What responsibility do I have beyond the people I know?

A guided 15 to 20 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. This exercise does not argue for a position, does not compare you to anybody and treats an expanded conscience that produces nothing as a worse result than one standing commitment.

A man in his thirties who uses a wheelchair working at the counter of a cluttered community office

Count what is already there.

Most people conclude they do nothing while doing a considerable amount they have never counted.

One thing you can hold in a bad year beats a plan that dies in March.

What you'll look at

01What you already do
02Where your line falls
03What you actually have
04What you have tried and dropped

A note from Mark

I am suspicious of conversations about obligation that produce feelings and no conduct. They are pleasant to have. Nothing follows them.

What I notice most often is that people do not count what they already do. Work that serves people they will never meet, tax paid without arranging around it, hours given to something nobody sees. Count it first. The picture changes, and the guilt usually turns out to be about the size of the problem rather than about you.

Then set the commitment low. One standing thing you can hold in a bad year is worth more than an ambitious plan that lasts until March. Nobody is served by a lapsed intention.

Read my full view ↓

And if the finding is that you are already giving more than you can sustain, the honest recommendation is to give less. That is a real result and I would not apologise for it.

What you'll get

This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.

01
What you already do
02
Where the line falls
03
Your real capacity
04
One bounded commitment
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.

See everything included ↓

01What you came here with
02What you already do
03What you believe is owed
04Where the obligation stops
05What the guilt is doing
06Your actual capacity
07The rival reading
08What deserves protecting
09The credible alternative
10What, if anything, should change
11What remains unresolved
12Where this goes next

When you finish

Bring it back to your tree.

Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.

This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.

The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.

Session
Date
The part of life this belongs to
What we found
The alternative we tested
What deserves protecting
What should change, if anything
Next actions
What to notice or find out
What remains unresolved

Open My Tree

What now?

01 · Save it
A plain list of what you already contribute, including the uncounted parts.
02 · Test it
Pick one thing, make it standing and put it somewhere it happens without a decision.

See more ↓

What I would do

01
Count what is already there before adding anything. Paid work that serves strangers counts. So does keeping rules that only bind the honest.
02
Say where your line is out loud. Everybody weights the people near them more heavily and almost nobody admits it.
03
Set the commitment below capacity, not at it. Anything set at capacity is gone by March.
04
Prefer one standing thing to five occasional ones.
05
Accept that your contribution is small relative to the problem. That is arithmetic, not a verdict.

Test it

01
Ask whether you would still do it if nobody ever knew. If not, it is reputation rather than contribution, which is fine, but name it.
02
Ask what would have to be true for you to stop. If you cannot answer, the commitment is not defined yet.
03
Check it against a bad month rather than a good one.

The alternative

The obvious conclusion is that you should do more. Often that is not what the evidence says. Sometimes you already contribute substantially through work you have never counted, and the guilt is tracking the scale of the problem rather than a gap in your conduct. Sometimes your capacity is time rather than money and you have spent years trying to discharge this in money, which is why nothing has held. And sometimes you are already giving beyond what you can sustain, and the honest finding is to give less, for longer.

Think about this

What you already do for people you will never meet.
Where your obligation stops, and on what basis.
Whether the guilt is tracking a real gap or the size of the problem.
What you actually have: money, hours, skill, attention.
What you have tried before and quietly dropped.

Take this to Ask Mark

You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.

This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Keep looking

TRY · 12 MIN

Circles of Obligation

TAIU

Family, neighbours, strangers. The same frame, one page.

Try it →

Was this useful?

READ · ESSAY

Famine, Affluence and Morality

Peter Singer

The strongest version of the demanding case. Also the one most people have never actually read.

Persons, Character and Morality

Bernard Williams

Read after Singer. The disagreement is real. It matters for how you actually live.

Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

A woman in her thirties handing a bench machine over to a younger person in a community workshop

Next tool

Who benefits from my life besides me?

If you want the same question closer to home

Continue →Boundaries →

Further thinking

Give and Take
Adam Grant
Spending money on others promotes happiness
Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton
Bowling Alone
Robert Putnam

See the thinking ↓

Book

Give and Take

Adam Grant

Grant's finding that givers occupy both the top and the bottom of most performance distributions is the practical heart of this. What separates them is not generosity but whether the giving is bounded. If you have ever concluded that you should do more while quietly running out of road, read this before you add anything.

Article

Spending money on others promotes happiness

Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton

The effect depends far less on the amount than on whether the giving was chosen and whether you can see what it did. That is a useful design constraint. A small, specific, visible commitment does more for the person giving than a larger anonymous one, which is worth knowing before you set up something you will never think about again.

Book

Bowling Alone

Robert Putnam

Putnam's account of the decline of associational life is contested and largely American, and it still changes how you count your own contribution. Membership, attendance and turning up repeatedly for something small are treated here as real civic goods rather than as lesser versions of writing a cheque.

Book

Together

Vivek Murthy

Loneliness isn't always about physically being alone. People can be surrounded by colleagues, family or social activity and still lack relationships in which they feel genuinely known.