As some of you know, I’ve pledged to give 30% of my income to the best charities I can find every year for the rest of my life.

It is, of course, a ridiculous stroke of luck that I am able to do this. The luck to be born in a place with consistent access to electricity and water, to parents who could take me to the doctor when I got sick and send me to school without fearing for my life (as in many parts of the world) or falling behind on rent to buy my school supplies (as for many of my classmates). The luck to live in a place where letting it slip that I date girls won’t cost me an internship or a job or my safety or my life, the luck to live in one of the only societies in the last two thousand years that doesn’t care at all if I’m Jewish, the luck that made me reasonably competent at some things that pay money.

I firmly refuse to feel guilty about my outrageous cosmic luck. I find it far more satisfying to pay it forward. See, luck, like pretty much everything else, can be bought with money. I was granted a roof over my head by random fortune, but I can send a couple thousand dollars to Kenya and let someone else buy a roof, or something needed more desperately. I was born by sheer chance into a country that has eradicated malaria already but I can buy a couple bednets towards the project of stamping it off this earth entirely. I am human, and thus (almost) everyone agrees that torturing me is wrong, and money can buy progress towards the goal of ending the torture of other animals also. Almost every advantage I have, everyone ought to have, and giving them money is the closest I can come to putting a finger on the cosmic scales.

Giving What We Can, the organization that takes these pledges and supports us in keeping them, is holding a pledge drive right now, asking people who can to commit 10% of their income to this project of changing global problems where money can make a huge difference. It’s not all of them - this blog grapples with a lot of issues that are hard to throw money at - but it’s a lot of them, more than you can probably imagine if you were born as fantastically lucky as me.

I have zero interest in making anyone feel guilty. But if you like the idea of levelling a battering ram at global inequality, if the problems in the world piss you off, if you wonder what sort of 50-year-old you’ll be and you want to commit to continuing to care, you might get a lot out of taking the pledge.

And if you’re unsure, and you want to talk it over with me for an hour, or ask a lot more questions, I would be delighted to be a part of your decision and to tell you more about how I made mine.