I accept all the argument for why one should be an effective altruist, and yet I am not, personally, an EA. This post gives a pretty good avenue for explaining how and why. I'm in Daniel's position up through chunk 4.

Ditto, though I diverged differently. I said, "Ok, so the problems are greater than available resources, and in particular greater than resources I am ever likely to be able to access. So how can I leverage resources beyond my own?"

I ended up getting an engineering degree and working for a consulting firm advising big companies what emerging technologies to use/develop/invest in. Ideal? Not even close. But it helps direct resources in the direction of efficiency and prosperity, in some small way. I have to shut down the part of my brain that tries to take on the weight of the world, or my broken internal care-o-meter gets stuck at "zero, despair, crying at every news story." But I also know that little by little, one by one, painfully slowly, the problems will get solved as long as we move in the right direction, and we can then direct the caring that we do have in a bit more concentrated way afterwards. And as much as it scares me to write this, in the far future, when there may be quadrillions of people? A few more years of suffering by a few billion people here, now won't add or subtract much from the total utility of human civilization.