I want to say something, but I’m not really sure how to phrase it very precisely, but I will just say the gist of it in some rambly way. Note: I am very much on the periphery of the phenomenon I am trying to describe, so I might not be right about it.
Most EAs come from a kind of western elite culture that right now assigns a lot of prestige to, like, being seen to be doing Important Work with lots of Power and Responsibility and Great Meaning, both professionally and socially.
“I am devoting my life to solving the most important problems in the world and alleviating as much suffering as possible” fits right into the script. That’s exactly the kind of thing you are supposed to be thinking. If you frame your life like that, you will fit in and everyone will understand and respect what is your basic deal.
“I am going to have a pleasant balance of all my desires, not working all that hard, spending some time on EA stuff, and the rest of the time enjoy life, hang out, read some books, and go climbing” does not fit into the script. That’s not something that anyone ever told you to do, and if you tell people you are going to do that, they will be surprised at what you said. You will stand out in a weird way.
Example anecdote: A few years ago my wife and I had a kid while I was employed full-time at a big software company that pays well. I had multiple discussions roughly like this with my coworkers:
Me: My kid’s going to be born this fall, so I’ll be taking paternity leave, and it’s quite likely I will quit after, so I want to figure out what to do with this thing that I am responsible for.
Them: What do you mean, you will quit after?
Me: I mean I am going to have a baby, and like you, they paid me lots of money, so my guess is that I will just hang out being a parent with my wife and we can live off savings for a while.
Them: Well, you don’t have to do that! You can just keep working.
Me: But doesn’t it sound like if you were ever going to not work, the precise best time would be right when you have your first kid? Like, that would be literally the most common sense time in your life to choose not to work, and pay attention to learning about being a parent instead? I can just work again later.
Them: [puzzled] Well, you’ll see what I mean. I don’t think you will quit.
And then they were legitimately surprised when I quit after paternity leave, because it’s unusual for someone to do that (at least not men) regardless of whether they have saved a bunch of money due to being a programmer. The normal thing to do is, let your work define your role in life and gives you all your social capital, so it’s basically your number 1 priority, and everything else is a sideshow.
So it makes total sense to me that EAs who came from this culture decide that EA should define their role in life and give them all their social capital and be their number 1 priority, and it’s not about a failure of introspection, or about a conscious assessment of their terminal values that turned out wrong. It’s just the thing people do.
My prediction would be that among EAs who don’t come from a culture with this kind of social pressure, burnout isn’t really an issue.
I am not quite sure what I would have thought about this two weeks ago, but I’ve just finished reading the book “Unmasking Autism” so my thoughts are kinda wrapped up in processing it right now.
Those of us who found out relatively late in life that we’re autistic tend to be very, very good at doing whatever it is that “people just do”, often unreflectively and very often to our severe detriment. (People diagnosed early can also be very good at this.) According to my own reading, which certainly emphasizes some parts of the book while downplaying others, the book is about 1) what it is like for a not-perfectly-normal person to pretend to be as-normal-as-possible, 2) how and why pretending to be normal kind of ruins our lives, and 3) how to live more authentically instead.
All of the “how to live more authentically instead” stuff is organized around exercises that help you figure out what you, personally, actually care about, as opposed to what everyone around you has told you for your entire life that you’re supposed to care about, or which things it’s really useful for you to care about in order to get by in a society where you’re disabled.
For example, my own story about myself has always said that I deeply value “independence”. I like to know how to do everything on my own, with no social support, to the point that people who want to support me often feel frustrated and helpless because I come off as so capable that it seems like there’s nothing for them to do. It’s not just immediately relevant stuff I like to be independent about, like financial security, cooking, or running errands; this goes all the way down to “wanting to be independent of society itself”. I got kind of upset with myself a while back when I realized that I didn’t know how to butcher a deer. I knew how to make bows and arrows, and I knew how to hunt rabbits, but I did not know how to turn one of the most plentiful protein sources in my area into food. So of course I immediately learned.
But despite all of this, I’m no longer sure whether I actually value independence.
The book has several “how to figure out what you actually care about” exercises, that are together called a “values-based integration process”. It starts with [paraphrased] “Think of five moments from throughout your life when you felt fully alive. Tell the story of each moment in as much detail as possible, and think about why the moment stuck with you so dramatically.” It is not obvious that any of my alive moments centrally feature independence.
Independence is one of the properties that came up over and over again as a common feature of autistic people’s masks. Not only does American society tell everyone to value independence, but one of the best ways for a disabled person to hide their disabilities is to seem exceptionally independent to everyone around them. “Disabled” means “I need extra support and accommodations, at least in the existing societal context”, while “independent” means “I don’t need shit from anybody”.
But of course, as I am in fact disabled, I really do need extra support and accommodations, no matter how successful I might be at convincing those around me and also myself that I don’t. My life would be much, much better if I received the support I need, and indeed it’s improved dramatically as I’ve begun to seek out that support over the past several years.
And this sort of mistake is happening all over the place for heavily masked autistics. Our lives are a lot worse, and we’re constantly exhausted and burnt out, because we’re putting everything we have into living as the people we’ve somehow come to believe we’re supposed to be, instead of putting at least something into living as the people we actually are.
I think this situation is especially extreme for disabled people of all sorts: autistics, ADHDers, people with schizophrenia, Deaf people, etc. And it’s especially extreme for other kinds of people who fall far outside of society’s expectations on some axis: gay people in conservative areas, for example, or people with exceptionally strong emotional responses. Because the phenomenon I’m describing is approximately “the consequences of being in the closet”; the consequences of pretending to be the person other people want or expect you to be, living an ordinary life, “just doing whatever it is that people do” without accounting for how you, personally, differ from whatever it is you think that “people” are.
But there’s a continuum, I think, from “the most neurotypical person in the world” to “super duper weirdos who do not naturally fit in at all and absolutely wreck themselves attempting to do so”. Is it really the case that none of those people who were baffled by your plan to stop working would not themselves be better off if they did the same, in your situation?
Maybe, but I doubt it! Some of them would probably be “just doing what people do”, and they would be making a mistake. They would be making the mistake of unreflectively pretending to be the person they’ve come to believe they are supposed to be, rather than knowing who they are.
I have known someone who did not need to work for money because his wife was quite wealthy, and was self-aware that all else equal, he would prefer not to work; but he also thought (perhaps correctly) that he would not be as well respected if he didn’t have a “job”, and for that reason he went to work. He is not making a mistake (or if he is, it’s not the mistake of unreflectively masking). Sometimes “pretending to be normal” when you know you are not is strategically the best thing to do, with respect to the balance of your true values. But for every one like him, I expect there are many, many more who do not really know why they are doing what they are doing, and who leave tons of value on the table as a result.
What you say makes sense. I think most of the people “doing whatever it is that people do” are making a mistake.
The connection to “masking” is very interesting to me. I don’t know much about autism so I don’t have much background about this. I think that almost everyone experiences this pressure towards acting normal, but it makes sense that it especially stands out as a unique phenomenon (“masking”) when the person doing it is very not-normal. Similarly, it’s interesting that you identify “independence” as a very culturally-pushed value. I can totally see what you mean, but I never thought about it very much, which on reflection is obviously just because I don’t have a hard time being “the culturally normal amount of independent”, so it never became a problem for me. I can see that the effect of the shared culture in these cases is totally qualitatively different depending on where a person is relative to it.
One of the few large psychological interventions I ever consciously did on myself was in about 2014 when I went to one of the early CFAR weekend workshops in some little rented house around Santa Cruz. At the end of the workshop there was a kind of party, and one of the activities at the party was to write down some thing you were going to do differently going forward.
I thought about it and I figured that I should basically stop trying to be normal (which is something that before I thought was actively virtuous, for reasons that are now fuzzy to me, and would consciously try to do—not that I successfully was super normal, but I was aiming in that direction.) It seemed like the ROI on being normal was just crappy in general and I had had enough of it. So that’s what I did.
It’s interesting to me that some people would have trouble with the “how to live more authentically instead” part. My moment to moment life feels like, there is a “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue that is automatically in my head, and I am just grabbing some things out of it and doing them. So to me, the main thing seems to be eliminating any really dumb biases making me do things I don’t value at all, like being normal, and then “living more authentically” is what’s left.
But that’s just my way—it would make sense to me if other people behaved more strategically more often, in which case I guess they might need to do a lot more introspection about their positive values to make that work.
But cata, where does your “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue come from? If you cannot see its origin, why do you trust that it arises primarily from your true values?
Perhaps in your case it does, or at least enough so that your life is really the life that you would prefer to be living, at the limit of full knowledge and reflective equilibrium. But it’s just not the case that “deliberately subjugating organic desires” is the main way that people end up acting without integrity. We get mixed up below the level of consciousness, so that the automatic thoughts we have arise from all kinds of messed up places. That’s why this kind of thing is so very tricky to fix! We don’t just have to “choose the other option” when we consciously encounter a dilema; we have to learn to see things that are currently invisible to us.
But cata, where does your “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue come from? If you cannot see its origin, why do you trust that it arises primarily from your true values?
Well, I trust that because at the end of the day I feel happy and fulfilled, so they can’t be too far off.
I believe you that many people need to see the things that are invisible to them, that just isn’t my personal life story.
This is very interesting comment, about book that I just added to my reading list. would you consider posting this as separate post? I have some thoughts about masking and Authenticity, and the price of it and the price of too much of it, and I believe it’s discussion worth having, but not here.
(I believe some people will indeed benefit a lot from not working as a new parents, but for others, it will be very big hit to their self-worth, as they define themselves by work, and better to be done only after some introspection and creating foundation of self-value disconnected from work.)
“I am devoting my life to solving the most important problems in the world and alleviating as much suffering as possible” fits right into the script. That’s exactly the kind of thing you are supposed to be thinking. If you frame your life like that, you will fit in and everyone will understand and respect what is your basic deal.
Hm, this is a pretty surprising claim to me. It’s possible I haven’t actually grown up in a “western elite culture” (in the U.S., it might be a distinctly coastal thing, so the cliché goes? IDK). Though, I presume having gone to some fancypants universities in the U.S. makes me close enough to that. The Script very much did not encourage me to devote my life to solving the most important problems and alleviating as much suffering as possible, and it seems not to have encouraged basically any of my non-EA friends from university to do this. I/they were encouraged to have careers that were socially valuable, to be sure, but not the main source of purpose in their lives or a big moral responsibility.
I want to say something, but I’m not really sure how to phrase it very precisely, but I will just say the gist of it in some rambly way. Note: I am very much on the periphery of the phenomenon I am trying to describe, so I might not be right about it.
Most EAs come from a kind of western elite culture that right now assigns a lot of prestige to, like, being seen to be doing Important Work with lots of Power and Responsibility and Great Meaning, both professionally and socially.
“I am devoting my life to solving the most important problems in the world and alleviating as much suffering as possible” fits right into the script. That’s exactly the kind of thing you are supposed to be thinking. If you frame your life like that, you will fit in and everyone will understand and respect what is your basic deal.
“I am going to have a pleasant balance of all my desires, not working all that hard, spending some time on EA stuff, and the rest of the time enjoy life, hang out, read some books, and go climbing” does not fit into the script. That’s not something that anyone ever told you to do, and if you tell people you are going to do that, they will be surprised at what you said. You will stand out in a weird way.
Example anecdote: A few years ago my wife and I had a kid while I was employed full-time at a big software company that pays well. I had multiple discussions roughly like this with my coworkers:
Me: My kid’s going to be born this fall, so I’ll be taking paternity leave, and it’s quite likely I will quit after, so I want to figure out what to do with this thing that I am responsible for.
Them: What do you mean, you will quit after?
Me: I mean I am going to have a baby, and like you, they paid me lots of money, so my guess is that I will just hang out being a parent with my wife and we can live off savings for a while.
Them: Well, you don’t have to do that! You can just keep working.
Me: But doesn’t it sound like if you were ever going to not work, the precise best time would be right when you have your first kid? Like, that would be literally the most common sense time in your life to choose not to work, and pay attention to learning about being a parent instead? I can just work again later.
Them: [puzzled] Well, you’ll see what I mean. I don’t think you will quit.
And then they were legitimately surprised when I quit after paternity leave, because it’s unusual for someone to do that (at least not men) regardless of whether they have saved a bunch of money due to being a programmer. The normal thing to do is, let your work define your role in life and gives you all your social capital, so it’s basically your number 1 priority, and everything else is a sideshow.
So it makes total sense to me that EAs who came from this culture decide that EA should define their role in life and give them all their social capital and be their number 1 priority, and it’s not about a failure of introspection, or about a conscious assessment of their terminal values that turned out wrong. It’s just the thing people do.
My prediction would be that among EAs who don’t come from a culture with this kind of social pressure, burnout isn’t really an issue.
I am very skeptical that “people doing ‘just the thing people do’” does not tend to amount to a failure of introspection.
(This is going to ramble.)
I am not quite sure what I would have thought about this two weeks ago, but I’ve just finished reading the book “Unmasking Autism” so my thoughts are kinda wrapped up in processing it right now.
Those of us who found out relatively late in life that we’re autistic tend to be very, very good at doing whatever it is that “people just do”, often unreflectively and very often to our severe detriment. (People diagnosed early can also be very good at this.) According to my own reading, which certainly emphasizes some parts of the book while downplaying others, the book is about 1) what it is like for a not-perfectly-normal person to pretend to be as-normal-as-possible, 2) how and why pretending to be normal kind of ruins our lives, and 3) how to live more authentically instead.
All of the “how to live more authentically instead” stuff is organized around exercises that help you figure out what you, personally, actually care about, as opposed to what everyone around you has told you for your entire life that you’re supposed to care about, or which things it’s really useful for you to care about in order to get by in a society where you’re disabled.
For example, my own story about myself has always said that I deeply value “independence”. I like to know how to do everything on my own, with no social support, to the point that people who want to support me often feel frustrated and helpless because I come off as so capable that it seems like there’s nothing for them to do. It’s not just immediately relevant stuff I like to be independent about, like financial security, cooking, or running errands; this goes all the way down to “wanting to be independent of society itself”. I got kind of upset with myself a while back when I realized that I didn’t know how to butcher a deer. I knew how to make bows and arrows, and I knew how to hunt rabbits, but I did not know how to turn one of the most plentiful protein sources in my area into food. So of course I immediately learned.
But despite all of this, I’m no longer sure whether I actually value independence.
The book has several “how to figure out what you actually care about” exercises, that are together called a “values-based integration process”. It starts with [paraphrased] “Think of five moments from throughout your life when you felt fully alive. Tell the story of each moment in as much detail as possible, and think about why the moment stuck with you so dramatically.” It is not obvious that any of my alive moments centrally feature independence.
Independence is one of the properties that came up over and over again as a common feature of autistic people’s masks. Not only does American society tell everyone to value independence, but one of the best ways for a disabled person to hide their disabilities is to seem exceptionally independent to everyone around them. “Disabled” means “I need extra support and accommodations, at least in the existing societal context”, while “independent” means “I don’t need shit from anybody”.
But of course, as I am in fact disabled, I really do need extra support and accommodations, no matter how successful I might be at convincing those around me and also myself that I don’t. My life would be much, much better if I received the support I need, and indeed it’s improved dramatically as I’ve begun to seek out that support over the past several years.
And this sort of mistake is happening all over the place for heavily masked autistics. Our lives are a lot worse, and we’re constantly exhausted and burnt out, because we’re putting everything we have into living as the people we’ve somehow come to believe we’re supposed to be, instead of putting at least something into living as the people we actually are.
I think this situation is especially extreme for disabled people of all sorts: autistics, ADHDers, people with schizophrenia, Deaf people, etc. And it’s especially extreme for other kinds of people who fall far outside of society’s expectations on some axis: gay people in conservative areas, for example, or people with exceptionally strong emotional responses. Because the phenomenon I’m describing is approximately “the consequences of being in the closet”; the consequences of pretending to be the person other people want or expect you to be, living an ordinary life, “just doing whatever it is that people do” without accounting for how you, personally, differ from whatever it is you think that “people” are.
But there’s a continuum, I think, from “the most neurotypical person in the world” to “super duper weirdos who do not naturally fit in at all and absolutely wreck themselves attempting to do so”. Is it really the case that none of those people who were baffled by your plan to stop working would not themselves be better off if they did the same, in your situation?
Maybe, but I doubt it! Some of them would probably be “just doing what people do”, and they would be making a mistake. They would be making the mistake of unreflectively pretending to be the person they’ve come to believe they are supposed to be, rather than knowing who they are.
I have known someone who did not need to work for money because his wife was quite wealthy, and was self-aware that all else equal, he would prefer not to work; but he also thought (perhaps correctly) that he would not be as well respected if he didn’t have a “job”, and for that reason he went to work. He is not making a mistake (or if he is, it’s not the mistake of unreflectively masking). Sometimes “pretending to be normal” when you know you are not is strategically the best thing to do, with respect to the balance of your true values. But for every one like him, I expect there are many, many more who do not really know why they are doing what they are doing, and who leave tons of value on the table as a result.
What you say makes sense. I think most of the people “doing whatever it is that people do” are making a mistake.
The connection to “masking” is very interesting to me. I don’t know much about autism so I don’t have much background about this. I think that almost everyone experiences this pressure towards acting normal, but it makes sense that it especially stands out as a unique phenomenon (“masking”) when the person doing it is very not-normal. Similarly, it’s interesting that you identify “independence” as a very culturally-pushed value. I can totally see what you mean, but I never thought about it very much, which on reflection is obviously just because I don’t have a hard time being “the culturally normal amount of independent”, so it never became a problem for me. I can see that the effect of the shared culture in these cases is totally qualitatively different depending on where a person is relative to it.
One of the few large psychological interventions I ever consciously did on myself was in about 2014 when I went to one of the early CFAR weekend workshops in some little rented house around Santa Cruz. At the end of the workshop there was a kind of party, and one of the activities at the party was to write down some thing you were going to do differently going forward.
I thought about it and I figured that I should basically stop trying to be normal (which is something that before I thought was actively virtuous, for reasons that are now fuzzy to me, and would consciously try to do—not that I successfully was super normal, but I was aiming in that direction.) It seemed like the ROI on being normal was just crappy in general and I had had enough of it. So that’s what I did.
It’s interesting to me that some people would have trouble with the “how to live more authentically instead” part. My moment to moment life feels like, there is a “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue that is automatically in my head, and I am just grabbing some things out of it and doing them. So to me, the main thing seems to be eliminating any really dumb biases making me do things I don’t value at all, like being normal, and then “living more authentically” is what’s left.
But that’s just my way—it would make sense to me if other people behaved more strategically more often, in which case I guess they might need to do a lot more introspection about their positive values to make that work.
But cata, where does your “stuff that seems like it would be a good idea to do right now” queue come from? If you cannot see its origin, why do you trust that it arises primarily from your true values?
Perhaps in your case it does, or at least enough so that your life is really the life that you would prefer to be living, at the limit of full knowledge and reflective equilibrium. But it’s just not the case that “deliberately subjugating organic desires” is the main way that people end up acting without integrity. We get mixed up below the level of consciousness, so that the automatic thoughts we have arise from all kinds of messed up places. That’s why this kind of thing is so very tricky to fix! We don’t just have to “choose the other option” when we consciously encounter a dilema; we have to learn to see things that are currently invisible to us.
Well, I trust that because at the end of the day I feel happy and fulfilled, so they can’t be too far off.
I believe you that many people need to see the things that are invisible to them, that just isn’t my personal life story.
This is very interesting comment, about book that I just added to my reading list. would you consider posting this as separate post? I have some thoughts about masking and Authenticity, and the price of it and the price of too much of it, and I believe it’s discussion worth having, but not here.
(I believe some people will indeed benefit a lot from not working as a new parents, but for others, it will be very big hit to their self-worth, as they define themselves by work, and better to be done only after some introspection and creating foundation of self-value disconnected from work.)
Hm, this is a pretty surprising claim to me. It’s possible I haven’t actually grown up in a “western elite culture” (in the U.S., it might be a distinctly coastal thing, so the cliché goes? IDK). Though, I presume having gone to some fancypants universities in the U.S. makes me close enough to that. The Script very much did not encourage me to devote my life to solving the most important problems and alleviating as much suffering as possible, and it seems not to have encouraged basically any of my non-EA friends from university to do this. I/they were encouraged to have careers that were socially valuable, to be sure, but not the main source of purpose in their lives or a big moral responsibility.