Concept of Contribution

Is contribution important?

As so many elements in life, which involve contribution, seem like they have such a minimal impact, is making your contribution relevant at all?

Contribution can be positive or negative, toward a grander positive or negative. Nearly everything you do throughout the day has a negative or positive contribution value, if you analyse and evaluate it. Nearly everything you do causes a chain of reactions, and influences an overall grander impact.

Evaluating whether the grander impact is positive or negative may be subjective, and depend on your perspective, but chances are that you would consider the impact to be either positive or negative. So if you do consider the impact positive or negative, then you must consider it relevant to some degree, otherwise you would consider it neutral. If the impact is relevant, then your contribution should be relevant, at least to some degree.

That degree of relevance of contribution, and therein the grander impact, only has to outweigh the degree of relevance for making the contribution. For eg. The choice at hand, causing a contribution, is to buy a doorknob made in Canada or made in China. If you consider the grander impact of, shipping across the planet causing pollution, which then causes climate change, and consider that to be relevant, then buying the knob from China (if you live in Canada) would be a negative contribution toward the grander impact of climate change. The degree of relevance of that negative contribution, just has to outweigh the negative impact to you, in order to buy that knob, rather than the 1 made in Canada.

If the negative impact to you is $3 extra in cost, then the negative impact of $3 on your life, just needs to be outweighed by the negative contribution toward the overall impact of climate change. The degree of negativity of the $3 is relative to your financial situation. A rough estimate of percentage relevance of that $3 might be, in ratio to the total amount of money available to you, in the time period before the next equivalent contribution decision (of perhaps buying something else with a $3 difference). Lets say that time period is 1 week, and you make $600/ week, then the % relevance of that $3, to the impact, is 0.5%.

The relevance of that impact, then needs to be evaluated, for comparison to the impact of the negative contribution. To put a # on it, for attempted accuracy, you could consider the relevance of any given element within your life, to be a value between 0-100 (where 0 is completely irrelevant, and 100 is maximum possible relevance), then the impact of $ could maybe be considered about an 80 (since its significant to survive, but not absolutely vital). Then we take 0.5% of 80, to get a relevance value of 0.4.

That relevance needs to be outweighed by, the negative contribution to the grand impact of the effect of buying that doorknob. If the negative impact is climate change, then you would estimate a percentage of relevance of contribution toward climate change. The contribution relevance, of shipping a single doorknob, toward climate change, should be considered within the time period before the next equivalent contribution element. If the time before the next contribution of that amount was 1 minute, the relevance toward 1 minute of climate change, might be 0.5%. Then the relevance of the impact, should be estimated as a value of 0-100, in ratio to all other elements of life. If you consider climate change to potentially ultimately kill all people and animals, then the relevance of that, as a value compared to all other aspects of life, might be 99. 0.5% of 99 = 0.5

Since the relevance value of negative contribution toward climate change is 0.5, and outweighs the relevance value of negative impact of spending $3, at 0.4, it would be most logical to avoid the negative contribution.

This is and example, and are of course very rough estimates, but you can take the concept to apply to any contribution scenario. These calculations would take too much time to be worth doing for every small decision in life, but after gaining a general understanding of tendency for certain elements of contribution to outweigh the cost, quicker estimates can be made to make more effective and relevant contributions. The relevant effect of this Concept of Contribution is to be conscious of actions and decisions having an affecting contribution, and to be mindful of which contributions are worth it, whether they are negative or positive.