Starved for rational moral guidance and prisoner to a catatonic state the Saturday following Election Day, I hopped in my car early in the morning to head to Princeton University and speak with Peter Singer, one of the most renowned moral philosophers of our time. Numbed by a contradiction of my generation - our righteous liberal ideals with our abysmal voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election - I needed help understanding how to convert millennial ideals into tangible impact.

While chowing on vegan food at the Effective Animal Advocacy Symposium, where Singer had just given his keynote speech, I gleaned wisdom from a soft-faced philosopher with wisps of white and grey hair haphazardly strewn about the sides of his balding head, sporting rounded spectacles, and sitting before me enjoying a bag of vinegar chips. I had one goal in mind, to cull from Singer’s years of experience defining change to help me build a new moral pathway in a post-Trump America.

My generation is mobilizing in facebook groups, organizing the Women’s March in DC, prepping for the 2018 mid-term elections, issuing de-escalation hacks for harassment, curating nasty woman art exhibitions, and channeling Pramila Jayapal’s win in Congress into progressive hope. We’re attempting change - the question is, will our ballooned efforts last, deflate into mundane life, or worse, culminate into Twitter compulsive disorder?

There is a growing fear that following Inauguration Day, we will slowly lose steam, and what started as a reactive surge to what Van Jones has called America’s “whitelash”, will dissipate into ineffectual Facebook quips that do more to stroke our quixotic virtual egos than solidify our ideals. Are we a generation that has taken heroism hostage, fronting care and concern into highly-tailored instagram photos? Are we riding a raging liberty train in the hopes that our wind-swept hair will somehow whip us into selfie-stick bearing social justice warriors. Millennials and rising youth run the risk of being defined more by our manufactured digital personas than our actionability. How will we channel our energy into change?

As a leading figure of effective altruism, “a philosophy and social movement that applies evidence and reason to determining the most effective ways to improve the world,” Singer is an expert on creating change. As opposed to taking a typical charitable approach - giving or helping because it makes you feel good or less guilty - effective altruism attempts to create greater impact through reason. It has the moral imperative of charity, the efficiency of a well-oiled machine, and the wit of socratic thinking - it is “more moved by arguments than by empathy,” as one effective altruist puts it in Singer’s book The Most Good You Can Do.

What does an altruist savant have to say to our generation in light of the election? With the air of an unruffled sage, Singer holds us accountable, millennials “should realize that those who didn’t vote or didn’t help Clinton to get more people to turn out to vote made a tragic mistake, and that if Clinton’s turnout had been higher, she would have won.” We all know this election’s voter turnout is a blight on millennials, but hearing so from Singer in a moralizing drawl was a socratic smack in the face. Singer’s rebuke to my generation stamped in the realization that there is a harrowing mismatch between our ideals and how we make them a reality - if we failed to vote, let alone get people to vote, what merit do our ideals have?

You might remember Batkid’s ride around “Gotham City”, an event orchestrated by the Make-a-Wish Foundation to make the wish of a child with Leukemia come true. We might all feel positively toward such a giving act, but an effective altruist would not - the average $7,500 needed to fulfill a wish could instead save the lives of three or more children, according to Singer. This righteous indifference is not dissimilar to our pre-election feelings - both conservatives and liberals expressed disapproval with Trump leading up to his win, but that didn’t convert to a vote for Hillary Clinton. Now we are living with that regret. For those of us who voted, our discomfort lies in something more insidious - we’ve been wearing liberalism as a cloak of status, shielding us from the grim reality of poor white discontent. Singer’s movement can teach us the importance of effective action - we should embrace a philosophy that is imbued with logic more than bubbly facades of goodness, it could have saved us from our own preaching in this election.

What does Singer urge us to focus on? He advises us to “start to build organizations, where people will pledge to vote and pledge to work to get out the vote to other people so that this doesn’t happen again.” Voter participation will be key in the 2018 congressional midterm elections - all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be contested. Gathering pledges now, while feelings are still incensed, to vote in the future can ignite dormant kegs that surfaced in 2008 for Obama - channeling this into Congress and the Senate is the kind of action that can prove lethal for Trump and that we should stick to.

Thinking about long-term systematic adjustments will be important too. Singer supports reform of the electoral college, citing the “disproportionate influence to small states,” and giving favor to an instant runoff voting system, which would allow states to award electoral votes to the most popular candidate. More than ever, we see the electoral college as an anachronistic vestige of the past, but we can agree with Singer that throwing it out wholesale with a constitutional amendment is less realizable than having states work around it. Maine was the first state to institute ranked-choice voting this year and if we’d had it nationwide, it might have won Hillary Clinton the presidency. Focusing on ways to actualize a runoff voting system could be the kind of long term initiative to carry into future generations and that is within our reach - we should be organizing campaigns to support ranked-choice voting in more cities and states.

What I searched for most from Singer came in his perspective on how we should react to Trump. Singer revealed the kind of insight that can help us to construct a view of change we’ll need moving forward.

“We definitely need to think a lot more about how we can try to persuade people to have a broader perspective. I mean I see part of the problem with the election as Trump’s slogan of make America great, [it] ignores the rest of the world, and I think a lot of his policies ignore the rest of the world...so we have to try to get people to take a broader perspective, and if we can find ways of doing that, that would be really important.” Singer’s call for a global mindset was exemplified in his response to what he thought was the most important issue with Trump’s election victory.

“One issue that concerns me most about Trump’s election really is the impact it will have on climate change because that’s going to affect everything, humans as well as animals, and it looks like this election can be extremely negative to that.”

Singer’s response felt like a calming ointment against the disorienting effects of rhetoric and fake news. Global warming can send the anthropocene era into a meltdown, and it demands our attention. Trump’s open denial of our baking planet, and the recent appointment of climate-change skeptic Scott Pruitt to the Environmental Protection Agency signals a battle that screams as loud or louder than bigotry.

It’s telling that I interviewed Singer at an animal advocacy event only days after the election - his commitment to helping animals illustrates a striking, even unreasonable aplomb - Singer doesn’t hesitate to put race issues on the same table as animal rights.

“I think they’re both important issues, and to say that we shouldn’t devote any time to animals because some groups of humans are not equal, is to assume that human issues are always more important than animal issues, and that’s exactly the species-bias that I think is not justified any more than it wouldn’t be justified to say as long as there are some poor whites we shouldn’t bother about poor African Americans. That would be a horrible thing to say, people say something very parallel about animals without realizing what they’re saying.”

A statement like this is the kind of moral foiling characteristic of Singer and that invites instinctual abhorrence in some people, much like others would find it abominable that pigs are being stabbed with metal prods to be bleeded out while alive. Singer’s view of animal rights is extreme, and many will disagree with his stance on speciesism. However, I urge those who feel disagreement swelling in them to draw a grain of sagacity from Singer that you can use to astounding effect - consistency is king. No amount of personal disparagement, online harassment, and social or political pressure will dissuade Singer from his vision to help where it is needed. This sentiment is reflected in Singer’s personal view on monitoring the Trump administration.

“I’m personally not going to shift towards that, I think there’ll be enough focus, and I think the kinds of issues I’ll be focusing on, like animal advocacy and effective altruism are still just as important or more important than before, I’m going to keep focusing on those things.”

It’s true that as a generation, we are very good at taking up a cause when it has our hearts throbbing and when social media gives ventilation to our ire, but we learned that our high-flying ideals were both the bubble wrap to cushion our feelings and to hide us from the bleak truth in this past election. We’re experts at spouting opinions, but amateurs at actionalizing them.

If the election of Trump has spurred us to care about politics and civic engagement, I’d like to take the spirit of Singer’s message to step beyond momentary shock and transient heroism. Here’s a man that consistently stands behind animals, to the extent one might think he’s comparing eating sushi to the threat of lynch mobs. This is not Singer’s message, but sponging consistency from his stubborn poise is exactly the kind of virtue we’re missing. Why aren’t we passionate enough to carry our conviction into action and over time. Isn’t our generation’s insignia passion itself?

We’re defined by our entrepreneurial acumen, technological boon, and willful optimism. We can build castles in the sky as dexterously as Miyazaki, but converting this skill and zeal into action will prove our pragmatism as much as our aesthetic. Consistency is greater than bleeding picket signs and muted coffee-house banter. We have the tools we need to usher in a mindset that steps beyond a like-happy facebook post and into greater voter participation, reform of the electoral college, care for our environment, and reduced consumption. Stepping beyond ourselves is stepping beyond our inconsistency, and giving long-term thinking a place not only in post-election heat, but in our lives. It is up to us to define a philanthropy of the machine, a deeply integrated altruism of action and passion that can travel through digital airways and into the oval office. After we’ve had a go at it, perhaps even Peter Singer will have an upgraded altruism to champion.