EA - A Manifesto by sophiathephirst

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Manifesto, published by sophiathephirst on February 7, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I started writing my EAG Bay Area application tonight (as any chronic procrastinator does), and instead ended up whipping up my backstory and a public declaration of my life's mission.I moved to Berkeley in July of 2022 without knowing what EA was. I moved to California alone at 18 because I needed to find a community that both shared a similar fervor for their work, and had values that aligned with mine. Rolling back a couple of months, to May of my senior year of high school, I knew my time was coming to an end. I had so few days left to leave a tangible impact on a community I loved so dearly. I had grown a deep-rooted seed of love in my heart for my senior class, as well as the underclassmen I had mentored in sports, and academic tutoring.I was brought up in a Christian household with core values of love, kindness, and responsibility. As I grew up, I tied these three values together, so by the time I was a senior in high school, the class president, and well-liked by my peers and administrators, I knew I needed to make a difference. I used the skills and ideas that I possessed to make my high school a better place for my peers, in return for the community and friendships they provided. But this love, and drive to make the community better extended beyond my peers.I had grown up doing service projects, packing meals with Feed My Starving Children, helping the homeless during the George Floyd murder and riots near my home, and helping people who needed it. I grew up with two polar opposite perspectives from my parents. I had been instilled with the values of love and kindness from my mother, who would always go out of her way to make those around her comfortable and content. On the other side, my father, an observant, methodical engineer, taught me to think about why things worked the way they did. I ended up with a blend of these traits, which led me to sit in a hotel room one night in West Yellowstone, staying up until 2 am, reading about effective charities to which I could donate my money.I was raised to work hard and earn my own money from a young age. I started caddying at the local country club at the age of 12, and by the age of 16, I had earned over $10,000 the previous summer. A little over a year before Yellowstone, I had decided that I would start donating a portion of my money. I had always tithed as a child, and at 15, my friend’s brother had recently become a quadriplegic, and I felt compelled to give $500 of my own money to help pay for rehab services.At 15, I realized that there were two intuitive components to altruism, one of which I had been missing at the church. 1) I would donate my resources to causes that I felt passionate about, as I believed there was an emotional element that I needed to acknowledge which is hard coded into humans, that we as humans should help those around us, to preserve the lives of others, and further our collective existence. 2) I wanted to give to causes that I knew my money would go to good use for. I started to question how my money had been used at church, and where my money was going when I donated to charitable causes such as WorldVision, and the Salvation Army. I needed transparency. I needed to know that the time and energy I had put into earning my funds, was saving lives equally if not, better than I could if I used my time to save lives directly.Flash forward to July of 2022, I sat in the Berkeley WeWork astounded that I had just talked to someone who shared the same passion that I had to make the world a better place, because of their love for humanity, as well as their desire to use their time effectively, and ask questions about why people did the things they did and acted the way they do. I soon stumble...