Does your job feel meaningless? Try “moral ambition.”

We’re told from a young age to achieve. Get good grades. Get into a good school. Get a good job. Be ambitious about earning a high salary or a high-status position. But many of us eventually find ourselves asking: What’s the point of all this ambition? The fat salary or the fancy title…are those really meaningful measures of success?

There’s another possibility: Instead of measuring our success in terms of fame or fortune, we could measure it in terms of how much good we do for others. And we could get super ambitious about using our lives to do a gargantuan amount of good.

That’s the message of Moral Ambition, a new book by historian and author Rutger Bregman. He wants us to stop wasting our talents on meaningless work and start devoting ourselves to solving the world’s biggest problems, like malaria and pandemics and climate change.

I recently got the chance to talk to Bregman on The Gray Area, Vox’s philosophically-minded podcast. I invited him on the show because I find his message inspiring — and, to be honest, because I also had some questions about it. I want to dedicate myself to work that feels meaningful, but I’m not sure work that helps the greatest number of people is the only way to do that. Moral optimization — the effort to mathematically quantify moral goodness so that we can then maximize it — is, in my experience, agonizing and ultimately counterproductive.

I also noticed that Bregman’s “moral ambition” has a lot in common with effective altruism (EA), the movement that’s all about using reason and evidence to do the most good possible. After the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the EA crypto billionaire who was convicted of fraud in 2023, EA suffered a major reputational blow. I wondered: Is Bregman just trying to rescue the EA baby from the bathwater? (Disclosure: In 2022, Future Perfect was awarded a one-time $200,000 grant from Building a Stronger Future, a family foundation run by Sam and Gabe Bankman-Fried. Future Perfect has returned the balance of the grant and is no longer pursuing this project.)

So in our conversation, I talked to Bregman about all the different things that can make our lives feel meaningful, and asked: Are some objectively better than others? And how is moral ambition different from ideas that came before it, like effective altruism?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

Why should people be morally ambitious?

My whole career, I’ve been fascinated with the waste of talent that’s going on in modern economies. There’s this one study from two Dutch economists and they estimate that around 25 percent of all workers think that their own job is socially meaningless, or at least doubt the value of their job.

That is just insane to me. I mean, this is five times the unemployment rate. And we’re talking about people who often have excellent resumes, who went to very nice universities. Harvard is an interesting case in point: 45 percent of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy or finance. I’m not saying all of that is totally socially useless, but I do wonder whether that is the best allocation of talent. [Note: In 2020, 45 percent of Harvard graduating seniors entering the workforce went into consulting and finance. Among the class of 2024, the number was 34 percent.]

We face some pretty big problems out there, whether it’s the threat of the next pandemic that may be just around the corner, terrible diseases like malaria and tuberculosis killing millions of people, the problem with democracy breaking down. I mean, the list goes on and on. And so I’ve always been frustrated by this enormous waste of talent. If we’re going to have a career anyway, we might as well do a lot of good with it.

What role does personal passion play in this? You write in the book, “Don’t start out by asking, what’s my passion? Ask instead, how can I contribute most? And then choose the role that suits you best. Don’t forget, your talents are but a means to an end.”

I think “follow your passion” is probably the worst career advice out there. At the School for Moral Ambition, an organization I co-founded, we deeply believe in the Gandalf-Frodo model of changing the world. Frodo didn’t follow his passion. Gandalf never asked him, “What’s your passion, Frodo?” He said, “Look, this really needs to be done, you’ve got to throw the ring into the mountain.” If Frodo would have followed his passion, he would have probably been a gardener having a life full of second breakfasts and being pretty comfortable in the Shire. And then the orcs would have turned up and murdered everyone he ever loved.

So the point here is, find yourself some wise old wizard, a Gandalf. Figure out what some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species are. And ask yourself, how can I make a difference? And then you will find out that you can become very passionate about it.

In your book, there’s a Venn diagram with three circles. The first is labeled “sizable.” The second is “solvable.” And the third is “sorely overlooked.” And in the middle, where they all overlap, it says “moral ambition.”

I wonder about the “sizable” part of that. Does moral ambition always have to be about scale? I’m a journalist now, but before that I was a novelist. And I didn’t care how many people my work impacted. My feeling was: If my novel deeply moves just one reader and helps them feel less alone or more understood, I will be happy. Are you telling me I shouldn’t be happy with that?

I think there is absolutely a place for, as the French say, art pour l’art — art for the sake of art itself. I don’t want to let everything succumb to a utilitarian calculus. But I do think it’s better to help a lot of people than just a few people. On the margins, I think in the world today, we need much more moral ambition than we currently have.

When I was reading your book, I kept thinking of the philosopher Susan Wolf, who has this great essay called “Moral Saints.” She argues that you shouldn’t try to be a moral saint — someone who tries to make all their actions as morally good as possible.

She writes, “If the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe or improving his backhand. A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.” How do you square that with your urge to be morally ambitious?

We are living in a world where a huge amount of people have a career that they consider socially meaningless and then they spend the rest of their time swiping TikTok. That’s the reality, right? I really don’t think that there’s a big danger of people reading my book and moving all the way in the other direction.

There’s only one community I know of where this has become a problem. It’s the effective altruism community. In a way, moral ambition could be seen as effective altruism for normies.

Let’s talk about that. I’m not an effective altruist, but I am a journalist who has reported a lot on EA, so I’m curious where you stand on this. You talk about EA in the book and you echo a lot of its core ideas. Your call to prioritize causes that are sizable, solvable, and sorely overlooked is a rephrase of EA’s call to prioritize the “important, tractable, and neglected.” And then there’s this idea that you shouldn’t just be trying to do good, you should try to do the most good possible. So is being morally ambitious different from being an effective altruist?

So, I wouldn’t say the most good. I would say, you should do a lot of good — which is different, right? That’s not about being perfect, but just being ambitious.

Effective altruism is a movement that I admire quite a bit. I think there’s a lot we can learn from them. And there are also quite a few things that I don’t really like about them.

What I really like about them is their moral seriousness. I come from the political left, and if there’s one thing that’s often quite annoying about lefties it’s that they preach a lot, but they do little. For example, I think it’s pretty easy to make the case that donating to charity is one of the most effective things you can do. But very few of my progressive leftist friends donate anything. So I really like the moral seriousness of the EAs. Go to EA conferences and you will meet quite a few people who have donated kidneys to random strangers, which is pretty impressive.

The main thing I dislike is where the motivation comes from. One of the founding fathers of effective altruism was the philosopher Peter Singer, who has a thought experiment of the child drowning in the shallow pond…

That’s the thought experiment where Singer says, if you see a kid drowning in a shallow pond, and you could save this kid without putting your own life in danger, but you will ruin your expensive clothes, should you do it? Yes, obviously. And by analogy, if we have money, we could easily save the lives of people in developing countries, so we should donate it instead of spending it on frivolous stuff.

Yes. I never really liked the thought experiment because it always felt like a form of moral blackmail to me. It’s like, now I’m suddenly supposed to see drowning children everywhere. Like, this microphone is way too expensive, I could have donated that money to some charity in Malawi! It’s a totally inhuman way of looking at life. It just doesn’t resonate with me at all.

But there are quite a few people who instantly thought, “Yes, that is true.” They said, “Let’s build a movement together.” And I do really like that. I see EAs as very weird, but pretty impressive.

Let’s pick up on that weirdness. In your book, you straight up tell readers, “Join a cult — or start your own. Regardless, you can’t be afraid to come across as weird if you want to make a difference. Every milestone of civilization was first seen as the crazy idea of some subculture.” But how do you think about the downsides of being in a cult?

A cult is a group of thoughtful, committed citizens who want to change the world, and they have some shared beliefs that make them very weird to the rest of society. Sometimes that’s exactly what’s necessary. To give you one simple example, in a world that doesn’t really seem to care about animals all that much, it’s easy to become disillusioned. But when you join a safe space of ambitious do-gooders, you can suddenly get this feeling of, “Hey, I’m not the only one! There are other people who deeply care about animals as well. And I can do much more than I’m currently doing.” So it can have a radicalizing effect.

Now, I totally acknowledge that there are signs of dangers here. You can become too dogmatic, and you can be quite hostile to people who don’t share all your beliefs. I just want to recognize that if you look at some of these great movements of history — the abolitionists, the suffragettes — they had cultish aspects. They were, in a way, a little bit like a cult.

Do you have any advice for people on how to avoid the downside — that you can become deaf to criticism from the outside?

Yes. Don’t let it suck up your whole life. When I hear about all these EAs living in group houses, you know, they’re probably taking things too far. I think it helps if you’re a normie in other respects of your life. It gives you a certain groundedness and stability.

In general, it’s super important to surround yourself with people who are critical of your work, who don’t take you too seriously, who can laugh at you or see your foolishness and call it out — and still be a good friend.