Dawn Drescher's Confession: The Emotional Hell of Choosing Which Lives to Fund with Charitable Grants

In a raw essay titled “On Responsibility and Death,” published on LessWrong in June 2026, Dawn Drescher details the personal horror of being a grantmaker for effective altruism. Starting a charity in 2010 with Lisa Wiese (who she now believes may be deceased), she managed about €50,000 per year. She devoured evidence on interventions—orphanage walls, bed nets, cookstoves, surgery—and made allocation decisions akin to a spaceship captain sealing a bulkhead on crew members. But unlike the stoic Star Trek captain, Drescher spiraled into grueling emotional anguish: she pictured the screams of abducted children, the slow deaths from malaria, the agony of factory-farmed pigs—all because she chose one charity over another.

For four years, sleep was impossible. She repeatedly considered suicide, though she recognized it would help no one. The essay references Jeff Kaufman’s “Dead Child Currency” and Bertrand Russell’s quote about weeping at a column of numbers. In May 2015, Drescher consciously gave herself permission to stop the empathetic self-flagellation, fearing social rejection for her “coldness.” Instead, she found only lukewarm responses. Months later, she developed a strange dissociation—mental blinders that stripped numbers of meaning, akin to repeating a word until it loses sense. Yet she knows that inaction is also an action. The essay is a stark meditation on the psychological cost of trying to see reality clearly when every choice involves suffering and death.