Buddhist thought has been helpful for me with this because the Buddha’s first noble truth—that life is tinged with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness (or suffering)—takes it as a given that there is always some way that we feel unseen, unknown, or unrecognized.

Psychoanalysis has explored many of the most obvious parental failings that contribute to such feelings but, in trying to find the source, or the cause, of personal uncertainty, it has encouraged people to overly blame their families of origin rather than taking on the responsibility of reaching out to establish whatever kinds of connections are actually possible in life.

A lot of the suffering we will witness in life will be greater than ours. There’s the question of what we can do to help and the different question of what to do when we can’t help. Often one thinks of another’s suffering: my dear friend you have so much life due you, how can this be happening? (I’m at Mass General waiting to see Emily.) For the sake of loyalty we keep in our minds the imagination of their private anguish. We cycle through all the emotions with them but often we also think—or behave as if we think—the abyss is remote for us.

Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.

This is the case for longtermism in a nutshell. The premises are simple, and I don’t think they’re particularly controversial. Yet taking them seriously amounts to a moral revolution—one with far-reaching implications for how activists, researchers, policy makers, and indeed all of us should think and act.

Looking back, it’s clear that, for many of my teenage choices, what mattered most was not the fun I had at the time—whether buildering was a thrill (it was) or whether studying medicine at Edinburgh involved better parties. Rather, what mattered most was the impact of these choices on the rest of my life, whether I was risking death or altering the values that would guide my future self.

Lerner argued as follows: To feel comfortable in the world, we need to believe the world is basically just— that generally people get what they deserve. Thus when we see a person suffering for little reason, it upsets us by implying that maybe the world isn’t just. And to restore that injured image, we might actually derogate such a victim— blame them for their suffering— as a way of restoring our needed belief that the world is just, and that people do in fact get what they deserve.

In one of the most surprising findings in the history of social psychology, this is just what happened. Subjects derogated the victim, downgrading her personality and character.