Summary
- Impact obsession is a potentially unhelpful way of relating to doing good which we’ve observed among effective altruists, including ourselves. (More)
- What do we mean by impact obsession?
- One can distinguish unhealthy and healthy forms of impact obsession.(More)
- Common characteristics include an overwhelming desire for doing the most good one can do, basing one’s self-worth on one’s own impact, judging it by increasingly demanding standards (“impact treadmill”), overexerting oneself, neglecting or subjugating non-altruistic interests, and anxiety about having no or negative impact. (More)
- Is impact obsession good or bad?
- Many aspects of impact obsession are reasonable and even desirable. (More)
- Others can have detrimental consequences like depression, anxiety, guilt, exhaustion, burnout, and disillusionment. (More)
- What to do about (unhealthy) impact obsession?
- Besides useful standard (mental) health advice, potentially helpful strategies involve, for example: reflecting on our relationship with and motives for having impact, integrating conflicting desires, shifting from avoidance to approach motivation, cultivating additional sources of meaning and self-worth, reducing resistance and non-acceptance, leaning into absurdity when being overwhelmed, and learning skills (e.g., exposure therapy, positive reframing, self-compassion) for managing common negative thoughts & emotions accompanying impact obsession. (More)
Introduction
We’ve noticed that many EAs, including ourselves, sometimes relate to effective altruism and impact in an unhealthy way. In this post, we describe this phenomenon, which we call ‘impact obsession’. While its specifics vary from person to person, certain common patterns emerge (as others have also pointed out). Here’s a (first-person) description of how this can feel, based on our own experiences and that of others we’ve spoken to:
By far my most important goal in life is to do as much good as I can. I connect with the logic of EA on a visceral level: seeing a human or animal suffering inevitably reminds me of just how much awfulness exists in this world, how much brighter the future could be, and that what ultimately matters is helping as many sentient beings as best I can. I feel a lot of responsibility because I might be able to make a big difference to the lives of others. Heck, the stakes might literally be astronomical once you consider how your actions might affect the long-term trajectory of Earth-originating life. This is why maximizing positive impact is so important to me.
Exactly how to go about doing the most good is a very difficult question and requires lots of strategizing and experimentation. Picking the right project in the right career path in the right cause area could easily mean having orders of magnitude more impact than if I’d settle on the first decent option. So getting this type of prioritization right is extremely important to me. I therefore spend a lot of time and emotional energy on questions like “is this cause area really the most important one?”, “is this project really the best one I can do?”, “is there some creative out-of-the-box idea that I’m missing and which would allow me to have way more impact?”, or “am I falling prey to some cognitive bias or undue social influence which leads me down the wrong path?”
Unfortunately, the world is extremely complicated, cluelessness is often a huge problem, and many smart people—most of them way smarter than myself!—disagree about what to do. So trying to figure out what I should be doing can feel overwhelming and often fills me with despair.
My self-esteem and my happiness are greatly influenced by how much impact I think I’m having. If I feel my work is important and I’m making progress, I feel great. But sometimes I feel like my work doesn’t make sense, or that I’m stuck or that I’ve made a mistake. I often feel like I’m not having enough impact and could do better. At times, I even worry about having negative impact. All of this can leave me feeling pretty sad and anxious.
I often compare myself to others. When I see someone working long hours, I push myself to do the same. If I can't, I feel guilty. When I see someone making a huge difference, I question why I didn't do the same and feel disappointed with myself. Sometimes I feel downright worthless and incompetent, especially when I think about the most impactful EAs who may be having literally thousands of times more impact than me. Sometimes I feel that I’m not smart enough or lack the necessary skills to help with the most important causes or projects. This can make me feel like a failure, useless and unable to contribute. I may feel like I’m letting those down who need me most.
I push myself and often try to work long hours. There are times when I'm too exhausted to focus, yet I still want to work more. But when I try and can't, it leaves me feeling frustrated and powerless.
I've also found that I'm not as excited about my hobbies or other non-EA topics anymore. I might have thoughts like, "Should I really go dancing now? I have enough energy to work more on my project and I'm not as far along as I'd like. Also, dancing isn't exactly going to save the world, is it?"
Why we wrote this post
Ewelina is a therapist who works with EAs. She noticed that many of her clients were struggling with impact obsession in a similar way to us. Our sense is that this type of unhealthy impact obsession is sometimes misinterpreted and not as readily recognized as, say, depression. With this post, we wanted to carve out this way of relating to impact & EA and give the concept a handle.
To be honest, we also wrote this post to remind ourselves of some of our unhelpful tendencies and how to manage them. We don’t want to pathologize “being hardcore” and obsessing about doing the most good you can. In fact, if more people did this, the world would probably be a better place. Instead, we want to help people who struggle with specific harmful and counterproductive attitudes towards being hardcore.
What do we mean by impact obsession?
Healthy vs. unhealthy impact obsession
To be clear, we are not claiming that if you obsess about impact, then you are necessarily doing something wrong. This is why we first want to distinguish healthy from unhealthy impact obsession though this distinction itself is best viewed (like almost everything else) as a continuum.
It’s possible to display almost all of the characteristics described below but nevertheless be happy and productive. For example, there are people whose sense of self-worth is mostly dependent on their impact, but they are happy with how much impact they are having. They set reasonable standards for themselves and are willing to adjust their goals if they realize that they are unrealistic. They obsess about impact and challenge themselves but, knowing their limits, they don’t push themselves too hard.
One important difference between this sort of healthy impact obsession and unhealthy impact obsession is the motivation driving the obsessive striving for impact. Unhealthy impact obsession seems primarily motivated by fear, avoidance, and a sense of threat. You are desperate to have lots of positive impact otherwise you feel like a bad person, worthless, deficient, inadequate, indebted, guilty for not doing more, unacceptable, and unlovable. (Much of this might be subconscious.) In contrast, healthy impact obsession seems to come more from a place of safety and already feeling good enough in some fundamental sense. For instance, you may take joy in becoming even better, helping even more beings, and treating every bit of additional impact as a nice bonus.
Another important difference is that unhealthy impact obsession is characterized by negative thinking and pessimism. People with unhealthy impact obsession tend to assess their impact unfavorably, focusing on what they haven’t achieved, their failures and mistakes, rather than what they have achieved. They are more likely to think about how useless they are and how little impact they have compared to the most impactful people, rather than how much impact they have compared to the average person.
Common characteristics
With this in mind, let’s discuss the most common characteristics of impact obsession in more detail, roughly ordered by their relevance. (This is basically a more structured and detailed version of the introduction; feel free to skip.)
Everyone is different and everything is on a spectrum; that is, people can vary on i) how many of these characteristics they exhibit, ii) the degree to which they display a given characteristic, and iii) how happy and productive they are overall.
Overwhelming desire for maximizing positive impact
If you’re an impact-obsessed EA, doing the most good is your most important life goal. In fact, you might view maximizing positive impact as your only purpose in life and see all other goals (such as, for example, pursuing hobbies) as primarily instrumental. You don’t just think this abstractly: you feel, as Nicole Ross writes, ‘a deep, powerful, clawing desire for impact’. This usually goes hand in hand with thinking that impact is, philosophically speaking, all that matters and that the stakes are extremely high. (These tendencies may be further exacerbated if you believe that we’re plausibly living at the hinge of history, e.g., due to short AI timelines.)
Self-worth and identity are linked to impact
Your identity, self-worth, and self-esteem are centered around having impact: you only see yourself as worthy and valuable inasmuch as you (believe you) have positive impact. Your moods may be unstable since they depend heavily on how your EA-related projects are going: if you believe that you’re having a large impact, you might feel great, but if you believe that you’re having no impact, you might feel depressed and worthless.
Personally demanding (or unreasonable) standards
You assess your own impact by ambitious and unreasonably demanding standards. If you don’t meet these standards, you become intensely self-critical and feel like a failure. Even if you do on occasion meet the demanding standards you’ve set for yourself, you soon start craving even more impact, and set even more ambitious goals. (EAs are also encouraged to be more ambitious, which may reinforce this pattern for some.)
Excessive comparisons and the impact treadmill
Humans are social creatures and our standards, including our standards for impact, are heavily influenced by our peers. The EA community is full of extremely talented people, so it’s easy to compare yourself to the best of the best and feel bad when you can’t match their accomplishments.
Many people experience a kind of ‘impact treadmill’ or ‘comparison treadmill’ (cf. the hedonic treadmill): as soon as you’ve achieved one threshold, you immediately start comparing yourself to people at the next level up. You might feel bad because you can’t directly contribute to an important cause area. After years of skilling up and many applications later, you finally can do direct work in your favored cause area, but now you compare yourself to the top 10% in our field. After another few years of hard work, you might even reach the top 10% but now you set yourself even more unrealistic standards (and compare yourself to, say, Paul Christiano). Even though you’ve achieved many of your original goals and do more impactful work than most people, you still feel bad about your impact.
Because you desire to do the most good, you feel like you’re never doing enough good.
Pushing oneself too hard and neglecting non-altruistic interests
As a consequence of trying to meet your demanding (often unrealistic) standards, you often push yourself very hard, and pride yourself on being ‘hardcore’. Even if you’re already achieving a lot or working many hours, you push yourself to do more. Ideally, you’d like to be productive all the time and neglect non-altruistic interests such as hobbies or relationships in order to be able to work more.
You might feel guilty, dissatisfied or even empty when you can’t work as much as you’d like. You are often willing to make great sacrifices in order to have more impact. You might feel drained and exhausted from working too much but interpret this as being lazy.
Black-and-white thinking
You often fall into black-and-white thinking when you consider how much impact you’re having. If you have less impact than some EA superstars, you might feel like you’re basically useless and a failure.
This can be exacerbated by understanding how heavy-tailed impact is: The most impactful people may have several orders of magnitude more impact than the median person. If you’re not one of these few EA superstars, it’s easy to feel like your impact, and thus your life, is basically a rounding error in comparison.
Frequent worries about (prioritization) mistakes
Generally, you often worry about making suboptimal decisions or mistakes. You might constantly wonder if your current projects are really the best you could do. Perhaps you are making a big prioritization mistake? This can reduce the motivation to finish projects because you doubt that this project is really optimal midway through.
It’s also not uncommon to worry about having negative impact, for instance, by overlooking backfire risks or crucial considerations.
Obsessive thoughts about impact
You might evaluate nearly everything in terms of how much impact you have and how to have more. You might find it difficult to stop thinking about impact even in your free time, making it difficult to enjoy leisure activities.
Obsessive thoughts about impact may negatively affect your relationships—for example, when meeting new people, you may wonder if you should try to convince them to pursue a more impactful career. Such thoughts often make it harder to form genuine connections.
Impact obsession, clinical perfectionism, and scrupulosity
Impact obsession has a lot in common with clinical perfectionism. (In fact, when we started working on this post years ago we tentatively called it “EA and perfectionism”.)
Clinical perfectionists base their self-worth primarily on achieving personally demanding (and often unrealistic) standards in at least one domain despite negative consequences (Shafran et al., 2002). Clinical perfectionism often involves black-and-white thinking, overexerting oneself, excessive comparisons and other characteristics we discussed above (Egan et al., 2016). The negative consequences of impact obsession and clinical perfectionism are also similar (we discuss them below), and some of the strategies that help with perfectionism can also help with impact obsession (which we also discuss below).
However, there are also important differences between impact obsession and clinical perfectionism. The most obvious difference is that clinical perfectionism doesn’t have to be about doing good and in fact rarely is. Another important difference is that standard clinical perfectionism is often characterized by cognitive and behavioral rigidity and inflexibility, task inefficiency and bad prioritization, i.e., spending too much time on perfecting unimportant tasks. In contrast, many impact-obsessed EAs are flexible, open to change, and good at prioritizing.
See this comment for more details on how EA can reinforce impact obsession and perfectionism and further similarities and differences between impact obsession and other mental health conditions, including perfectionism and scrupulosity. See also this 80,000 hours interview with Tim Lebon on ‘altruistic perfectionism’.
Benefits and costs
Isn’t impact obsession reasonable?
Some people may recognize these patterns in themselves, but think: ‘ok, sure…but since the world really does have many terrible problems, and since I do believe that I’m basically obligated to do something about them, isn’t it reasonable to feel this way?’
If someone is, say, grief-stricken about a school shooting in their town, we don’t say that they have a mental health disorder; similarly, when effective altruists feel guilty, stressed or despairing, these emotions are often rooted in facts about the world and admirable moral convictions.
Yes, it’s basically good to put effort into being altruistic. There can be a weird societal double standard when it comes to altruism: society often admires and respects athletes or entrepreneurs who strive hard to succeed in sport or business, yet people are suspicious of altruists who strive hard to be more moral (see also do-gooder derogation). If a ballerina permanently injures her knees through too much training and then becomes depressed because she can no longer dance, people have sympathy; but if an EA burns out because she’s pushed herself too hard, and feels sad about the fact that this limits how altruistic she can be, this is sometimes taken as evidence that EA is a fundamentally mistaken philosophy.
There is arguably a continuum between ‘caring about impact constantly and obsessively’ and ‘never thinking about one’s impact’: people with extreme impact obsession are plausibly too far towards the one end, given that they aren’t utilitarian robots but humans who also need to take it easy from time to time given their psychological and physiological limitations. But most people are probably (way) too far towards the ‘children dying from malaria isn’t my problem, I’m not gonna worry about this, and focus on having fun’ end.
Benefits
If having a positive impact is your most important goal by far, you probably will have a greater impact than if you primarily cared about other things, ceteris paribus. Or in Ozy Brennan’s words, ‘EA dedicates’—people who strive to only care about impact—are usually “going to get more good done than comparable non-dedicates, assuming they don’t burn out”. (Though the “assuming they don’t burn out” clause is very important, as we’ll discuss below.)
In general, if you practice a skill a lot, you’ll get better at it. Athletes who are obsessed about their sport will usually improve more quickly than those who only sorta care. Similarly, if you think about impact all the time, you’ll be, for example, more likely to think of unusual ideas about how to have an impact, and less likely to settle for a career or donation opportunity that is ‘good enough’ as you’ll always be looking out for whether you can do something even more impactful. You’ll also be more willing to work on causes that are ‘weird’ and not socially respected (e.g., AI alignment before, say, 2015) because you care much more about impact than about status and social acceptability. There are many other benefits like these.
Potential negative consequences of unhealthy impact obsession
That being said, unhealthy impact obsession can often have negative long-term consequences. We list some common ones below, most of which we have experienced ourselves (in varying degrees).
Depression, feeling worthless or unable to contribute
What happens if your only goal and source of meaning in life is to have impact, but you think that you’re unable to? You feel pretty lousy, especially if you’re surrounded by other high-impact people. You might feel guilty and ashamed for not doing enough to help the world and worry that other EAs look down on you.
All of this can leave you feeling useless and worthless, especially if you believe you lack the necessary interests, talents or intelligence to contribute to the most important causes (e.g., AI). (Assessments of lacking ability may be wrong, as in the case of impostor syndrome, but they can be correct, too.)
If you’re unsuccessful in or unhappy with a certain way of life, you can usually move on to a different one. For example, a soccer player who continues to be unsuccessful or is getting bored of soccer will, sooner or later, move towards a career more suited to her talents. His identity and self-worth are not tied to soccer on some fundamental, philosophical level. But if you’re deeply convinced by the arguments behind EA, you cannot really escape their logic and might feel trapped in EA even though it’s starting to make you unhappy.
For all of these reasons, some impact-obsessed EAs are at substantial risk of developing depression. In extreme cases, they might have suicidal thoughts like "I basically have no impact, I’m such a failure, and there is no hope in getting better, from the point of view of the universe my life is basically meaningless, I should just kill myself."
Despair over the state of the world
Those with impact obsession need not doubt their own worth and may even feel pretty good about themselves. However, they can still feel saddened by how much suffering there is in the world or despair over potential dystopian futures. Feelings of hopelessness can be further exacerbated by the apparent apathy of others and a sense of one’s limited influence over the world’s trajectory.
Anxiety and guilt
As mentioned above, people with unhealthy impact obsession often seem motivated to have impact from a place of fear, threat, or deficiency. Their thoughts and emotions are primarily concerning negative events they want to avoid, rather than positive events they want to achieve.
This might give rise to thoughts like “what if my work has little or no impact—let alone negative impact!—while receiving money from an EA organization? My life would be much worse than merely being useless; I would have caused enormous counterfactual harm by reducing the funding of a highly effective organization.”
Such thoughts can easily become overwhelming and cause us to become paralyzed by fear and anxiety. It’s unfortunate that the more you care about impact, the more vulnerable you are to such fears.
In our experience, such ‘threat-based’ avoidance motivation is worse for our mental health, creativity, and productivity, especially in the long term, than ‘drive-based motivation’, characterized by feelings of enthusiasm and optimism. While writing this post, Richard Ngo published an excellent sequence with a very similar key message: to replace fear with excitement-based motivation. See the section Approach vs. Avoidance motivation below for further discussion.
This type of “impact anxiety” can also give rise to a particularly vicious cycle of “anxiety about having not enough or negative impact” → “being less productive and creative, having more (mental) health problems” → “ insomnia, and/or inability to rest, and recover ” → “reduced productivity and thus reduced impact” → “even more pronounced worries about having no impact”.
Burnout and (chronic) fatigue
In general, many of the above mentioned patterns of thought and emotion contribute to a decreased capacity for rest and recovery. In combination with chronic overexertion and stress, this often leads to increasingly severe problems over time, sometimes culminating in chronic fatigue and burnout.
Sadly, such states are often interpreted as laziness, when in truth, they’re more accurately viewed as the opposite, that is, the result of excessive, demanding work and insufficient rest. (In this context, we also recommend Luise's post on how burnout and fatigue feel like and what can help.)
Another cause of burnout appears to be the excessive neglect of non-altruistic interests—a common occurrence among those with unhealthy impact obsession—as Carl Shulman observed many years ago:
[...] sometimes people caught up in thoughts of the good they can do, or a self-image of making a big difference in the world, are motivated to think of themselves as really being motivated primarily by helping others as such. Sometimes they go on to an excessive smart sincere syndrome, and try (at the conscious/explicit level) to favor altruism at the severe expense of their other motivations: self-concern, relationships, warm fuzzy feelings.
Usually this doesn't work out well, as the explicit reasoning about principles and ideals is gradually overridden by other mental processes, leading to exhaustion, burnout, or disillusionment. The situation winds up worse according to all of the person's motivations, even altruism.[...]
Unfortunately, many people tend to brush off initially mild symptoms of burnout and don’t change their ways until serious psychological damage has been done. This seems more common among younger people and those who recently discovered EA. (We certainly did the same and believed that we were different and that burnout is something that only affects weak-minded, insufficiently dedicated people.)
Fears of motivated reasoning and self-deception
A further complication is that many impact-obsessed EAs are suspicious of arguments for prioritizing self-care and mental health, dismissing them as excuses for rationalizing personal desires. They thus aim for the minimum of self-care (or less). Unfortunately, such worries are indeed warranted since self-deception, hypocrisy, and motivated reasoning are hallmarks of human nature.
Reduced curiosity, excitement, and interests
People with impact obsession often start out with intrinsic enjoyment of and curiosity about many things, but over time, they begin to feel guilty about devoting time to these less-impactful pursuits.
Before we discovered EA, we were interested in a wide range of topics. But then we gradually learned to evaluate almost everything in terms of its potential impact. After a few years, it felt like our natural curiosity had diminished. Asking ourselves whether something was really the most impactful thing we could be reading or thinking about had become almost second nature.
What is more, over time we might become actively suspicious of our intrinsic interests and view passion and excitement as potential sources of bias and motivated reasoning. “Oh no, project A feels really exciting so my evaluation of its expected impact is probably inflated! In contrast, project B feels dull and overwhelming but my evaluation of its expected impact is comparable. After factoring in my biases, I bet it’s actually most altruistic to work on project B!”
This might seem great because you stop wasting your time on unimportant topics and won’t delude yourself into working on pet projects that aren’t actually impactful. Two potentially big advantages, for sure. However, in our experience, this type of thinking (if done excessively) often does more harm than good because it greatly decreases motivation, productivity, and curiosity over time, sometimes culminating in depression, anhedonia, and burnout—though this might take a few years to materialize. It seems that many others have had similar experiences. See, for example, the post “Please don’t throw your mind away” and Anna Salamon’s observations on this topic: for example, the last section of this post, and her comments (e.g., 1, 2).
Less likely to enter flow states and reduced creativity
It’s difficult to get fully absorbed in your work if you’re constantly obsessing about your impact and second-guessing whether your current project is really the most impactful thing you could be doing (as the answer is essentially never a resounding “yes”).
This is not only detrimental to your well-being. In our experience, it also makes you less impactful, because lots of impactful work benefits from the ability to enter flow states and to access playful, relaxed states of mind; for instance, researchers who want to think of creative or novel ideas. Personally, I (David) came up with some of my best ideas during a period in my life where I felt not as concerned with the question “what is the most impactful thing I can do?” and more motivated by the joy of exploration and experimentation (or “maximizing the value of information” which was the framing I used to pacify my inner “impact optimizer” part).
Competitive comparisons, shame, and isolation
The negative thought patterns of impact obsession often revolve around one’s own relative impact and value. That is, people often don’t focus that much on absolute impact—“I donated $10k, so I basically prevented the deaths of two children, that’s great!”—but rather on their relative impact, often in comparison to other EAs. “I donated $10k. If I keep doing this every single day for another 30 years, I’ll have donated about 1% as much as Dustin Moskovitz, fantastic.”
Generally, such thoughts can make you feel as if you’re competing with other EAs and can give rise to feelings of envy, bitterness, shame, self-hate, and alienation. Rather than feeling excited or hopeful about the achievements of other EAs, and having a sense of camaraderie, you might feel threatened and embarrassed about how little impact you’ve had.
This is quite sad and also kind of silly. After all, we’re all in this together and are working towards similar goals. Thinking like this also makes it difficult not to be biased in certain ways—e.g., to overestimate one’s own impact or downplay the impact of others in order to feel better.
Other risks
- Disillusionment with EA and/or leaving EA: People with impact obsession often struggle to live up to their own highly exacting standards and/or (what they see as) the serious moral demands of utilitarianism; rather than living with the inconsistency or lowering their standards, some stop believing in the ideals of EA entirely or leave the community.
- Generally speaking, being too fanatical and ‘hardcore’ about EA, without any sense of moderation or uncertainty, can cause problems, many of which Holden Karnofsky outlines in his post EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous.
What might help
In this section, we list some ideas that have helped us and other people. Note that none of these ideas are panaceas.
Everyone is different so the most useful options probably differ from person to person and need to be adjusted to your own idiosyncratic needs, preferences, and circumstances. It’s best to cultivate a patient approach of repeated trial-and-error and seeing what works for and resonates with you and ignoring what doesn’t. Our suggestions are meant to be merely starting points for further exploration and experimentation on your part.
This section is by no means exhaustive. There are many helpful interventions which we don’t discuss, like improving sleep, exercise, nutrition, trying out antidepressants, psychotherapy, talking to friends, meditation, relaxation exercises, and many established CBT-style techniques (e.g., journaling, behavioral experiments, etc.). This is not because we think they are less important. In fact, you should probably try these interventions first if you haven’t already. It’s just that these interventions are usually rather straightforward and there are already enough resources out there which discuss them at length. Instead, we mainly focus (with some exceptions) on approaches that are targeting cognitive and emotional patterns more unique to impact obsession.
Reflect on your relationship with having impact and your conflicting motivations
To begin with, it seems crucial to reflect on your relationship with EA, your deeper motivation(s) for having impact and your conflicting desires. Many dedicated EAs feel guilty when they observe that impartial altruism is not their only motivation. They try to subjugate or eliminate their conflicting desires in order to have more impact (and reduce their guilt). However, this rarely works and usually just leads to more internal conflict, worse mental health and reduced productivity.
(If you struggle with guilt, it may help to remind yourself that no human is a purely altruistic creature. We are animals created by evolution and our minds consist of many different modules, some of which have non-altruistic motivations. Thus, it cannot be “your” fault if your motivations aren’t perfectly altruistic; you didn’t choose or create them.)
In the long term, being honest with ourselves, exploring and accepting our different parts, resolving internal conflicts and working out mutually beneficial agreements is almost always the way to go. A better understanding of our different motives can also help us to become more aware of our biases, reduce self-deception and motivated reasoning, which in turn enables us to have more impact. If you’re not aware that parts of you strongly care about, say, approval, status, fitting in with the cool crowd, safety, survival, or avoiding feelings of guilt or shame, you will inevitably optimize for the wrong things.
Better understanding yourself also makes it easier to identify your specific needs and the most helpful approaches for improving your mental well-being.
Strengthen additional sources of meaning and self-worth
If your self-worth, happiness and meaning in life are exclusively and solely determined by how much impact (you think) you have, you’re probably going to feel pretty antsy and it might be difficult to relax and rest. If your ability to have impact, for whatever reason, takes a hit, so will your self-worth and mental health. This lack of stability doesn’t seem optimal, especially if you aren’t very resilient. Therefore, having impact as your sole life goal could actually lower the expected amount of impact you’ll have.
So, in principle, trying to find other sources of meaning and self-worth would seem like a great idea. In fact, finding value in other aspects of life—like family, art, hobbies, being a good person—is a core treatment strategy for clinical perfectionism (e.g., Egan et al., 2016, especially ch. 13) and thus might also work for impact obsession.
However, for people with impact obsession, this is much harder to put into practice. People with typical clinical perfectionism usually derive their self-worth primarily from reaching demanding standards in, say, their work. But they usually didn’t pick their line of work after engaging for several years with various philosophical and empirical arguments. They are just an architect, for instance. If you engage them in Socratic dialogue and ask “well, in the grand scheme of things, is creating the perfect house really more important than being a good spouse? Shouldn’t you care more about the latter?”, there is a good chance they’ll concede pretty quickly.
In contrast, imagine asking a committed EA whether “in the grand scheme of things, is improving the long-term trajectory of Earth-originating life in order to increase the probability of utopian outcomes and decrease risks of astronomical suffering really more important than being a good spouse?”. Not exactly a slam dunk.
Another complication is that it might seem as though you’re asked to perform this Jedi mind trick of convincing yourself to adopt alternative values and find hobbies you really care about but only because this allows you to rest and recover and thus furthers your true terminal value of doing the most good, so these values and hobbies remain instrumental, so they can feel empty and unfulfilling.
All that being said, we think that it’s possible, though it might take a while, to find and strengthen alternative sources of self-worth and meaning in life. Luckily, no one derives their self-worth and meaning solely from their impact. There are no pure utilitarian robots. We’re all human, and we all have our idiosyncratic motivations besides doing good. We already care at least somewhat about other things, like being a good friend or partner, irrespective of the impartial impact that has.
It seems possible to further grow how much meaning and self-worth you derive from these areas by, for example, reflecting on values and virtues besides impact that seem important to you, or hanging out with people who inspire you and who seem to have lots of impact but also pursue other goals in life.
What about value drift?
Some people (including ourselves) have worried that cultivating other sources of meaning in this way could lead to value drift. To some extent, our advice might encourage this: rather than only and exclusively valuing utilitarian impact, those with unhealthy impact obsession might want to try attending to the other values and sources of meaning in their life that they’ve been suppressing (partly because this might allow them to have more impact). As Logan Strohl writes, EA burnout can often result from “prolonged dedication to satisfying the values you think you should have, while neglecting the values you actually have.”
To be clear, we aren’t saying that it’s wrong to only care about maximizing impartial good, philosophically speaking. If there was a pill that allowed you to exclusively care about impartial impact and spend all your available energy and resources towards that goal, by all means take the pill if you want to. We might take that pill. It’s just that there is no such pill.
You could view it as an expected value calculation. You could either stay on the EA hardcore path, where the risk of mental health problems, burnout and thus losing much of your future impact is non-trivial. Instead, trying to attend to your other values might mean some value drift, but it’s probably limited in scope—it seems unlikely that you would stop caring about impact completely. What is more, it’s plausible that having a more “lighthearted” attitude about having impact would actually make you more rational, happy, motivated and creative, which might increase your impact a lot. (See also the demandingness objection of utilitarianism and responses.)
Approach motivation vs. avoidance motivation
‘Approach motivation’ refers to the tendency to move towards something positive and is usually associated with excitement and interest. ‘Avoidance motivation’ is about wanting to move away from negative stimuli. Generally speaking, excessive avoidance motivation is associated with reduced creativity (e.g., Friedman & Förster, 2002), and lower subjective well-being, performance and productivity, at least in the long term (e.g., Scholer et al., 2019).
We therefore want to shift our motivation for having impact away from avoidance (e.g., fear of failing those in need, or being a bad person) towards approach motivation (e.g., the hopeful prospect of helping others and making a positive difference). Note that this is not a binary either/or but a continuum which also relates to our previous distinction between healthy and unhealthy impact obsession.
Of course, shifting one’s perspective in this way is much easier said than done. We hope that some of the sections below contain helpful tips. (For a personal anecdote from David about how he achieved this perspective shift (at least once), see this footnote.)
To be clear, we’re not advocating to never challenge or exert yourself. But we encourage you to use (when possible) approach/excitement-based motivation, rather than fear and self-criticism.
Obligation vs. exciting opportunity
All of this relates to the discussion of whether effective altruism should be seen as an obligation or an exciting opportunity. Philosophically speaking, we tend to agree more with the former perspective. But adopting (some of) the latter perspective seems to have various psychological benefits and plausibly allows you to have more impact. In a way, you might have an obligation to view effective altruism as an exciting opportunity.
Focusing on the positive
You can increase your approach motivation by focusing more on the positive outcomes you want to achieve with your work rather than the negatives you want to prevent. For example, if you work in global poverty, rather than only thinking about all the children that are dying from easily preventable diseases and using this as your sole motivation, also reflect on all the children who are now able to lead happy lives, in part thanks to your efforts.
Or, if you’re working on longtermist interventions, take time to contemplate sublime futures where everything went well, in part thanks to your work, rather than only thinking about how we are all going to die soon (or way worse), and how you’re desperately trying to prevent that.
The obvious risk here is complacency, wishful thinking, and other forms of motivated cognition. Don’t do that, please. (Cf. Should you reverse any advice you hear?).
Second, if you struggle with feelings of depression or self-hate you could probably benefit from focusing more on your positive qualities or the positive things you have already achieved. (Of course, if you’re a massive narcissist with an overinflated ego—you know who you are!—please don’t do this.) For example, you might want to write down all the impactful things you already did in your life and remind yourself of them if you’re feeling particularly down (but be wary of overly demanding standards for what counts as impact). Or you could imagine an alternative possible world where you have had much less impact. In comparison, you might feel that you’re doing pretty okay—cf. this post for more details on why and how to replace our implicit, demanding, dichotomous (and ultimately arbitrary) standards with more adaptive ones. (You might also want to check out the exercises in Meuret et al.’s Positive Affect Treatment for Depression and Anxiety (2022), particularly chapter 6.)
Focus less on yourself, compare yourself less
An unhealthy relationship with impact is often characterized by an exaggerated preoccupation with one’s own impact. That is, thoughts like “how much impact do I have, especially compared to others?” or “am I having enough impact?”.
Of course, it’s natural for us to spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves. Thinking about yourself and your strengths and weaknesses is useful in many situations (e.g., when thinking about your career choice). However, (excessive) self-focus is associated with depression, anxiety, and negative affect (Mor & Winquist, 2002), and can make us competitive and envious.
Again, all of this is certainly easier said than done. We certainly often had thoughts like “I wish I was smarter and had more energy”. But it’s possible to lessen the emotional impact of such thoughts by repeatedly reminding ourselves, whenever such emotions arise, that ultimately our combined impact is what matters, not our individual impact.
You want to be the least impactful person in the world
In fact, we can take the above line of reasoning to its logical extreme. (The following is a bit tongue-in-cheek but you might find it helpful.)
Imagine two worlds. World A has 1,000,000 committed EAs, World B has 100 committed EAs. All else being equal, World A is (probably) going to be better than World B, so you should prefer World A. However, your relative impact is probably lower in World A (holding your ability to have impact constant) since most of the low-hanging fruit for doing good has already been picked.
Keep this in mind the next time you, for example, get rejected from a job at an EA organization. Every rejection you receive is an update that we’re actually closer to World A, and thus reason for celebration. What if you are already working at an EA organization, or doing EA-related work? Well, hopefully you are often worried about your performance and feel inferior to your colleagues. But what if you are widely considered to be one of the most competent EAs and have good reasons for believing this? Well, you have our condolences.
In all seriousness, this sort of thought experiment might make you realize that you don’t only care about impact, you also care about you personally having lots of impact. This is (of course) perfectly human and nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, admitting that your motivation for having impact isn’t purely altruistic and at least somewhat egocentric, can make it easier to develop a more light-hearted relationship with having impact. Recognizing this can help you take yourself and your mind’s stories about how it makes perfect sense to be miserable less seriously. It might also allow you to cultivate other sources of meaning in life.
Leaning into absurdity
When confronted with the real possibility of astronomically bad outcomes, cluelessness, backfire risks, and the immense complexity of the relevant problems—especially when compared to our capabilities—we can easily become overwhelmed by despair.
Usually, it’s best to boost our spirits by telling ourselves that “we can do this, it’s not impossible, we already made some progress”, and so on. Perhaps paradoxically, we have found it useful to occasionally do the opposite. We actively dwell on just how insane and ridiculous the whole situation is and positively relish the absurdity of it all. (This approach is probably more useful for certain types of problems, e.g., x-risks and s-risks.)
Some hypotheses for why leaning into absurdity might work: It can provide comedic relief and help you develop a more playful and relaxed attitude towards having impact. When the stakes are so high, leaning into absurdity takes off the pressure, and the possibility of failure becomes less frightening. You feel less like it’s your fault, and more like you aren’t even meant to succeed. It’s as if you’re being tasked with scoring a basket from 50 meters away. You’re pretty sure you can’t even throw that far, let alone muster the necessary precision. It might seem like a sick joke, but at least no one will hold it against you if you fail. But making the shot would be pretty epic, and that keeps you going.
Accepting what we cannot change
It’s common for those with unhealthy impact obsession to feel guilty, ashamed, or sad because of how little impact they have and that they cannot do more. Unfortunately, most factors that contribute to how much impact we can have are largely beyond our control—for instance, intelligence, energy / physical health, executive functioning, and our passions and interests.
Focusing our attention and efforts on what is within our control while developing an attitude of acceptance and equanimity regarding what is outside our control is one of the key teachings of Stoicism. From this perspective, feelings of guilt or shame about how much good you do rarely make sense. Generally, one should try to cultivate whatever emotions are most helpful for achieving one’s goals. If your goal is to do good, guilt is rarely helpful (at least for most people who are reading this—there are certainly people whose positive impact would increase if they felt more guilt and changed their actions accordingly.)
Below we outline additional strategies and techniques that can help with accepting painful realities or possibilities (related to EA and having impact), divided into different emotions and themes.
Beware self-improvement perfectionism
One potential failure mode (for self-improvement in general) is to be overly perfectionistic and scold ourselves for not being an ideal Stoic sage who is able to immediately accept everything we cannot change no matter how painful. But this is unrealistic. A more healthy approach would be to celebrate every gradual increase in acceptance, even if we’re still far from perfect.
Welcoming and exploring negative emotions with acceptance and curiosity
(Mumbo-jumbo alert! This subsection contains what many might perceive as unscientific, esoteric, new-agey, mindfulness gibberish. We included it because we personally found it very helpful (after years of annoyed dismissal). Feel free to skip to the next section, which mostly consists of advice grounded in evidence-based CBT and good-ol’, hard-nosed Stoicism.)
Of course, in practice it’s extremely difficult to genuinely accept what we cannot change if it goes against our most profound wishes. In our experience, what appears crucial is to fully internalize that something really cannot be changed, e.g., by patiently allowing your different parts to realize this.
This process in turn often involves many negative emotions, like anger, sadness and grief. We often instinctively resist and try to push such negative emotions away because they are unpleasant. But in our experience, this doesn’t work. The negative emotions will just reappear sooner or later, lurk around in the background, or become stronger over time. (See also Tara Brach’s talks on how resisting sadness without taking the time to grieve might lead to depression.)
What seems to work better is to lean into, fully allow and even welcome negative emotions to ‘wash through’ you. It also helps to have an attitude of curiosity and kindness towards the emotion. How does this emotion feel in your body, what are its physical sensations? What are the thoughts, images or verbal fragments associated with this emotion? What is the “felt sense” of this emotion? Perhaps there are several emotions present at once (e.g., exhaustion and frustration or fear regarding this exhaustion)? A related helpful approach is to ask what the emotion “wants”; what is it trying to “tell you”, what is its purpose? For some emotions this is fairly obvious (e.g., a specific fear alerting you to danger) while it’s less straightforward for others. (Generally, almost all negative emotions have, at least to some extent, a useful function. Keeping this in mind can reduce the suffering associated with experiencing them and increase our acceptance.)
If you’re anything like us, some of this may feel weird or difficult in the beginning. You might constantly wonder whether you’re “doing it right” and whether this is all a load of bullshit. To facilitate such inner dialogue, you might benefit from using psychotherapy approaches that emphasize working with inner multiplicity or techniques that help to personify, embody, or otherwise externalize emotions (e.g., chairwork).
Mindfulness meditation, broadly defined, can be very helpful (not only for this technique!), partly because it trains relevant subskills like concentration, metacognitive awareness (not being swept away in one’s thoughts and feelings without noticing), sensory clarity, and equanimity. We personally like the app Waking Up.
You also want to set boundaries for negative emotions
To be clear, resisting negative emotions can often be the right approach! For instance, when we’re overly anxious over some upcoming important event, we’ve found it helpful to "fight back" and adopt a defiant stance: "Listen, we’ve been in this situation many times before. I refuse to be intimidated by you, anxiety. You’ve always been mistaken before and are most likely mistaken now. I know you’re trying to help but you aren’t. I’m going to ignore you, you’re just wasting your time." We find this 'compassionate upper-cut’ technique especially useful for recurring moderate forms of anxiety, self-doubt, or self-criticism that we have felt many times in similar situations before.
It's worthwhile to experiment with both approaches. What's most effective varies based on the individual, the emotion, and the situation.
Fear and coming to terms with the possibility of having no impact
If all you care about is having impact, worries about having no impact—let alone having negative impact—can cause fear and anxiety.
A potent way of reducing the emotional impact of such fears is to “play the script till the end”: Imagine a relatively concrete, (near-) worst-case scenario: for example, that your recent performance at work has been so bad that you are fired. Rather than following the natural urge of flinching away from such distressing scenarios, you stay with this imagined scenario and try to make it even more concrete, e.g., by asking yourself questions like “what next?”. For example, you might visualize how you would say goodbye to your colleagues, how you would explain the situation to friends and family, and so on.
At first, you might feel even more intense anxiety, but when you stay with this image your anxiety will usually abate and you will emotionally habituate to the scenario before long. This is the ‘exposure’ part of the technique. It’s analogous to how patients undergoing exposure therapy for arachnophobia will experience at first intense fear when a spider is placed in the same room, but as time goes on and nothing bad happens their fear will decline. The important part is to stay with the source of fear until the anxiety has reduced at least somewhat because stopping the exercise prematurely can backfire. This is of course much easier said than done so you might want to do this exercise with the guidance of a friend or therapist!
The second crucial part (and benefit) of the exercise is to come up with new ideas for coping if the feared situation should really happen (see also Robertson, 2019, ch. 6). Coming up with ways of coping usually further reduces your anxiety. For example, doing such exercises helped me (David) to keep in mind that I could probably manage to do a few hours of easy but impactful personal assistant work per week while living with my parents even when suffering from moderately severe insomnia, depression, and fatigue. This helped me to worry much less about being unable to have any impact for the rest of my life, even when I’m unable to work because of the aforementioned symptoms.
(Admittedly, the above is not a literal worst-case scenario. While this technique can also be used to lessen the fear of one’s own death or human extinction, it usually needs to be adapted and combined with other approaches. Warning: This technique typically doesn’t help and can easily backfire when applied to fears of more extreme scenarios such as s-risks.)
Last, there are less emotionally demanding but surprisingly effective techniques for reducing anxiety, such as worry postponement (e.g., Borkovec et al., 1983), which you may want to try out first. If you’re struggling with anxiety (or other negative emotions discussed in this section) we can also recommend the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders: Workbook (Barlow et al., 2017, especially ch. 10, 11 on avoidance of emotions and exposure).
Sadness, despair, and guilt
As mentioned before, caring about doing good can be accompanied by sadness and despair about the state of the world or its future.
We might criticize ourselves for having such feelings because they are often not conducive to being motivated and productive. A part of us feels like we’re weak and that we should just toughen up—being sad isn’t going to help anyone, after all.
However, a better approach is to remind yourself that, while there is certainly lots of badness in this world, there is also much goodness (cf. focus on the positive). The world has gotten much better in the last hundred years and the future might be very bright indeed, so there is room for existential hope.
It’s also helpful to internalize that you’re not a weak person for feeling sad from time to time. If your work involves engaging, even indirectly, with the suffering of sentient beings, it’s normal to feel sad about this sometimes. Only psychopaths and sadists would never do so. It’s also worth remembering that your sadness comes from the fact that you care about others and want to help them; that is, from what motivated you to be an EA in the first place. So it’s not only not realistic to eradicate this part of you, it might not even be desirable because it might reduce your altruistic motivations.
If any of the above resonated with you, or you’re struggling with depressive feelings in general, you might be interested in Overcoming Depression (Gilbert, 2001, 2nd edition), particularly ch. 14 ‘Coping with Guilt and Caring Too Much’. (Only the 2nd edition contains this chapter.)
Feeling like a failure or inadequate
People often feel like inadequate failures because they judge their accomplishments using very high standards. “If I am to be a worthwhile person, I must be truly outstanding in at least one major domain” is a typical core belief of clinical perfectionism. The related belief “If I am to be a worthwhile EA, I must have outstanding impact” is not uncommon among EAs. (The “logical part” of them might disagree, but there is another part of them that seems to believe it, at least sometimes.)
Unfortunately, such beliefs can be reinforced by our reflectively endorsed goal of trying to ‘do the most good’ which often entails doing something outstanding.
Of course, doing something outstanding is very difficult. Feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness may be lessened by reflecting on the logical necessity that only a small fraction of people can have truly ‘exceptional’ impact—that’s what ‘exceptional’ means. If everyone adopted the decision rule of “I’ll feel bad about myself if I don’t do truly exceptional amounts of good”, the vast majority of people would have to be miserable. Adopting this decision rule violates universalizability and veil-of-ignorance intuitions that are (in part) motivating the importance of doing good in the first place.
What if you feel like a failure not because you’re “just average” but because you truly have exceptionally low amounts of impact? First, you want to ask yourself whether it’s really true that you have exceptionally low impact. Compared to whom; the average person? That seems very implausible for most people reading this text. Let’s take charity donations as an example. The most cost-effective global health charities are usually around 25 times more effective than the average and US Americans donate about $1250 per year (in 2017). So you would have to donate only about $50 per year to, say, AMF to do an average amount of good. In fact, this crucially ignores that most US Americans donate to US charities and that donating to global health charities is plausibly much more cost-effective than that!
Also, all of this isn’t even taking into account longtermist considerations or other valuable flow-through effects of beneficial actions almost everyone can take such as being a supportive friend or partner to people who are doing good, promoting compassion, rationality, truth-seeking, or other EA ideals (online or offline), and so on. (Though once you factor in cluelessness and backfire risks, this line of reasoning may stop being the most reliable way of soothing your worries. But if you can stomach the uncertainty, go for it.)
What if you can’t do any of those things, e.g., because of extreme poverty or severe (mental) health problems? It might help to reflect on the fact that it’s really not your fault that you got dealt such terrible cards. Imagine how you would feel about other people who face similarly terrible circumstances that prevent them from doing good. Concepts like “failure” wouldn’t even enter your mind. The same is true for you and the fact that you’re engaging with the EA forum at all in such circumstances is admirable.
Replacing self-criticism with self-compassion
In our experience, many people with impact obsession almost constantly criticize themselves about how they are lazy failures, how they don’t have enough impact, how they aren't smart, judicious, or courageous enough. We’ve certainly been there.
We often do this based on the assumption that harshly criticizing ourselves is what will actually motivate us to do better. However, the opposite is probably the case. For example, higher self-compassion (and lower self-criticism) is associated with less procrastination (Sirois, 2014) and self-compassion seems to increase self-control (Dundas et al., 2017). You might have already noticed yourself that telling yourself how lazy and useless you are doesn’t actually make you all that motivated. Of note, moving from (excessive) self-criticism to self-compassion is also a core treatment technique for clinical perfectionism (Egan et al., 2016, ch. 13).
One common misunderstanding is that self-compassion basically means telling yourself how awesome you are while you just play video games all day long. This is not self-compassion. Many illustrate self-compassion via the attitudes of a good coach or teacher. When his students make mistakes, he clearly points them out; he doesn’t pretend they didn’t happen. But he doesn’t insult or berate his students; instead, he demonstrates how to do better and soothes his students if necessary, explaining how everyone makes mistakes. He would inspire his students to continuously improve, but from a place of finding joy in excellence, not with the threat of punishment. Last, he isn’t a pushover and will impose fair penalties if necessary, e.g., in cases of repeated misbehavior.
You might want to try emulating the approach of such a coach when talking with or trying to motivate yourself. If you’re interested in cultivating self-compassion you might want to check out the Compassionate Mind Workbook (Irons & Beaumont, 2017, especially ch. 17).
Fully commit to rest
As discussed above, unhealthy impact obsession often comes with a diminished capacity to rest and recover. You want to make time for regular periods of rest and really commit to them, without feeling guilty. We need to be mindful of two common failure modes.
Keeping yourself busy with semi-useful tasks
The first failure mode is preventing yourself from resting by keeping yourself busy with semi-productive tasks that aren’t actually important or necessary to do. Why do we do this? Presumably, part of the reason is that we tend to judge ourselves on the basis of hours worked. (Also, other people will often judge you based on how long you are working.) Our inner critic often seems to believe that only bad and lazy people work for, say, 4 hours a day. Committed, morally serious, non-evil EAs work at the very least 7 hours a day. And if you want to really feel good about yourself, you want to work for 10 hours or more.
Unfortunately, the most important tasks are often very draining and, for many people, are difficult to do for more than, say, 4 hours per day. (Generally, most people probably work less than you think.) So, what can you do if you’re too fatigued and drained to continue working on your most important tasks but want to feel like a good, hard-working EA? You work on tasks that are much easier to do (but still somewhat draining): “Perhaps I can improve my task management system or read some marginally useful non-fiction book that isn’t too tedious!”
(See also Pain is not the unit of Effort.)
Not committing to rest
The second failure mode is to not fully commit to rest and recovery. We often observed the following pattern in ourselves: You notice that you’re too fatigued and drained to keep on working. So you stop working and decide to rest. For example, you play a video game. But part of you still would like to work. While playing, in the back of your mind you continually have thoughts like “I haven’t made enough progress today, I should work more, I’m so behind”, “I haven’t been productive enough to deserve rest”, “I can’t believe I’m playing video games while the world is on fire, how can I be so selfish?”, or “I should be the kind of person who enjoys reading books in their leisure time, playing video games is not cool”.
Obviously, such thoughts interfere with really ‘switching off’, and your time spent resting is much less restorative than it could be. It’s also worth pointing out that this failure mode can be difficult to recognize and requires some level of mindfulness. You might have had thoughts like this for such a long time that you’ve habituated to them and aren’t even fully aware of having them.
This type of “half-speeding rest” can be difficult to overcome, but the first step is usually to notice that you’re doing it and decide whether you really want to rest. If yes, really commit to the decision to rest for a set period of time, using whatever technique works for you. Perhaps put a post-it note saying “remember that you committed to resting for the rest of the day!” somewhere prominent, and block the time in your calendar.
If you have denied yourself from resting for a long time, you might need some time to figure out what activities you actually enjoy and are re-energizing. Then give yourself permission to enjoy that without any guilt or shame. In the beginning, you might need some form of therapeutic work, or to talk to resisting parts of you and engage with their concerns.
It’s fine if you need more rest than others
Keep in mind that there are probably large individual differences in how much rest you need. Some people really can work 10 hours per day. But many cannot. This doesn’t (necessarily) mean that you are less committed or altruistic. (See this comment for more thoughts on individual differences in needs for rest.)
Another useful piece of advice is to have something like rest and recovery days.
There is a good overview on mental health resources tailored for EAs by Miranda Zhang. We have referenced most but not all texts included there. We also liked these essays which aren’t included in Miranda’s list:
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Amber Dawn for helping with writing and editing substantial parts of the sections “What do we mean by impact obsession” and “Benefits and costs”, and for editing, comments and feedback on the whole post.
Thank you to Harri Besceli, Lucius Caviola, Ruairi Donnelly, Damon Pourtahmaseb-Sasi, Johannes Treutlein, and Kaj Sotala for many helpful comments and feedback!
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What a phenomenal post — thank you both for writing it! A bunch of the potential negative consequences of unhealthy impact obsession felt super familiar to me, and the ideas for things that might help are just so good. Going to discuss a bunch of them with my therapist :)
Thanks for your kind words, I'm glad to hear that you found the post helpful! :)