I've Moved to Nairobi!

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This week I moved to Nairobi, Kenya, where I will live for a year while working at BCG’s office here. I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest people have had in my decision to make this move, so I thought it would be worth it to write up my thought process at the outset of this trip. I’ll also be writing blog posts throughout the next year documenting what I see, learn, and do, and how I use this experience to decide what the next step in my life will be (1).

So why am I moving to Kenya? Basically to see if working in global development / global development is the best way for me to improve others’ lives, which is what I see as my life’s purpose.

My main purpose in life is to improve the lives of others as much as I can, and not necessarily to be happy. I think the call to help others is a strong moral obligation, and while it’s possible that I would be happier or more satisfied pursuing some other purpose, I would not be living the best life I could (2). But I generally do feel happy and satisfied by helping people anyways, so it works out great!

My thinking about my life’s purpose has been influenced strongly by the ideas of the philosophical movement Effective Altruism, and has lead me to two core driving ideas:

  • I ought to push myself to help people as much as I can rather than settling into a career that does a moderate amount of good and remaining satisfied with that.

  • I ought to look for opportunities where I will be doing work that would otherwise not be done. For example, I wouldn’t want to work at a nonprofit, even a super effective one, if I was just filling a job that would otherwise be filled by someone just as capable as me. Because if I do that, I’d simply be displacing good that someone else would be doing rather than making sure that more good gets done in the world. Instead I want to find a job that nobody else would do if I wasn’t doing it, or that I would do far better than the next person (3).

So what’s the work that will help me help others as much as possible in a manner that would not be done without me? As best as I can tell, for me that work is in global development / global health. And working in that space often requires living in or at least having had experience living in a low-middle-income country. So since we do a lot of that kind of work in BCG’s Nairobi office, living and working here seemed like the best way for me to find out if this is the type of work that I want to do longer-term (in addition to being a lot of fun)!

So my goals in moving to Nairobi are to:

  • Gain experience and credibility working and living in a low-middle income country

  • Decide if I would be comfortable living abroad for longer than a year

    • maybe I’ll want to live abroad for 3 years? 5 years? I’m not sure

  • Discover if I actually like and do well at global development / global health type work

  • If I like it, find out where in the global development/health space I think I can make the greatest contribution

    • There are a lot of types of work I could see myself in (working as a development economist in academia, working as a consultant, working in a for-profit or non-profit startup, working for a government agency, etc.) and I want to narrow that list down

  • Learn about the different ideas and actors in global development / global health

  • Refine my views on what the world - and in particular Americans - should do differently from what we’re doing now in order to improve life for everyone on the planet

I’ll be blogging throughout the year as my thoughts evolve and move towards some kind of resolution on these topics. On 31 January 2022 I’ll write up my conclusions, which I hope might be useful for other people thinking about similar kinds of questions.

I’ll also hopefully be blogging about other fun and interesting things that happen while I’m here. So if any of this interests you, stay tuned!

1. Given the level of interest people have shown in my thought process about moving to Kenya, it seems like in this case people want to hear my thoughts about myself. So in my blog posts for the coming year I’m going to allow myself a higher-than-normal level of introspection in the hopes that my analysis of my own personal circumstances might give you some kind of insight into yours. If it’s boring, you’ve been warned!

2. I don’t feel this obligation from the fact that I was lucky to be born in a wealthy country, get a great education, have people help me in my life, etc. (though all that’s true). I think that just being a person means being called to help others.

3. As a concrete example, at BCG a lot of the people at my tenure want to be put on social impact cases, and there aren’t enough social impact cases to go around. And people at my tenure at BCG are pretty interchangeable from a work capability perspective. So that means if I was being put on a social impact project, I’m simply replacing an equally capable other consultant. 

This is a problem to me. If my goal is to feel good about helping other people, then being put on a social impact case would be great for me. But if my goal is to actually improve other people’s lives through social impact, being put on a social impact project doesn’t help at all, because I’m just taking the place of someone else who probably have basically the same amount of impact and learning as me. So if my goal is to improve other’s lives, why should I try to be put on a social impact project?

I raised this question to several people at BCG, but the only person who gave me an answer that seemed reasonable to me was the person who said “I actually don’t care about improving the world through social impact. I just like the feeling of working on those projects.”