Good morning, John.

In your video this week, you were talking about how believing in a hopeful worldview actually makes it more likely that the hopeful stuff will come to pass. I think that this is probably right. I mean, it's hard to tease out because there are moments where it becomes hard to have hope, and part of the reason for that is because the hopeful moments are becoming less likely. But anytime you're thinking like, "Well, X behavior is gonna mean, like, Y outcome in the future more likely," I immediately start thinking about the guy who arguably saved the most lives in human history, who in fact was intending to do research on how to blow people up better. I'll link to a couple videos about Fritz Haber in the description.

We never really know what is going to result in what. Like, if you had told me that we were going to build a global communication network that would succeed in making it just as easy to talk to someone in Nepal as talking to your next-door neighbor, I would guess that that would result in a world that would be more connected and empathetic and where people's circle of care expanded. But we did that, and it has had on average the opposite effect. I think that's very important to try and understand in retrospect why that has happened, but I think just as important is recognizing that no one has time machines. We cannot predict the future. No one knows if X leads to Y, especially if X is happening now and Y is, like, more than 10 years from now.

There are some people in the world who argue that when we're talking about giving or philanthropy, we should be optimizing not just for protecting people today, but we should also be thinking about the people who do not exist yet. We should be expanding our circle of care to people many generations from now. I think that this is, like, fine in theory, especially when it comes to things that feel like they have a really concrete potential advantage, like making sure that the Earth remains fairly livable. But honestly, what I have seen in my 45 years is that we just don't know what's gonna help people in the long term. Again, nobody's got time machines. The future just gets out of focus extremely quickly, but I actually have a framework that I think fixes this.

Now, I'm not a moral philosopher, but I am a vlogbrother, and having done that for a couple of decades, it seems to me that there's basically just one thing that is very protective against harm being done to people, and that is the belief that lives are valuable. And not just that, but pushing back against the thing that my brain does and that your brain does where it believes that some lives are more valuable than others. Now, some amount of this is inevitable. Tie a stranger to one railroad track and my brother to the other one, and I absolutely will pull the lever because I'm not a moral calculator; I'm a human being. But that's maybe a little bit my point. Like I think there's a real danger in turning yourself into a moral calculator because it disregards the actual path of progress which is that human lives continue to get more valuable because people in our, like, social and biological and cultural and spiritual context just do believe that. And as we start to assign more value to the lives of people, that increases the amount of value in the world which increases the drive to provide better lives for people which makes people's lives better. This doesn't happen because somebody in the past was like, "Let's do some moral calculus and apply it to the future." No, it's just because life is precious.

And from that, I'm gonna make two points. First, since we cannot predict the future, we are likely to be much better at achieving near-term goals, and so, that's never a terrible place to focus. But second, and more importantly, I think that it's very possible that focusing on nearer-term goals is actually likely to deliver the better future. Because we have the resources we have today, and the more that we fight to place more value on people's lives, not just saving them, but making them rich and valuable, the faster we get to a world that is structured in such a way that does not treat lives as cheap. The value of life isn't something that we'll discover in the future. It's something that we generate and cultivate in the present. It is a resource that grows the more we insist it exists, and it is the basis for literally all value creation. In short, just as believing in a hopeful worldview actually makes it more likely that the hopeful stuff will come to pass, believing that lives should be full and rich and long today is likely to be the most effective path toward a future where lives are full and rich and long.

And that is why all those years ago we started working with Partners in Health and Save the Children during the Project for Awesome because they are organizations that reject the idea that some lives are more valuable than others. And it's also why the Project for Awesome is such a good and hopeful time every year and it is coming and is just around the corner. Put it on the calendar: February 13th to the 15th. And also, if you are the kind of person who might be able to give a little more, you can become a matching donor. We accept donations in checks and stocks and donor-advised funds and credit cards. We'll take your PayPal. We will take a shoebox full of cas–We will not take a shoebox full of cash. But by becoming a matching donor, you help build excitement during the live stream because at times we're able to double, triple, or even quadruple donations because of matches. If you think you might be able to be a matching donor, you could check out more about that in the description. We do not need to wait on this. We make lives more valuable in the future by insisting that lives are more valuable today.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.