Summary: By exchanging gifts for Valentine's Day of donating to effective charities, you can both improve your health and well-being, and also advance global flourishing.
At least one person who read a draft version of this post, after talking to his girlfriend, decided to adopt this new Valentine's Day tradition, which is some proof of its impact. The more it's shared, the more this new tradition might get taken up, and if you want to share it, I suggest you share the version of this post published on The Life You Can Save blog. It's also cross-posted on the Intentional Insights blog and on Less Wrong. Thanks to Agnes Vishnevkin, Jake Krycia, Will Kiely, Jo Duyvestyn, Alfredo Parra, Jay Quigley, Hunter Glenn, and Rhema Hokama for looking at draft versions of this post.
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The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives
Last year, my wife gave me the most romantic Valentine’s Day gift ever.
We had previously been very traditional with our Valentine’s Day gifts, such as fancy candy for her or a bottle of nice liquor for me. Yet shortly before Valentine’s Day, she approached me about rethinking that tradition.
Did candy or liquor truly express our love for each other? Is it more important that a gift helps the other person be happy and healthy, or that it follows traditional patterns?
Instead of candy and liquor, my wife suggested giving each other gifts that actually help us improve our mental and physical well-being, and the world as a whole, by donating to charities in the name of the other person.
She described an article she read about a study that found that people who give to charity feel happier than those that don’t give. The experimenters gave people money and asked them to spend it either on themselves or on others. Those who spent it on others experienced greater happiness.
Not only that, such giving also made people healthier. Another study showed that participants who gave to others experienced a significant decrease in blood pressure, which did not happen to those who spent money on themselves
So my thoughtful wife suggested we try an experiment: for Valentine’s Day, we'd give to charity in the name of the other person. This way, we could make each other happier and healthier, while helping save lives at the same time. Moreover, we could even improve our relationship!
I accepted my wife’s suggestion gladly. We decided to donate $50 per person, and keep our gifts secret from each other, only presenting them at the restaurant when we went out for Valentine’s Day.
While I couldn’t predict my wife’s choice, I had an idea about how she would make it. We’ve researched charities before, and wanted to find ones where our limited dollars could go as far as possible toward saving lives. We found excellent charity evaluators that find the most effective charities and make our choices easy. Our two favorites are GiveWell, which has extensive research reports on the best charities, and The Life You Can Save, which provides an Impact Calculator that shows you the actual impact of your donation. These data-driven evaluators are part of the broader effective altruism movement that seeks to make sure our giving does the most good per dollar. I was confident my wife would select a charity recommended by a high-quality evaluator.
On Valentine’s Day, we went to our favorite date night place, a little Italian restaurant not far from our house. After a delicious cheesecake dessert, it was time for our gift exchange. She presented her gift first, a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation. With her $50 gift in my name, she bought 20 large bed-size nets that would protect families in the developing world against deadly malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In turn, I donated $50 to GiveDirectly, in her name. This charity transfers money directly to recipients in some of the poorest villages in Africa, who have the dignity of using the money as they wish. It is like giving money directly to the homeless, except dollars go a lot further in East Africa than in the US.
We were so excited by our mutual gifts! They were so much better than any chocolate or liquor could be. We both helped each other save lives, and felt so great about doing so in the context of a gift for the other person. We decided to transform this experiment into a new tradition for our family.
It was the most romantic Valentine’s Day present I ever got, and made me realize how much better Valentine’s Day can be for myself, my wife, and living beings all around the world. All it takes is a conversation about showing true love for your partner by improving her or his health and happiness. Is there any reason to not have that conversation?
I hear your concerns, and thank you for sharing them!
I think the issue of "making everything about altruism" is an important one to address. However, we seem to have different takes on how to go about this.
Let's take a bird's eye-view of our society. Currently, we have the consumer industry predominating our cultural space. The consumer industry creates a hedonistic treadmill around all aspects of our lives, including holidays. Valentine's Day is a classic example of a Hallmark Holiday, popularized by the consumer industry to inspire the population to buy stuff.
Now, I see our goal as trying to channel people's money into effective charity instead of consumerism. By comparison to the messages of consumerism out there, we're a tiny drop in the bucket. If we get even a bit more of our message out there, it would be a wonderful thing, I think. This article is an example of an effort to redirect a tiny proportion of that huge Valentine's Day spending into effective charities.
You postulate that for people who aren't EAs, this seems spammy. I would love it if that was the case! It would mean they were regularly exposed to such messages. From an effective giving marketing perspective, it would be a dream scenario. It's also incredibly unlikely to happen, given the current systemtic incentives.
Now, you might mean that it feels spammy to you. Might it be that you're more exposed to such messages than most people? I know that already a number of people indicated to me they will pursue this course of action. How much money has already been redirected toward effective charities because of that?
Here's some further evidence. Judging by the fact that this post got 500 FB likes the first day it was posted on The Life You Can Save Blog, which is followed by EAs and non-EAs, people are not finding it spammy. Note, the baseline for posts on TLYCS blog is about 100-200 likes over their lifetime, not the first day.
Here's another piece of evidence. It was just accepted for publication to The Plain Dealer, the 16th largest newspaper in the US. They would be highly unlikely to accept anything their audience would find as spammy.
Finally, regarding romance. This is something on which people will differ. If altruism doesn't float someone's romantic bubble, well cool - no pressure. For me, and potentially many others, it does. Regarding romance, I think of it as a feeling that I want to help the other person have a great life, be happy, and flourish, and a confidence that they want the same for me, with sex thrown in. That's perfectly compatible with altruism for me, but different people define romance differently :-P
Hope that helps relieve your concerns, and much appreciate you raising these issues!
It can be 'spammy' on the EA Forum, and not so on other publications.