Or, the ‘Everything is EA’ mindset
I’ll try to distill this in as few words as possible, because I don’t think it needs to be a long post.
The essence of what I want to say is: don’t rest too long on progress.
I had a lot of struggles with EA. I overcame them. I gradually understood the world better and better, my models became more and more accurate, and my anxiety was less and less crippling.
And then, I was free.
I was free of the constant nagging concern of 'what if this isn’t EA?', because I thought I was in a good spot. I could justify my life, because I was going to help the world. I had resolved the immediate, pressing concerns. All that was left was to calmly prioritise and get going.
In a sense, that’s where the real problems for my impact started.
Certain changes in life can make us apathetic towards things we were previously passionate. This concern exists in various places. I’ve heard it said about certain SSRIs, meditation, psychedelics. The list goes on.
And it’s a real concern. Especially if you’ve decided that you don’t need to justify anything any more beyond some sort of hand-wavey ‘it’ll be good for my impact, probably’. I call this the ‘Everything is EA’ mindset:
Socialising? Good for impact!
Blogging? Good for impact!
Eating? Good for impact!
Sleeping? Good for impact!
Breathing? …
You see my point. Breathing is good for impact, obviously, but only in the sense that it’s terrible if you stop doing it. Breathing is very easy to do. You should be allocating very few conscious resources to breathing. Breathing alone won’t save the world.
There are cases where this type of attitude can be very helpful. If you’re going through a tough spot, focusing on the basics is great. Not just because it’s easier, but because it can be really bad if you don’t do the basics, and if the basics are in danger of not being done, you should focus on those, and be happy with that.
Moreover, if you can put most things in your life into some sort of prioritisation framework with a clearly defined bottom line, I think you’re probably in a good spot. I don’t want to be critical of that, because it’s not something to criticise. I think the problem comes when you start to consistently and habitually satisfy the part of you that wants EA by telling it things like: look, I brushed my teeth! That’s enough impact!
Again, this can be fine for a bit. But I think it simply fails as a long-term strategy for ambitious altruists.
This mode of thinking led to a peculiar type of value drift in me (one I’ve written about elsewhere), in which I let EA become some far-off future idea in my head. A future idea that I nonetheless thought about every day. And every day, I justified myself as an EA, because I was breathing, and sleeping, and eating.
I rested too long on progress.
If you rest too long on progress, eventually the progress you’ve been missing comes back to bite you, and then you’re pretty stuck. Helping the world is a constant, iterative process, both personally and professionally. Big improvements are great, but you have to be able to handle them properly.
When things come back to bite, and suddenly they’re not okay again, you’re pretty stuck. “But everything was okay!” you exclaim. “Everything I was doing was EA!” And suddenly, it’s not all EA any more—or at least, it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like the EA-ness of your existence is in jeopardy. It’s not a nice feeling. And you can’t help feeling like it really didn’t have to be that way, if only you hadn’t rested too long on your progress.
By all means rest. Rest long, if you need. Sometimes you will need that. But don’t rest longer than you’d intended, or you’ll risk jeopardising the work you’ve done. You’ll risk missing the opportunity to further refine your career plans, to build more skills, and to actually go about having the impact you’ve been thinking about having.
It’s very tempting to bask in the warm glow of anxieties alleviated and prioritisation issues settled. But life is a constant fight, and if you’re anything like me, you’d struggle to have it any other way.
So I thought I’d write this short post in case it helps people to navigate career planning. Let it be a cautionary tale. I rested too long on progress—and trust me, you don’t want to let it happen to you.
