But take it from me, someone who has volunteered for civic tech organizations and have participated in ground work for political campaigns. The most positive impact you could possibly make is money.
Political campaigns need thousands of volunteers. But someone who has no skills or education can volunteer. The supply pool is giant! But campaigns need millions of dollars in order to survive. It’s way harder to raise a dollar because in order to donate to campaigns the person usually needs to have discretionary income. And to move the needle financially for a campaign, you need to be fairly wealthy.
At the end of the day, maximizing your salary and donating, say 10k (2.8k direct + 7.2k via PAC) to a political candidate that you believe will make a way bigger positive impact than working for minimum wage or free for that candidate. Because your skills aren’t being used optimally. If you take a paycut from 300k to 60k, are you still comfortable making that donation?
Anyways, my personal mantra is to maximize income at impact neutral companies or positive adjacent. And then commit to donate a significant chunk of income to positive impact organizations. Don’t know if this helps or not.
- The work you're doing to make that 300k doesn't happen in a vacuum; it has an impact on the world too. Make sure it's not doing more harm (including the political donations that might get made by the owners you're making richer) than your donations are doing good.
- People aren't robots; intrinsic motivators are important for some. In some cases it can be worth making a smaller impact with your own hands, vs a larger impact that's unsustainable because your soul isn't being fed with a sense of purpose, because you're too far removed from the purpose.
I'm sure your approach works for some people, but I don't think it's an end-all answer to the question
I understand you don't mean that literally, but (to minimize disinformation among others): There is absolutely some number of lives saved which would compensate for that.
https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
Before writing off an entire industry, I beg you to consider that $45,000 could save 10 lives and improve many more (Yes; it's not precise. No; it's not out of their ass - read their extensive discussion of the calculations)
1. Some people are happy with creating more positive than negative. 2. Some people want to do no negative.
The practical problem with what you proposed is that now I need to vet the charities I donate and make sure its not a scam. Its a hard task to (i) spend 8 hours a day doing net negative (ii) spend more time per day to make sure you as a whole are net positive (iii) be social and have family etc.