big Sisters has been around a long time and has real, validated impacts on life outcomes for these kids which translates into real impacts on your community. They are locally operated so program quality varies.
I've been thinking about this lately, exchanging my former apathy-based charitable inaction for wealth-of-options based inaction. I have heard EK and MY defend EA over the years, and even gave to GiveWell at some point. I felt a little good, but not all that good really.
The classic EA example of the child drowning in the pond is instructive for me. Not giving 20 dollars to a 3rd-world child is made equivalent to not personally jumping into the muck to save a local child. But if I'm being honest, the local child's life is of much higher value to me, and for self-serving reasons. A statement I would not make is, "I want to maximize the amount of human life on Planet Earth." What I would say is, "I want to live in a community that I value and respect, and that value and respects me." To that end, giving to local charity seems much more productive, even if in an absolute sense it is less productive. Not only would my local giving help someone I might rub shoulders with at the grocery store, it might have a secondary effect of making people in my community think I'm good. Those people might be more inclined to treat me with kindness or to extend career opportunities to my child.
I could be easily convinced that EA is overly cosmopolitan, full of rich, overly-rational men that buy a feeling of being good while allowing their local communities to fester and rot through neglect and disinterest. And that might be the rational thing for them to do. They have enough money that they can go to their literal and figurative bunkers ensconced in their walled gardens. I, however, don't enjoy that luxury. I have to live in and interact with my community. (MY says here he helps both locally and globally, so we'll give him a pass. I'm not writing this to attack Matt.)
I don't have a conclusion. I'm still trying to work through this stuff.
Thoughtful and reasoned, I was inspired by this post, thank you!
I also appreciated the links to the YIMBY groups (alas, none near me) and political GiveSmart lists. Helpful!
Good Job, Matt! 👏👏
I’ve been a Slow Boring paid subscriber for over a year. I’m a small government/personal freedom guy (fiscal conservative/libertarianish). I very often disagree with your general direction (though I’m 100% in with your hyper YIMBYisum), but I always appreciate your logical approach.
I don’t have the time to comment very often, but I had to say something this morning because I think this is one your best posts yet. Good job!
"...weirdly valorize victimhood". When the dynamic and message in society is "you're either the oppressed or the oppressor; the victim or the victimizer", It's not surprising that many people would rather be the former. Victimhood also provides all kinds of excuses for why you're not happy and/or successful, and makes you "special".
The narrative in entertainment for decades has been the underdog, the victim, the sufferer is the hero, with that suffering directly tied to their hero status. Effectively, they are the hero because they suffer, because of things that happen to them, rather than things they do.
I think the "crisis of meaning" is much less about the "waning of religion" and more about the relentless centering of wealth (at all costs) rather than any kind of reasonable focus on being a good person. Society gives far too much play to wealth and the wealthy. Chasing the dollar at the expense of all else is a surefire recipe for a meaningless life.