Charity

It is good to have a purpose in life. People at different levels of educational, social, and financial status can help in various ways. Rather than just money donations, and for people who don't have spare money to donate, what is often better is using one's own abilities, time, and efforts to help people locally, and to engage in one's own community.

Some people have a lot of money but not the time, whereby financial donations only are good, of course.

What I am focused on more here is people doing good things for the community rather than just living a hedonistic lifestyle.

Logic tells many of us that we were fortunate to be born relatively well off, and to have many opportunities which others in this world did not have, by sheer luck.

I have helped a lot of people on my own, for free, and also given some people money when they needed it and who I thought would work their ways up, not just beggars. Professionally, I have worked on US Agency for International Development projects, both good ones as well as with projects in which I have some corruption and game playing which compromised the missions. It's good when large organizations can make a significant difference. However, we should act locally, too, as first responders to practical situations in our immediate environments.

Many of the kinds of good people I have worked with in humanitarian organizations have been quite different from what I encountered elsewhere, and more socially satisfying. When you work with people who truly care, it makes you feel very happy and have more hope for the world. To a considerable extent, I was drawn to work with some humanitarian organizations because of some of the kinds of people I was working with.

However, many of these were echo chambers, and working in business and dealing with ordinary people in society far outside of the ivory towers is very eye opening about the statistics of truly caring and giving.

I've also known a lot of nuts in the humanitarian field, as well as scammers. Poster children and slick websites are sometimes a big business. Government contractors are a mix of the caring vs. the careless corrupt with contacts and questionable modus operandi. Compassion drives our feelings to help the poor, especially when we see a poster child in an advertisement by a humanitarian aid organization which is slick in its appeals to peoples' emotions and perceptions.

It is a challenge to raise money for things like space development investments since it is a much more intellectual matter rather than emotional which appeals to a wide range of people.

Indeed, many people have argued that there are too many things that need money on Earth before we try to go to space.

However, all the other charity matters, as well as the lives of our grandchildren, will not matter if some entity makes humankind extinct, and space settlement may be our only realistic hope for the survival of humankind.

Unfortunately, I and many others have found it exceedingly difficult to raise money for space development, and our best hope has been extremely rich investors such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

I have long discussed these matters on my SpaceSettlement.com and GAINextinction.com websites, plus I have added the website HumanKindSurvival.com for some more current discussions.

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