Why it’s so hard to align our work with our values, and how we justify not trying.

Part 2: Compartmentalization at the individual level

In collaboration with Elizabeth Lepro

Note: This is the second essay in a two-part series about compartmentalization. Find part 1, about how it works at the economy-scale, here.

In the opening scene of the television series “Severance,” a woman sits at a conference table, unable to answer any questions about her name, where she’s from, or the color of her mother’s eyes. She, like other employees of the dystopian Lumon Industries, has chosen a life in which she can’t remember who she is when she’s at work.

You may relate. Many of us accept that what we do to earn money and what we do to benefit humanity or the planet—which is often tied to our deeply held values—must be separate activities.

People often, for example, oppose the actions and belief systems of billionaires, but take jobs at companies that increase the power and influence of those same billionaires. It’s not because these job-seekers are bad people, but because we are all operating in a system that makes aligning our values and our everyday lives seem impossible.

This separation leads to, in Spencer R. Scott’s words, a kind of “moral injury”: “the pain of the cognitive dissonance between what you believe is good, and the actions you feel trapped to perform.”

Healing this injury seems out of the question, so we instead treat its surface-level symptoms by doing a little bit of “good” here and there. We make a post online supporting a social movement, despite the fact that an increasing majority of us don’t actually see its potential for enacting effective social change. We donate a bit of our income to address a societal or environmental issue that our employer happily ignores or actively perpetuates. Then we get back to work.

In other words, we compartmentalize.

I’ve written about compartmentalization as it relates to organizational behavior: Corporations separate their social impact strategy from their business strategy, ensuring that more collectivist-minded thinking never interferes with profit motive. Nonprofits separate the external impact of their work from the internal culture of their organization, enabling toxic working environments. I also wrote, in part one of this series, about how compartmentalization at an economy-scale keeps traditional business owners from making impact a priority and allows social enterprises to feel justified in perpetuating inequality.

Here, I’ll address compartmentalization at the individual level, how it is encouraged by sloppy logic like “earning to give,” and kept alive by the creation of false binaries and the perception of scarcity.

The misguided logic of “earning to give”

When compartmentalization becomes the norm, performative behavior is not only acceptable, it’s encouraged. That is what I see happening in the effective altruism community via the “earning-to-give” model, which encourages people to choose careers that allow them to make large charitable donations.

The simplified logic of earning to give is that earning more means donating more, which is always a good thing. In this framework, working at a company like Meta can be a values-aligned choice if it allows you to donate more to a climate relief fund than, say, someone who works as an elementary school teacher.

The nonprofit organization “80,000 Hours,” which researches how people can use their careers to make social impact, employs this logic:

“There’s an odd thing that happens in the non-profit sector where someone might typically work, say, as a corporate lawyer as their day job with an hourly rate of $1,000/hour. But then when they want to do good, they will volunteer to do minimum wage labour at a charity. This can be seen as especially generous and giving. But if that lawyer had instead worked an extra hour and donated their earnings, they could fund 100 people to do that labour instead… giving the money is likely far better for the charity and its beneficiaries.”

But, is it “far better”?

As Emma Goldberg writes, "On top of being a philanthropic approach, [earning to give is] also, sneakily, a moral claim. The giving justifies the earning; it’s a permission slip for the accumulation of vast sums of wealth."

80,000 Hours considers the impact of jobs such as corporate lawyer, Google engineer, and the like, “morally neutral.” If we accept that position, then it’s fair to say that any money earned from these jobs and funneled toward social causes is net-positive. In reality, these jobs aren’t neutral—no job is neutral.

De-compartmentalization means recognizing that all work moves society in certain directions. Taking that direction into account matters when we’re talking about a person’s overall contribution to the social good.

Impact, as I’ve argued before, is an infinitely complex beast. Considering all of its dimensions when it comes to employment is more complicated than just whether or not your position is causing direct harm: What power structures is your employer reinforcing? What policies are they lobbying for? Who is profiting off the success of the organization that you help drive?

It’s not possible to assume based on the information in the example above that donating $1,000 would outweigh the potential harm the lawyer may cause as a result of that hour’s work. Corporate lawyers often have to represent the interests of corporations and wealthy shareholders, regardless of the well-being of the general public and the environment. If the lawyer’s goal is to accrue more money to funnel toward social impact, then the means by which they’re accruing that money may inherently be against their own progressive values.

To take it a step further, it doesn’t even make sense to quantify a person’s impact as a tally that weighs all the “good” they’ve done against all the “bad,” where beneficial ends justify dubious means. Unless you believe the apocalypse is nigh, human society has no definitive "end.” Our living conditions are impacted by the cumulative measure of everyone's daily means, i.e. the choices each of us makes each day. If we say that the means to peace is violence, what we experience is a violent society that aspires to peace, rather than a society that practices peace.

From a holistic mindset—compared to a compartmentalized one—a good teacher may be more impactful than a corporate lawyer, no matter how much money the lawyer donates or posts on social media about their progressive ideas. The teacher doesn’t have to rationalize offsetting their career through donations because the primary way they earn their living directly supports the well-being, opportunities, and capabilities of their students. This kind of work could have a powerful reverberating effect for years to come.

Also key to the earning-to-give logic is the assumption that if one corporate lawyer doesn’t take the job, another will, and that person may not be interested in donating to charity. This assumes that lawyers are a commodity that can be easily exchanged. I would argue that one lawyer choosing to use their skills, training, and ability for good does more than just leave a single gap in the field—if that lawyer chooses to start their own firm built on collectivist values, for example, they are using one of their most valuable resources, their talent, to create an entirely alternative economic infrastructure, opening up opportunities for others to follow suit. Similarly, the teacher has willfully chosen not to dedicate their abilities, training, and education to harmful systems and institutions, and is contributing to a reverse “brain drain” away from the corporate power structure.

If everyone took the advice of 80,000 Hours, more money might flow toward nonprofits, but we would likely still be dealing with all of the various issues plaguing the world—economic inequality, climate crisis, gender and racial disparities—because many of those issues are symptoms of, and are exacerbated by, the things people do to earn money.

We won’t give our way out of the climate crisis. Addressing these issues requires adjusting our decisions and expectations to retool the economy at its core.

I understand that this may seem easier said than done. What follows are a few of my thoughts on de-compartmentalizing. The goal is to identify areas where we are holding leverage and power and consider how we can utilize our individual agency to challenge systems for collective benefit.

Rejecting the binary

Do you want to be a lawyer or do you want your family to starve? The 80,000 Hours example presented above relies on this false, but common, binary of choice, between a high-earning corporate job and sub-living wage work.

In reality, there are myriad career choices with varying salaries available to this hypothetical person, who has the skillset and education of a lawyer.

I also see this perceived binary at play regularly when we talk about doing “the work” of making meaningful change. The choices are presented as opposite poles: On one side, being called to do “the work” of social change means centering your life around literal work; pursuing a career that directly addresses societal issues, and giving it every ounce of time and physical/emotional/mental energy that you have. This is a collectivist mindset, potentially to the detriment of the individual. On the other side, some say that work doesn’t need to have any meaning, because it’s what you do outside of work that delivers meaning. This is an individualist mindset, potentially to the detriment of the collective.

I do think that if you’re sincerely committed to benefiting the collective good, finding employment that is in some way meaningful and values-aligned is integral to that mission. But the question of employment and social impact doesn’t have to be such a binary.

De-compartmentalization means recognizing a spectrum of opportunities between two seemingly opposing lifestyles. Work doesn’t have to be the central thread of your life, and it doesn’t have to be your only lever of impact. Work can occupy a limited place in your life, but still be meaningful. Work can represent just a portion of who you are and not be completely in conflict with the rest of your identity.

A holistic way of approaching impact at an individual level is to look at your role within the bigger picture, taking into account every facet of your life, from how you work to how you spend your non-working hours to how you treat others. A useful way for me to do this has been to envision the type of world I want to live in and imagine my role in it: ‘In a more equitable economy, what would my employment opportunities look like? Let me start or join the type of organization that exists in that world.’

This mindset frees us from the false binaries that make it seem like we have to choose between financial solvency+ethical compromise and financial devastation+ethical alignment. Crucial to this task is rejecting the idea that any financial compromise puts us at risk of being on the financially devastated end of that spectrum.

Questioning the concept of scarcity

Capitalism, in its current form, depends on the perception of scarcity. Sometimes the scarcity is real: Some people have to take the minimum-wage jobs that are available to them as a matter of survival. But for others—and this is probably true for the lawyer—scarcity is often a matter of perception.

The consumerist system will always be convincing you, no matter how much money you’re earning, that if you had more, you'd be happier. And, because you’ll always have less than “more,” you experience a version of scarcity.

This perceived scarcity is a powerful force in favor of financially abundant companies.

To stay on top, corporations depend on hiring highly educated and/or skilled people, and they spend a lot of money to recruit those people, poaching them away from competitors and, often, more values-oriented careers. This is how so many humanities majors, worried about debt, end up serving large corporations rather than pursuing the civil or human rights careers they may have once envisioned. But it is exactly these people—who have the advantage of higher education and choice and who are not, necessarily, bound by low-wage positions for their survival—who can risk a move along a wide spectrum of opportunity and open up options for everyone down the supply chain.

This perception of scarcity keeps us competing with others rather than collaborating. It facilitates our understanding of ourselves as cornered victims of the capitalist system and encourages only one type of resistance: taking advantage of that system for our own gain. From that perspective, taking a high-paid corporate job or founding a hyper-growth startup may seem empowering—like you’re gaining ground against a ruthless oppressor. In reality, though, intentionally participating in the system makes you integral to its power, and its harm. At some point, you may find that rather than feeling like you’re simply a victim, you’ve also become an abuser.

Perceived scarcity also makes us believe that we have to choose between the wellness of our inner circle of loved ones and societal-level well-being (another false binary).

Many people think that it is a selfless act to grind away at a high-paying job because it allows them to provide for their families. From this mindset, a low-paid activist is selfish because they don’t make enough to be so generous. But what does it mean to be generous? Some of what you need to provide for your family and loved ones is essential, like healthcare, food, and clothing. Some of it is only “essential” once you’ve achieved a certain level of financial comfort, which is when the concept of scarcity starts working overtime to make you think there's a reason to keep accumulating wealth.

Do your kids absolutely need to go to an elite private school as a prerequisite for a good life? Do they benefit from rooms full of toys, closets full of clothes they will outgrow, expensive cars? How much, by contrast, would your kids benefit from the example you’re setting as an adult who participates actively in their community and works to change unjust systems? Or from a world that is more equitable than the one they were born into?

Establishing the notion of enough

When there is no ceiling to how much you can consume, it’s tough to know when to stop.

If your monetary desires are limitless—which modern capitalism allows them to be—there's no room to shift your career in alignment with collectivist values. And if every individual maintains an infinite financial growth perspective, we can’t continue to survive within ecological limits—that’s already clear to people encountering the devastating effects of climate change.

The hypothetical questions I posited in the previous section are part of a broader consideration: What are your actual priorities? This is a practical question, and a holistic one. It puts every consideration—material and non-material—into the hopper. This question can help you determine the place you want to live, the kind of house or apartment you want to live in, your family’s essential needs (food, electricity, healthcare), and the cost of the activities that add pleasure and meaning to your life—traveling, hobbies, etc. It also allows you to consider what your priorities are from an impact perspective—involvement in your community, being there for your friends, reducing your waste—at the same time as you’re thinking about your material needs. Rather than cordoning off your value-oriented priorities into a less urgent category, to be pursued when you’ve reached financial satisfaction, you are making them of equal importance.

Once you’ve considered what’s deeply important to you, you can find a real baseline for the amount of money it would take to prioritize those things. That’s what Cortney Cassidy did when she quit tech to become a full-time gardener, as documented in this interview. How many hours do you actually need to work to reach that baseline? If you determine that you can get by on less than you currently make, what career options open up that you hadn’t considered before? If more time opens up, what can you do with the rest of that time to address your other priorities?

One challenge we may encounter with this concept of enough is that it can seem like the set up for a boring life. We associate accomplishments with purchases. It feels good to upgrade your apartment or buy a new car. These purchases create a tangible marker of success: ‘Look where I was before, and look where I am now.’ Buying something often feels like earning something, in a more spiritual sense; it feels like progress, personal growth, a reward for your hard fought efforts.

Growth, like impact, is a multidimensional word. But in the compartmentalized framework in which many of us are operating, growth often means one thing: accumulation of wealth, through savings, investments, and objects. In reality, there are many forms of growth that can continue infinitely, grow indefinitely, and that don’t require material or financial growth to sustain, but can thrive on baseline stability.

You can always be acquiring new perspectives that change how you experience the world, without extra square footage in your apartment or a new car. What's the increased material footprint of becoming a more skilled pianist or table tennis player? You can go from a beginner piano player to composing a concerto without needing to buy so much more stuff to make it happen.

The accumulation of wealth is time- and energy-intensive. Establishing a notion of enough based on your priorities can help you see whether some of what you consider deeply important is actually being hindered by your pursuit of more money. “The grind” can detract from your ability to prioritize other forms of growth.

If we let consumerism be the primary guide for our decisions and how we measure our successes, we’re unable to resist the temptations of capitalism; at any career crossroad, a capitalistic perspective will win out over the benefits of being involved in more progressive work.

Establishing your own notion of enough doesn’t require you to accept martyrdom; it doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice a fulfilling life. If you take anything from this discussion on compartmentalization, it should be this: It doesn’t have to be a binary.

The scarcity mindset keeps you thinking you have to choose between a good life and a life that benefits the collective good. And, it is partly the vacuous, limitless promise of consumerism that keeps you thinking you have to choose between your values and your financial needs. Rejecting the perception of scarcity and false binaries in order to de-compartmentalize our values from our lifestyle choices might require some mental rewiring, but it’s not impossible. The more we do it on an individual scale, the more pathways we create for others to follow, and the more potential there is for whole systems to change.