The Pendulum of Privilege: Moving From Guilt to Action

I spent my early adulthood in various coastal subcultures of the 1990s and aughts, where people wore thrashed clothes, drank cheap beer, performed in warehouses—and where it was hard to tell who was a genuine starving artist and who was slumming. No one dared to admit that they were living on money that they hadn’t earned, or that they were spending it on nights out in a world where crushing need was always right there on the periphery. I would know: I was one of those Pabst-chugging children of privilege.

Recent research suggests that there are a lot of people like me. In a New York magazine cover story from February 2025, I learned that roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults under 43 depend on financial help from their parents. The article’s anonymous sources talk a lot about hiding or downplaying their privilege. What hardly comes up at all is the question of what to do with that privilege, beyond one’s personal needs and desires. About five years ago, the answer to that question became a little clearer to me.

Nothing to Something

Growing up, I went to public school and blended in smoothly enough with the kids whose parents were teachers, carpenters, and civil servants. But my dad worked in Hollywood, and my maternal grandparents were handy with real estate. We weren’t mansion rich, but vacations and spending money were plentiful, and debt was an alien concept. Perhaps because of this discrepancy between my peers and me, I never trusted my family’s worth, or my own as a human. I worried that I would be exposed as a coddled rich kid and that the money would dry up without warning.

As I neared adulthood, I made a bet with the funds that would appear, unearned and unrequested, in my bank account: Okay, money, I said, I won’t spend too much of you. In exchange, you won’t run out and I won’t have to think about you.

Under this agreement, I pursued my creative passions while holding down part-time jobs until my early thirties, when a career finally began to take shape. Even then, I wore used clothes, dragged furniture off the street, and kept a death-grip on my cheap apartment. My charitable efforts were minor and ad hoc: one-off donations made to gun-control orgs and political campaigns; memberships impatiently given to clipboard-wielding volunteers. These gestures did nothing to quell a newer strain of guilt that had been building up in my head—a voice that kept saying, The world is full of problems, and you’re not doing anything to fix them.

And then, about five years ago, I read Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save. Its thesis is simple and jarring: As he puts it in a recent essay, “In a world of unprecedented affluence, we must acknowledge that allowing others to die or suffer from causes within our power to prevent constitutes a profound moral failing.” Singer urges us to make regular contributions to thoroughly vetted and highly effective charities; a popular figure is ten percent of one’s annual earnings. 

My salary had recently cracked six figures, which meant that a Singer-appropriate annual donation would total more than $10,000. At first, this was unfathomable—I still winced every time I spent $10 on a drink—but the more I thought about it (and I couldn’t not think about it, once the idea was in my head), the clearer it became that I had much more than I needed and that my money could be put toward malaria-fighting bed nets, fistula surgeries, girls’ education programs, and other interventions that demonstrably save and enrich lives. 

And so in the last days of 2020 I set up a bank transfer, took a deep breath, and hit “send.” And I found that I felt good.

What Money Can’t Buy

The you’re not doing anything voice didn’t go away, but once I made that first donation, I heard a quiet, tentative answer: I’m doing something. That answer is with me every December, when I make my annual transfer, and it’s there throughout the year when I read another infuriating news article or have anxious political talks with friends and family.

Crucially, the answer is never I’m doing enough. I know that I could give more and that my privilege is the result of systemic injustice. I also know that swirling around in guilt and berating myself like some minor character in an Atlanta episode doesn’t actually help anyone.

So I keep donating, and I keep looking for other ways to be of service. Maintaining my annual pledge has not stopped me from making donations elsewhere, and it has not let me off the hook when it comes to activism. In fact, my activism has grown in tandem with my years in effective altruism. In both cases, I’ve found that commitment and consistency make the work less daunting and more fulfilling.

My giving pledge has (and there’s no way around the cliché here) granted me something money can’t buy: a little calm in a world of overlapping crises. The donor-side benefits of charitable giving, from the internal “warm glow” to stronger social bonds, are well established. And the great twist of effective altruism is that giving away big chunks of money, knowing that you’ll never see the direct results of those donations, might be the best cure for the Gollum-like neurosis that can come with wealth.

No Shame

Of course, not every person of privilege feels this neurosis; the pendulum swings both ways. If Instagram is any indication, there are plenty who feel no need to hide their riches, earned or otherwise. I sense that the donor-side rationale might be even more relevant here: Committed giving doesn’t have to be about atoning for your wealth; it can be a way of celebrating wealth and the fact that you actually have the power to save lives. Even a devout hedonist might find this kind of giving to be a new and powerful kind of dopamine hit.

Wherever the privilege pendulum finds you, I hope you’ll consider making activism and charitable giving as integral to your life as work, art, wellness—whatever brings you energy and meaning. I hope you’ll do some research and decide to take on the incalculably rewarding work of converting privilege into active kindness.