I donate freely to good causes.

Nobody sends a card for a standing order. It leaves on the eighth, joins several thousand others, and produces no moment at all - no handshake, no photograph, no sense of having done something.

That absence is roughly the point. Giving that generates a feeling is partly a purchase of the feeling. Giving you have forgotten about, running quietly in the background of a life for eleven years, is not buying anything. It is money going where it is more useful, which is a plainer and much less flattering description than most of us would choose.