Why Charitable Giving Feels So Hard (Even When You Care Deeply)

R3ciprocity.com - Prof David Maslach: Innovation; Research Life; Striving Towards Happiness · Dec 20, 2025 · 12m

I struggle with charitable giving. I always have. And I think it’s because of ambiguity.

When you buy a carton of eggs, you get instant feedback. You know what you paid. You know what you got. You crack the eggs the next morning and you know if it was good or bad.

Charity doesn’t work like that.

You give money and it disappears into a system you can’t see. You don’t really know what it bought. Was it food? Was it training? Was it staplers? Was it overhead? And overhead matters. Every real organization is mostly overhead. Even Apple and Google are mostly overhead.

But with charity, we want…