TL;DR Imposter Syndrome and deep uncertainty are repeating themes in community members. We need to look further into the reasons for this and how we can address it, especially since it likely contributes to the gender gap in EA.
For people early and mid in their careers, one theme dominated: Imposter Syndrome and deep uncertainty. The apparent downside of a community of high-achievers doing impactful work is that it is very easy for self-doubt to creep in.
One person felt bad that they hadn't started a charity by the time they were 16. Another was starting a charity but was comparing themselves to founders who had global reach and had started 10 years ago. Countless university students were feeling uncertain about what to do next and stressed about the fact that they were uncertain, as if not knowing what to do at that age is not only normal but almost expected. I even found myself doubting if my career as a Data Scientist for a company that digitalises clinics in Rwanda was impactful enough.
The question is why? My theory is that it's a combination of three things:
- The type of people EA attracts - high achievers and deep thinkers (read possibly overthinkers)
- The fact that so many in the community have accomplished amazing things - it can be difficult to avoid comparisons
- The pressure to be an Effective Altruist - this results in a feeling that there's always that nagging question of am I doing enough/am I the most effective I can be?
This has important implications for community building because it could explain one of the factors influencing underrepresentation from various demographics, such as women, who are more likely to face Imposter Syndrome. My guess for a mechanism is that the added psychological load from Imposter Syndrome makes a person a. less likely to join the EA community and b. more likely to leave the EA community.
I'm fairly new to EA so I can't speak to details on what is likely contributing to this and how to best address it.
This is a fairly rough post but I wanted to get the conversation going, so please share thoughts.
Welcome to the forum, Quinn. Glad to have you here. :)
I wonder to what extend the imposter syndrome in EA is unique to EA, and to what extent it is a broader societal trend of comparing ourselves to others. This could easily turn into a long rant on social media and how comparison is the thief of joy, but I'll try to keep it concise: we generally only feel that we aren't doing enough when we see other people that are doing more, and we usually have a very superficial glance[1] at doing more. When I feel the worst about myself is when I've made the poor decision to scroll through Facebook or LinkedIn, and I see other people doing things that I wish I was doing. Mimetic desire at it's finest. As you can imagine, I don't often scroll through those things.
Maybe these trends are both exacerbated in EA because it is a fairly online community, and it is also a fairly young community?
"Superficial" in the sense of us mainly seeing crafted images rather than seeing realities. I see that someone earns 250,000 USD per year and donates about half of that, but I don't as easily see A) the tradeoffs & sacrifices that person made in order to do that, or B) the unearned privilidge that allows that person to do that. Here is an image I think of often, from Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhapy.
This is a nice summary, and I agree with your theory about potential causes. I added the Impostor Syndrome tag to this post, which you might find useful to browse for more ideas other people have had.
(In case anyone else was wondering, the dictionaries I checked accept both impostor and imposter as variants of the same word. It looks like existing posts are split about evenly between the two :) )