Some people scoff at the idea that charity makes us feel better about ourselves. They figure that this is just something that people say in order to manipulate others into giving to charity, and that it is not a natural inclination that they would have without the requisite social engineering. The entire foundation of society is built on people being willing to help others, naturally, but plenty of people are still resistant to the idea because they take society and a good portion of what it offers for granted in more ways than one.

What I want to tell you is that there is a great deal of scientific evidence stating that giving to others really does feel incredibly good. When given the choice between giving something to others and keeping it for themselves, the people who choose to give something to others reported a higher degree of happiness than the people who were just interested in being self-serving. One of the secrets to being happy in the first place is to help others, which is the sort of conventional wisdom that a lot of people question, but which has a great deal of scientific evidence supporting it.

We evolved this desire to be social for a reason. Humans need each other in order to function in groups, and this is more important for us than it is for the majority of other animals. We would never survive on our own, given that we have fewer protections from the elements than the majority of animals. Our big strength has always been our brainpower. Brainpower, however, isn’t going to help you when you’re alone and you have no resources. Humanity created civilization with the help of other humans, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that if we did not have something of an innate desire to help one another. You tap into that innate desire each and every time you manage to help another person with anything.

Helping someone with something is going to stand out in your memory so much more as well. Lots of people don’t even remember a random sweater that they bought the one time. In a consumerist society, the purchases that people make have a tendency to blur together in one way or another. The times in which people help one another are the sorts of memories that you will save for posterity. They have much more meaning in a person’s life, and they always will.

One idea that is starting to become more mainstream is the notion of efficient charity as opposed to inefficient charity. It is no secret that certain charities are not run very effectively, and that a good portion of the monetary donations that they receive do not directly go into addressing the cause in question. It is also no secret that the causes themselves will vary tremendously in terms of how much they help society as a whole.

While I love animals, an animal rights charity is going to do very little for society at large, since animals are not part of human society in the way that people are. Given how damaging even the loss of one life can be to a community and to a family, a charity that is aimed at saving lives is going to work wonders for society as a whole. Charities that are aimed at attacking the roots of social problems were very much designed with the rest of society in mind.

I do think that efficient charity is a very important concept to keep in mind. People only have so much money to give to charity, even if they are very wealthy. It makes more sense to give to the organizations that will help the most people. While all charities will help some people, the difference between saving one life and saving hundreds of lives is unmistakable.

However, it is important to remember that adhering to efficient charity is a guideline and not a rule. I don’t want to discourage people from giving to the causes that they personally care about, and I would expect that they would extend the same courtesy to me. All people have certain emotional factors that motivate them to give to charity, and it is important to encourage those feelings. There is nothing wrong with giving to charity for the sake of warm fuzzies.

However, it should be noted that some charities are inefficient not because of the causes, but because the charities are actually doing very little to support the causes in question. All charities are going to need to spend money on their headquarters and meeting places, advertisements, and promotions. Charities like PETA barely spend their money on anything else. Even people who agree with PETA’s cause and tactics should hope that PETA is doing enough to help animals, which is certainly not always the case.

There are charities that are trying to deliberately scam their contributors. However, most of them are simply not run especially well. Making a difference in the world is really difficult. Not everyone is up to the task, which is why it is a good idea for some people to become donors instead of volunteers in the first place. Not everyone is wise enough to make that choice, and charities get headed by people who are not truly qualified for the job.

I would encourage people to research charities before contributing to them. Some charities are so efficient that a contribution of thirty dollars could save a life. Other charities are so inefficient that the donors are just helping them stay afloat, and nothing is really getting accomplished one way or another. Donors need to know which charities are which in advance, or they are going to find that their altruistic tendencies are going to waste.

Volunteer workers will sometimes speak derisively of charitable donors who just write a check for a given organization without actually contributing any of their time in order to volunteer. The people who hold this point of view are often very hostile about it as well. Some of them will draw parallels about the sales of indulgences during Martin Luther’s time. Other people will just assume that charitable donors are all callous wealthy people who don’t actually care about the causes that they give to, and that they’re just trying to achieve status among their fellow rich people.

I think that this worldview does a huge disservice to everyone involved with charity, and that includes the people that charities were designed to help in the first place.

For one thing, the idea that all charitable donors are rich is empirically false. Middle class people and poor people in the United States have consistently given a bigger portion of their incomes to charity than the rich. Naturally, when rich people do contribute, a comparatively small portion of their discretionary incomes is still going to be larger in terms of the sheer amount of dollars. However, while giving a million dollars to charity when you have twenty million is generous, the person who gives ten thousand to charity while having a net worth of twenty thousand dollars is technically making the bigger sacrifice.

People also should avoid focusing too much on the generous rich people of the world, like Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffett. By and large, wealthy people don’t give most of their money away. The image of the wealth charitable donor may convince some rich people to give away most of their money, but it also does a disservice to the middle class and poor people who really are making a huge sacrifice when they give a certain percentage of their income to charity.

The idea that charitable donors are not giving their time is also wrong in that it misrepresents economics. People need to take into account the time value of money. People spend a good portion of their lives earning money, and that is time that they could have spent volunteering or doing something else. Each dollar represents a certain amount of time that was dedicated towards earning it in the first place. When people donate money to charity, they really are giving their time, but in a very different way.

It should also be noted that not everyone who has a caring heart has a working body. Plenty of people with certain disabilities are not able to go out and do volunteer work. Even doing something like working in a soup kitchen may be difficult for people with mobility problems or problems with pain. People with psychological disabilities like social anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder may have similar problems in that sort of environment. Disabled people should not be shamed for the fact that many of them are not going to be able to help out in the manner of an able-bodied person.