“Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”
– P.J. O’Rourke
I first learned about mutual aid from a reader of this newsletter in December 2020. I had asked everyone to share the things that made them happiest in the previous week, and for this particular reader, making deliveries with her local mutual aid group was one of them. It sounded like an interesting way to stay active during a bleak period of the pandemic, so I reached out to learn more.
Mutual aid is simple: Members of a community organize to voluntarily help one another. After being put in touch with the right people, and getting added to the group’s email list, I began to help strangers in my neighborhood. My first task was to deliver masks and cleaning supplies to elderly residents in Downtown Brooklyn.
Eventually, I graduated to grocery deliveries, and began taking orders from a woman named Flora, who was unable to carry heavy grocery bags and did not feel safe leaving her apartment during COVID. I found her pickiness oddly endearing – “green grapes, unless they’re from Peru” – and enjoyed hearing wonderful stories about her 70-odd years in Brooklyn while helping to unpack the food. We hit it off.
That was two years ago, and I continue to deliver Flora’s groceries to this day. I’m no longer part of the email list, since the group is now defunct, but I’m still a fixture in Flora’s life, just as she is a fixture in mine.
We’ve spent more time together over the past two years than I have with most people.
I’m reminded of Flora whenever I start feeling down about the state of the world and my ability to do anything about it. No matter how useless I feel in the face of great suffering, or injustice, I know that at the end of the day, there is a woman half a mile away who needs me to go get her groceries.
I can help with that.
On the other side of the mutual aid movement is effective altruism, a philosophy which argues that individuals should make rational, data-driven decisions in their lives that maximize the positive impact of their time and money on the world. Viewed through that lens, my work with Flora is unhelpful at best and unethical at worst. The time and money that I spend on her – a woman living in a comfortable apartment in the United States – would be better spent on people in the developing world, dealing with worse things than loneliness and discomfort.
As effective altruist Peter Singer writes in The Most Good You Can Do:
“Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.”
I found Singer’s book extremely compelling when I read it back in 2018, but now I’m not so sure. After two years working with Flora, I’m less and less convinced that effective altruism has a chance of making it to the mainstream. The most good that most people can do is not, like the effective altruists argue, donate 50% of their income and all of their free time to saving people around the globe. The world would be a better place if that were the case, but it’s not.
Instead, the more reasonable goal I set for myself is to find someone nearby who can use a helping hand, and offer it to them. After all, each of us has two hands to give.
If the most good I do in my life is ensure that Flora has groceries in her apartment each week, then I’ll be content. I won’t go down in the history books, but I’ll have made a measurable impact on one woman’s life. That’s good enough for me.
We should all consider lowering our expectations of how much good we can do, if we ever hope to do any good at all.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
11 Important Things I’m Thinking About in 2023 – Ryan Holiday
“Success, at the end of your life, is a crowded table—family and friends that want to be around you.”
I Want to Lose Every Debate – Derek Sivers
“I don’t want to convince anyone of my existing perspective. I would rather be convinced of theirs.”
What I’m Listening To:
Adagio For Strings – Hauser (Youtube, Spotify)
John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race – Conversations With Tyler
“It would be nice if language were more efficient because it would be easier to learn other people’s languages, et cetera, but it will never happen because languages are like cats. They’re always crawling in and getting dirty or stung.”