“Many of us go through life understanding that we should care about people suffering far away from us, but failing to. I think that this attitude is tied, at least in part, to the fact that most of us implicitly trust our internal care-o-meters. The “care feeling” isn’t usually strong enough to compel us to frantically save everyone dying. So while we acknowledge that it would be virtuous to do more for the world, we think that we can’t, because we weren’t gifted with that virtuous extra-caring that prominent altruists must have. But this is an error – prominent altruists aren’t the people who have a larger care-o-meter, they’re the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters. Our care-o-meters are broken. They don’t work on large numbers. Nobody has one capable of faithfully representing the scope of the world’s problems. But the fact that you can’t feel the caring doesn’t mean that you can’t do the caring.”

— Nate Soares, On caring