It’s been two months since I last wrote.
I knew what this piece needed to say, and I kept finding reasons not to say it.
Closing a chapter, even one you’re ready to close, takes longer than opening the next one.
So. Here it is.
The question I’m not avoiding anymore
For the past few years, this newsletter has been about decision-making: how to reduce anxiety, build better habits, and make choices you can live with. I still believe in all of that. The book is still the book.
But I’ve been writing about process while carefully avoiding the most important decision I’m actually facing.
I have roughly 20 working years left. Probably fewer if I want them to be good ones. The question that has been sitting in my chest, not my head, for the last six years is this: *am I doing the most good I can, or am I doing comfortable good?*
I work in AI. I’m reasonably good at it. I earn a Sydney salary. And every month, part of that salary funds, in principle, one or two full-time advocates working animal welfare in the Global South.
It’s significant.
But it might also be a way of staying safe.
The specific question I’m now putting in writing, publicly, is this: **should I keep earning and fund the people doing direct animal welfare work, or should I become one of them?**
I don’t know the answer. This newsletter is going to document the journey to figuring it out.
Why I’m doing this in public
Partly accountability. I wrote a book about decision-making. I want to show you all how I apply it to my own high-stakes decisions.
But there’s a second reason. I’ve spent six years quietly holding a position that I haven’t said out loud much: I think the suffering of non-human animals is one of the most neglected moral problems of our time, and I think most people, including most people who care about leaving the world better than they found it, are systematically underweighting it.
So, I’m not writing this series to convince you that animal welfare matters. I’m writing it to work out, in front of you, how someone with my specific skills and constraints can contribute to it most effectively.
What this newsletter is now
Over the next two to three years, I’m running a series of structured experiments to test whether I’m better placed as an operator inside the animal welfare movement, or as a funder of it from the outside.
I’ll be using a framework for making that assessment. I’ll introduce it properly in the next piece. For now: it involves measuring the scale of a problem, how neglected it is, and how tractable progress actually is, then crossing that against how well my specific skills fit the work.
Each piece will report what the evidence says, not what I hoped it would say.
If you’ve been here for the decision-journaling content: this is still that. It’s just a live case study instead of a worked example. The methodology is the same. The stakes are higher.
If you’re new here because someone shared this: welcome. The short version is that I’m a data and AI professional in Sydney, I’ve written a book on decision-making under uncertainty, and I’m now applying that book to the question of what to do with the rest of my career.
It’s still up for grabs
I haven’t made this decision yet. I’m not announcing a career change. I’m announcing that I’m going to make this decision carefully, in public, using the same tools I’d recommend to anyone else facing a high-stakes choice.
The answer might be: stay in tech, keep donating, and do the most good from there. That would be a legitimate outcome. I’m not writing toward a predetermined conclusion.
What I’m committing to is the process.
Next piece: the framework I’m using to make this decision, and why I think most people making similar choices are missing one of the most important inputs.