Never Give Money to Charity

And hope shooting star wishes do the trick.

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Not that I'm about to openly make a point for punching orphans, but that title still comes off as an unhinged nose dive into the Devil's advocate's ass crack, so let me explain.

There's nothing wrong with tricking the socially conscious into monthly donations. Sure this 1-star shit parade of rampant inequality we affectionally call "late-stage capitalism" is gonna take more than telethons and the Ice Bucket Challenge to even out, but it's a start.

And if I've learned anything from Cardi B's OnlyFans subscribers is that you can always find worse ways to spend your money anyway.

But the problem with charity is not the sentiment

There's therapeutic value in taking your mind off tangled earbuds and other 1st World problems, innit? Once in a while, think about the fact that as the top 17% of the global population (that's you) overeat themselves to the discovery of type 3 diabetes, a child roaming Ethiopia on tire rubber sandals is not gonna meet his daily nutritional intake unless he finds a way to photosynthesize.

The problem is this naive conviction we have that charities can harass a bit for a signature, then perform some type of voodooist, Gandhi-esque witchcraft on it to infuse their recycled bracelets with the power to turn that kid into a National Geographic cover. And they can't. They're not that slick.

In fact, were you take a peek at how charities actually operate, you'd find the kind of patent disorganization you'd get for trying to ad-lib an Ikea bedframe — nothing but loose bolts, creaky corners, and a reprehending "How can they even sleep at night?" sort of feeling.

Let me give you some examples.

We knocked Kenya's textile industry out of business

I get that those neglected low-rise jeans cluttering your wardrobe haven't sparked any joy since nineteen ninety-never — and what better way of having your KonMari getting a bunch of likes on Instagram than a selfie of you dumping them on a charity clothing bin?

Here's the thing though. Kenya had a thriving textile industry back in the 80s. Maybe not big enough for a spectacular Shark Tank pitch, but it gave a monthly salary to half a million people.

That is until the performative generosity of the West came in hot with a gangbang of 100,000 annual tons of hand-me-downs. For those of you who clearly missed Sesame Street's episode where they explain the law of supply and demand, let me tell you why this is problematic.

When you take the clothing market of a 3rd World country and turn it into Macklemore's 2012 hit rap song "Thrift Shop," you eliminate the need for the kind of 9-to-5s that would've manufactured that same product locally. You kill the local hustle culture and create a cycle of dependency with the West, simultaneously kicking 96% of that workforce to the back of the welfare wagon.

No one's sleeping commando in Kenya, but without a local industry, they're never taking their economy past the point where they stop asking tourists to get special vaccines before they visit.

We left rural Africa without drinking water

Thirst quenching is arguably one of my favorite hobbies — I do it every day — so I understand the charitable impulse to provide poor African villages with a water source that doesn't take them on a butt-clenching ride of typhoid fever just to metabolize it.

A bunch of NGOs raised hundreds of millions of dollars to go build water supply points all over the place. And credit to them, these villages got their water pumps. For a while, they could pull on a lever and have a good ol' H2O cocktail. It wasn't the Starkey Spring from Whole Foods, sure, but at least they weren't drinking from a turbid puddle that looks like the murder weapon in a poisoning homicide case anymore.

For a while.

I don't want to say these charities did a botched job, but I've put more thought into the construction plans of my Monopoly hotels than these people did on their water pumps.

The thing with any piece of machinery that is not made out of old-school Nokia brick phones is that, eventually, the wear-and-tear is gonna cause them to break. And since not even once did the NGOs pay Xzibit to fly his MTV crew over to do some tune-up on the water pumps, they started to break.

Today, more than 50,000 water supply points are drier than my elbow, and no one is going there to repair them. It's just a lever pump now. The only thing they could do with them is install a lunk alarm next to it and open a Planet Fitness.

And that is not exactly a lifestyle upgrade in my book.

We worsened Ethiopia's famine

Back in the 80s, the Ethiopians were going through a particularly bad case of non-intermittent fasting — the kind of brutal famine that would make you feel really guilty for complaining about your microwave not heating the lasagna evenly — which was a problem in and of itself.

But then in came the West to make a cameo.

Step 1 of the plan was to put together the Live Aid concert. Surely you remember; the biggest musical stars were thrown together (way before the Avengers made crossovers cool) to encourage donations to combat the Ethiopian famine. Step 2 was to take the $127 million in lunch money they had raised and give it all to Mengistu, the deranged Ethiopian dictator who, at the time, was busy playing real-life Risk against his political opposers to see who could kill the other first.

Ironclad plan.

Unfortunately, in a complete ass-over-tits plot twist that absolutely everyone saw coming, Mengistu ignored the starvation ravishing his country — a famine that was caused by the military conflict in the first place — and went on a weapon shopping spree.

Bullets were bought instead of cereals. Don't get me wrong, I can totally see a powder diet going viral on TikTok. But I doubt ammo will ever become the breakfast of champions, so do you see the problem here?

Why donate to charity at all?

I don't doubt people's good intentions here, but if we can learn something from these examples is that the only thing charities are truly good at is at being billionaires' tax evasion sugar babies.

Complex problems can't be solved just by dumping a shipping container full of second-hand clothes or canned food. And, as we've seen, they sometimes make things worse.

So in short, don't just tip your halo to an NGO's bank account so your brain gets tickled in that part of the brain that makes you feel like Jesus would've wanted to have a secret, best-friend handshake with you.

If you want your donation to help, at least check sites like Charity Navigator and Give Well and make a smart donation instead of blindly venmoing the Red Cross to help them fight the war against "administrative fees."

But if your donation is more about how it makes you feel, then maybe stick to shooting star wishes. You're better off not giving at all.