I'm surprised the article and non of the comments I've seen in this thread mention effective altruism, which in the framing of the article is an attempt to scale caring in some sense.

The article helped me realize why so many people in the startup/tech/software engineering scene are drawn to effective altruism, it's a way to scale helping humanity in the best way possible. The effective altruism argument is that it's more productive to by mosquito nets in Africa than to volunteer at a food shelter because buying mosquito nets will save more lives.

But this article helps explain why I don't personally feel drawn to or buy into effective altruism. Because caring doesn't scale, you can only really care about a handful of people close to you. And to me that altruism feels better and seems like it goes further than donating money to help more people that I can't truly care for.