In isolation, the reason for charity appears obvious: You give to Unicef, you save children's lives, and you make yourself feel better about yourself. Or you express your gratitude towards some community website or content creator for entertainment provided over the past year.

As soon as there is more than one demand for charity, things become more complicated. You have only a limited amount of money to give, so who is more deserving? Should you give to Unicef for the children, the World Wildlife Fund for the animals, or to the Red Cross for some specific catastrophe relief? What about political implications, of for example giving aid to Gaza and potentially ending up funding a terrorist organization? How does a donation for a website or content creator stack up against a donation for somebody in need? For any dollar you give to a charity, how much is actually reaching the charitable target, and how much is "lost" paying administrative costs, paying a first world secretary instead of feeding a third world child?

You obviously can't give to everybody. Which leaves you with two solutions, neither one being really good: Either you give to some causes, based on random encounters and gut feeling; or you don't give to anybody at all. I have to admit that this year I mostly went for nobody at all, seeing how much lower my pension is than my salary previously was, and feeling as if I first needed to see how my retirement finances are going to work out before giving money away. In the middle of a global cost of living and inflation crisis I don't blame anybody who decides to not give any charitable donations.

What I am extremely sceptical about is the growing percentage of the economy that is based on donations. Yes, part of the influencer business runs on sponsoring contracts or advertising revenue, but another part of it clearly runs on donations. One reason I pay for YouTube Prime is that part of that money is distributed to the channels I watch proportionally to how much I watch them, which makes me feel less bad about not donating to anybody's Patreon they remind me about in every video. A part of the gig economy is running on tips, with a potential big gap between what a delivery driver thinks he should get for delivering a $20 pizza, and what the recipient thinks would be a fair tip.

In the end everybody gets squeezed between some sort of social pressure to donate and tip, and the economic pressure of not really having money to give away. The amount of money the median household has left after paying for a roof over their head and a long list of life's necessities is shrinking, and the number of people who want donations and tips is growing. That doesn't look sustainable.