On Responsibility and Death: Can We See Reality for What It Is or Will It Break Us

She was probably friends with those crew members, wrote their obituaries, and would’ve contacted their families if they hadn’t been 70,000 lightyears away: “I killed your son.”It was an archetype I found inspiring. Someone who knew the weight of her responsibility and yet could carry it.Too many people can live their lives only because they close their eyes to their responsibility.“The mark of a civilized human is the ability to look at a column of numbers, and weep.”I started my first charity in 2010 – together with my wonderful friend Lisa Wiese, who is probably no longer with us – and within just over a year, I had a stream of some €50,000 per year that I needed to allocate to charities according to their cost-effectiveness. I read everything I could find about the comparative cost-effectiveness of various interventions that we could support – a wall to protect an orphanage from shamans who kidnap orphans for child sacrifices, provisioning of clean cookstoves, quad bikes for emergency medical care in remote villages, bed nets for malaria prevention, anal fistula surgery, undercover investigations of factory farms, and many more.Eventually, I made a decision, like a Star Trek captain. But that’s where the parallels end.For the first four years of my grantmaking, I could barely fall asleep. I self-flagellated with nightmarish, graphic, and intensely emotional fantasies of all the suffering that I had just inflicted because I decided that it’s better to make a grant to one place than another.The screams of the children abducted and sacrificed because I wouldn’t fund the wall for the orphanage, the torment of the mo