I think we have time for one more question. This one comes from Ezra. Ezra says, "Is it really a deep life if it's entirely focused on my local community?" As Ezra then elaborates, "When you talk about the deep life, it sounds to me often utilitaristic"—I think you might mean utilitarianistic—"in the sense that all the buckets you mentioned have the purpose of making me feel good, satisfied, connected, etc.

But what about the people we do not get in direct contact with? Shouldn't that be part of a deep life ethic, one that urges us to care about all of humanity? Of course, it makes no sense to talk about social injustice and then ignore the needs of the people in our immediate neighborhood, but shouldn't that be a step after looking further?" So Ezra, when we're thinking about the different buckets of the deep life, it sounds like we're honing in here on the community bucket.

I do often talk about, when I give examples about overhauling that area of your life, getting involved and giving back to people in your immediate community, but I think you're absolutely right that there are broad interpretations of community as well that are important. So at the most narrow interpretation, community is going to be your family.

All right? These are my kids, my wife, my siblings. This is a really big priority. I want to make sure that I am serving them, I am there for them. Then we move out to a slightly broader scope and you get to your friends. These are people I know and like and spend time with.

These are my friends. I want to be there. I want to serve them. Someone has a kid. I'm going to go over there. I'm going to help them. I'm going to cook them dinner. Someone gets sick. I'm going to be there to make sure that the errands get done, that their car oil still gets changed.

Broaden out further and you get to your geographically proximate neighborhood and community. Okay, here's the town I live in. Here's the suburb I live in. I want to be involved, right? This is where you might also have community group involvements. My church, a volunteer effort that I do. So now you're dealing with, these aren't maybe your close friends, but people who have some sort of geographical proximity to you.

Beyond that, relevant to your question, the scope will broaden to serving people in the broader human community. And this is where you might be involved in causes or issues that have no real relevant geographic proximity to you. I'm working on climate change issues. I'm working on issues with injustice in prisons or something where now you are outside of, these are people that are actually related to me or around me all the time.

And I think that could be really important as well. And when you're doing an overhaul of the community aspect of your deep life, that needs to be in the mix. The one thing I will say though, and I'm far from the first person to note this, is that moving in order from the narrowest scopes towards the largest scopes is almost always the recipe for making the most sustainable long-term impact.

If you jump past your family, past your friends, past local organizations and your geographically proximate neighborhood straight to global issues that you want to be involved in, that's a risky move. Because you don't have this foundation. You don't have this foundation of what it feels like to sacrifice on behalf of others.

You don't have the empathy. You don't have the patience born of this actual, much more, let's call it human-compatible type community service. I say human-compatible just because it's what we're wired to expect, to actually see eye to eye and spend time with the people that we are serving. You want to build that foundation, then you can better serve the larger causes.

You get your local house in order and then you can go build houses for others as well. This tends to be the right way to do it. Now the internet, because it has erased, obviously, the obstacles of distance with low friction digital communication, has created a moment in which we can skip those early steps.

Up until about 30 years ago, I mean, this was what community was going to be because it wasn't easy to be involved with a cause halfway across the country because you couldn't talk to the people over there. You couldn't find out about it. But now you can be on Twitter opining on anything, anywhere.

You can be right in the mix on national political issues, national causes, international causes. This is really new. 30 years ago, you might be upset with the president, but you didn't really have a lot of time in your life spent talking publicly about the president or what you don't like about the president because who was going to listen?

Your neighbors and your wife at some point would say, "Okay, I get it. This isn't interesting. But today you could be on Facebook, you could be on Twitter, you could be on Instagram. Everyone's involved at all these different levels." That opens up a lot of opportunities for a lot of good.

It opens up a lot of opportunities for a lot more people to get involved in advocacy. That's all great. But as with all things that are new, there are dangers. And I think this is the danger here is that if you're 23 and you jump past all those lower scopes of community so that you can weigh in on Putin, that is going to be an unstable foundation for trying to give back and trying to serve.

On the other hand, if you have the patience and empathy and experience of serving your family, serving your friends, serving your local community, and then on top of that, can really get involved in something that's larger scale, something that you would have had a hard time being involved in in a pre-internet world, that involvement is going to be, I think, not only much more successful, but also more meaningful for you.

You're going to be able to extract more out of it. You're going to be able to approach it with more of a moral maturity. So I don't mean to turn my answer here into a rant, because basically all of this stuff is good. No one is going to be upset at anyone for doing giving back to the community at any scale.

And it's better to be doing some of that than none of that like so many do. But that tends to be my advice. Don't forget the old fashioned human compatible, I can see you, look you in the eye. I am servicing and serving you, even though sometimes you say things that annoy me and we don't belong to exactly the same tight ideological, geographically sorted tribe.

Like, yeah, my neighbor down the street is odd as far as I'm concerned in this way, but you know what, I'm still helping them because they're going through a hard time. I think it's really, really important. And we should not allow the easy access we have to the sort of low friction advocacy that's on unlimited scale.

Don't let that get in the way of the harder local eye to eye community service. Do them both start with the local, but then also move on to the global. That would be the recipe I'd recommend.