Why Being a Saint Isn’t Strategic

Sainthood glorifies self-denial, but impact requires power, clarity, and personal drive. Don’t aim to be flawless—aim to be useful, strategic, and real.

I used to think long up until my thirties the ideal was to be a good person in the moral sense: self-effacing, ascetic, maximally altruistic. Someone whose life couldn’t be criticized, whose motives were pure, whose conscience was clean.

That view has a certain aesthetic elegance, especially when you’re young. It’s tempting to believe that renouncing ego and comfort is the highest form of intelligence. But eventually you realize that this is a pose, and worse, a self-sabotaging one.

The idea of sainthood—living above reproach, denying yourself, existing as a vessel of virtue—fails a simple test: it doesn’t scale. Not emotionally, not practically, and certainly not strategically. You don’t build institutions by being a saint. You don’t win wars, or shift markets, or fund malaria vaccines. You don’t even write very good software. You just wear yourself out trying to suppress basic human instincts and wonder why people don’t follow your example.

The Miscalculation of Humility

One of the first tactical failures of sainthood is its treatment of humility as universally good. This is empirically false. In real-world systems—corporate, political, social—people respond to visible confidence, not virtue. Confidence is taken as a proxy for competence. If you speak softly in meetings, deflect credit, refuse to show ambition, the system doesn’t reward you. It excludes you.

I learned this the hard way. For a while I thought the way to lead was to step back, to serve, to “let your work speak for itself.” But systems don’t care how much integrity you have. They care how clearly you signal dominance, vision, or decisiveness. Humility might be a private virtue. But publicly, it looks like weakness. And humans, being animals, optimize for hierarchy.

If you’re serious about doing important work, suppressing your presence is not just ineffective—it’s negligent.

Why Guilt Is Useless

Then there’s guilt—the psychological parasite that feeds off moral ambition. Guilt is framed as a signal of conscience. It’s not. It’s a cognitive sinkhole. The more you try to be flawless, the more guilt you accumulate. You begin selecting actions not because they’re efficient or effective, but because they allow you to avoid the emotional penalty of feeling like a bad person.

This creates moral paralysis. You hesitate to take risks. You distrust your own needs. You spend more time managing your inner critic than actually doing work. Worse, guilt becomes a form of self-importance—your suffering becomes proof of your goodness. And if your goodness depends on your suffering, you will sabotage anything that reduces it.

The Strategic Cost of Asceticism

Asceticism is treated in moral philosophy as a kind of purification. The logic is that by denying the self—pleasure, comfort, luxury—you become more focused, less corruptible, more aligned with the truth. But in practice, it’s an incredibly inefficient way to live. It assumes that the human animal is the problem, and that the path to virtue is to suppress it.

That’s a mistake. Your drives—comfort, status, pleasure—aren’t moral liabilities. They’re motivational architecture. If you strip them out, you don’t become more ethical. You become emotionally malnourished, creatively impotent, and deeply reliant on the approval of others to validate your suffering. You’re not a better person. You’re just tired and underfed and stuck.

If you’re actually trying to solve real-world problems, this is catastrophic. You don’t need self-denial. You need energy. You need motivation. You need stamina. And if you’re operating at any kind of scale, you need leverage—which almost always comes from amplifying your own talent and optimizing your environment to support it. That includes basic comfort. Sleep. Food. Autonomy. Intellectual stimulation. Joy.

Asceticism is a spiritual UX failure. It optimizes for purity, not throughput.

Why the Personal Is More Productive Than the Holy

Here’s a dangerous idea: it’s not “holiness” that enables people to build valuable things. It’s selfishness—but the right kind.

People create when they have something to say. When they feel urgency, pain, joy, obsession. These are not saintly qualities. They’re human ones. If you try to live above them—to suppress your preferences, to neuter your identity—you don’t become a universal instrument of goodness. You become irrelevant.

The best thinkers, builders, artists, founders—they don’t aspire to be universally good. They aim to make something real. And realness is personal. It’s specific. It comes with rough edges, with strange intuitions, with experiences that don’t always map neatly to virtue.

Trying to operate from a framework of pure morality forces you to dilute all of that. You become inoffensive, over-considered, timid. You stop saying what you mean. You stop doing what you believe. You start optimizing for being admired instead of being useful.

You want to be more effective? Abandon the performance of virtue. Start building what matters to you. Not just to others. Not to “the world.” To you.

Effective Altruism Is What Moral Seriousness Actually Looks Like

This is why I found Effective Altruism so compelling. It doesn’t care how you feel about yourself. It doesn’t care how pious you look. It wants to know what works.

The best EAs aren’t saints. They’re researchers. Strategists. Engineers. They don’t flagellate themselves to feel virtuous. They run numbers. They test interventions. They think in counterfactuals and opportunity costs. They don’t believe in the moral high ground. They believe in the moral multiplier.

Here’s the key: if your goal is impact, sainthood is a local maximum. It feels virtuous. But it cuts you off from scale. You can’t lead teams as a martyr. You can’t raise capital from a cave. You can’t negotiate with governments if your only asset is how little sleep you get.

If you want to play on global terms, you have to abandon the idea that morality is about personal purity. It’s about output. Reach. Effect. Strategy. You don’t get points for what you suffer. You get points for what you build that actually works.

Embracing Power Without Guilt

This doesn’t mean you discard ethics. It means you treat ethics like any other hard problem: with realism, with skepticism, and with data. You move from a purity-based model to a power-based one—not in the Nietzschean sense of domination, but in the engineering sense of capacity.

You want to be good? Don’t be pure. Be powerful. Not in the showy, Elon-Musk-on-Twitter way. In the real way. Build systems. Shape norms. Change incentives. Develop frameworks. Write tools. Teach people. Move capital. Design ideas that scale beyond you.

This requires a kind of confidence that sainthood explicitly disavows. A belief that your own reasoning is worth acting on. That your sense of how things should work is not a liability, but a signal.

You don’t get that by humbling yourself into silence. You get it by studying the system, seeing the leverage points, and stepping in—even if it’s messy, even if it’s imperfect.

Especially then.

Strategic Goodness Over Sacred Innocence

Being a saint is seductive. It offers a kind of clean, well-lit control over your life. But it’s not strategic. It’s not even moral, if your definition of morality includes actually making things better.

The world doesn’t need more innocent people. It needs more effective ones.

So if you feel guilty for being ambitious, stop. If you feel arrogant for believing you have something valuable to say, speak louder. If you feel like your desire to be comfortable makes you selfish, realize that you’re maintaining the system that keeps your output viable.

In other words: stop trying to be a saint. Start trying to be useful.