the shape of a useful life (a triangle?)

Lately I have realized I am pulled by three things that do NOT naturally agree with each other:

• Effective altruism: help people as much as possible; make as much impact as possible.
• Founding/startups: build something new; be agentic; maybe be the one.
• Love: remain human, attached, tender, and non-abstracted.

This is not meant as a taxonomy of EA people, founders, or anyone else. It is more like a map of failure modes I recognize in myself.

I used to think Effective Altruism and the startup world were almost incompatible. In my head, they sat on opposite ends of the purpose spectrum. EA felt like: it does not matter who helps, only that the most help is done. Startups felt like: I saw something missing in the world, and I am going to be the one to build it.

Both are noble. Both can also become incredibly weird.

After a long year at Oxford surrounded by AI safety enthusiasts, I probably lean more EA than I used to, though I still would not exactly identify as EA. One of the more interesting posts I have read recently is Lessons from my time in Effective Altruism, which captures some of my ambivalence better than I can.

Despite the valid criticisms of the actual community, I think the central claim is hard to dismiss: if I can use part of my income, my time, my career, or my attention to prevent enormous amounts of suffering, then I probably should. Why wouldn't you?

But there is also a part of me that still yearns to found something.

We COULD just join the most optimal existing effort. Sometimes that is exactly the right thing to do. But it can also feel like becoming a replaceable unit in the highest-impact machine. It feels much more fun and human to build something from zero, to take responsibility for an idea, to make something real that did not exist before. And if I am being honest, some part of that desire is noble, and some part of it is ego.

That is the uncomfortable part.

At one failure mode, ambition becomes the desire to be THE ONE who builds it. If someone else is building something similar, and maybe doing it better, joining them feels intolerable because then you do not get to be the person who made it happen. The world matters, yes, but so does your place in it. Sometimes this works spectacularly. It also produces a lot of people who seem less interested in the world than in their proof of exceptionalism.

EA has the opposite failure mode, or at least it claims to. In theory, it is not about you. It is about helping as much as possible, as efficiently as possible. It is supposed to remove ego from the equation.

At its best, I think EA does something morally clarifying. It forces you to admit that your intuitions are biased toward proximity. You care more about the person crying in front of you than the stranger you will never meet, because narrative hits harder than magnitude.

That is the part of EA I find harder and harder to dismiss. It asks whether my compassion is really compassion, or just attachment to the people close enough for me to feel.

But EA has its own ego trap too. Caring can start to feel most legitimate when it sounds abstract, global, and emotionally detached. And even in a movement built around helping others, there is still a way to become the main character. I can operate at global scale. I can optimize for impact. I am rare and clear-eyed enough, so it has to be me.

It is still about helping the world. But it is also, sometimes, about being the kind of person who helps the world. That distinction matters.

So this is the tension I keep circling around: I believe EA is basically right about the obligation to help. I also believe founding can be beautiful, generative, and morally serious. And I am terrified of using either impact or ambition to escape the actual intimacy of loving people.

Because if I am being honest, what drives me is much less clean than either ideology.

I want to feel things deeply, experience life fully, and more than anything, I want to love people. NOT save them, NOT optimize them, NOT reduce them to some unit of impact. Just love them.

From the outside, that can look almost identical to altruism. If you care about people, if you pay attention, if you are actually present in their lives, you do end up helping them. But the internal logic is completely different.

I still believe that. But believing it is not the same as living it, and love by itself, at least the cozy immediate kind, does not actually get you all the way there.

Because here is the thing about love without scale: it slides into sentimentality way too easily. It becomes a comfy excuse for only stepping up when helping feels emotionally natural, when the person in front of you already has a face and a story and a favorite ice cream flavor. It lets me convince myself that the sheer intensity of my feelings for the people I know is the same thing as having a large moral universe. And that is just not true.

The people close to me are vivid. They have voices and bad days and inside jokes and birthdays. They are effortless to care about because they already feel real to me. But the harder question is what I owe to everyone else, the person who will never be vivid to me, who will never have a name or a story I can hold onto.

This reminds me of something Kay Aull wrote on Quora about why communism does not scale. Her point was psychological: once people become statistics, they stop inspiring the same loyalty as a face. You cannot feel your way into caring about a million strangers the way you care about one person in front of you.

That is exactly the problem love runs into when it tries to stretch beyond the people you already know. And that is also where EA gives love a much-needed correction: fairness requires more than tenderness toward whoever happens to be standing nearby. The stranger is not less real just because you will never hear them laugh or know what they are afraid of.

But love gets to argue right back: do not get so abstract that you forget what a person actually is. Do not forget the moral texture of one person's pain, the specific kind of pain that happens in a specific body on a specific Tuesday.

And this is where founding re-enters the picture, not as the enemy of EA, but as one possible way of putting it into practice.

At its worst, founding is ego with a pitch deck: the desire to be inevitable, to have gotten there first, to have your name stamped on the thing that finally mattered. But at its best, founding is much simpler and harder. It is taking responsibility. It is noticing a missing institution, tool, product, system, or whatever it may be, and deciding to become accountable for bringing it into the world, whether anyone claps or not.

That kind of ambition is not obviously anti-EA. Sometimes it is exactly what impact demands.

So EA gets to ask ambition a hard question: are you building this because it genuinely matters, or because you want to be someone who matters?

And founding gets to ask EA an equally hard one: are you actually changing reality out there, or have you found a sophisticated way to refine your moral framework forever without ever getting your hands dirty?

Ideally, I do not want to choose. I want ambition to stay answerable to impact. I want impact to stay answerable to actual human beings. And I want love to remain the thing that makes any of it worth doing in the first place.