---
layout: post
title: "Before donating, consider leaving that wretched job"
date: 2019-04-06 07:35:42
categories: misc
---

It is perhaps about the time i start looking for donations myself, but before i
go into details about that, i wanted to write a post to discourage people from
donating.

<cut/>

This may sound counter-intuitive, but the reason is pretty simple: i want to be
reasonably sure that for every donation i may receive, nobody (including me,
donor and possibly others) gets upset or regrets about it. It is unfortunately
not that uncommon for donations or their handling to result in heated arguments,
break-ups and other nasty stuff. I don't want that to happen to or around me.

But more to the point of this particular post, lets consider why do people
donate at all? There might be lots of different reasons, including pure
utilitarianist reasoning ("if i donate now, they will create more cool stuff for
me to enjoy"), personal sympathy, self-importance, gamification elements etc,
but ultimately i believe that for most people there's at least some degree of
what can be called "desire to make world better".

If that's the case, the natural questions arise: does particular donation make
world better? Could this money be spent in more effective world-bettering way?

I believe that it might often be the case that donation is indeed sub-optimal
and the better alternative would be to save the money and leave anti-social,
exploitative or in other way bad job instead. Why? Because if we are serious
about making world better, throwing money around (even for the good) will never
be enough. The argument about place of money in society is too long to be put
here, but i would suggest that generally if you're getting money in unethical
way, you're unlikely to balance that with then donating its fraction for the
good.

For example, consider programmer who makes proprietary software and then donates
some fraction of their salary to free software development. If you agree that
proprietary software is bad and unethical, you might also agree that such a
programmer would do world a better favour by finding more ethical way to sustain
their living, even if that means they could no longer afford donations.

***

With all that said, i do not want to imply donations are generally bad. Rather
than merely discouraging people from donating i want to encourage them to do
more direct change. Furthermore, if you look a bit deeper into the argument, you
may see that most of what i say about donations can be applied even stronger to
other forms of payments for non-material rewards (e.g. "buying" copyrighted
materials).

Essentially, it can be boiled down to this: consider minimizing negative impacts
of your job on the world before attempting positive impact via money. You may
still arrive at conclusion that you would prefer to donate, and that's fine; but
i hope next time you do it, you're doing it having considered alternatives.
