Saturday 13 July 2019

Hallucinatory commitments, charitable mechanisms

The title of this post is an example of loose association. Nothing strictly bonds these things together other than that they are all on my mind at once. So as a relatively high-functioning person with formal thought disorder, I decided that it's as good as any a title for this post, given that it'll deal with all the things I'm alluding to.

The first word is a way of expressing that I am/was hallucinating. Specifically I was hearing the screams of thousands of people, dying, being tortured, being killed, all unjustly. People dying of easily preventable diseases. People murdered by repressive regimes. People starving and drone struck in Yemen. These are things that go on daily.

In an effort to relieve my hallucination and the stress it of course incurred, I made a charitable donation to GiveWell, a group that monitors charities, recommends them based on effectiveness, and—if you give to them directly—reroutes your money to charities it deems most effective at the moment. Hence the "charitable mechanisms": charitable donation as a coping mechanism. (In the vast majority of circumstances I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you give money to a worthy and effective cause whenever you feel guilty, that accumulates into a lot of good done, and remembering that can help you feel less bad about all the oxygen you're breathing.)

And as for "commitments", that refers to something very simple. I opened this blog with a promise, primarily to myself, that I'd write more frequently. I'm not saying much in this post, but it's something. And I hope to continue that.

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