Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Tim LeBon: What is this moral perfectionism? Instead of focusing just on achievement, it would be focusing on your moral worth: your identity is linked with how good you are as a person. The standards would again be unfeasibly high and inflexible. Maybe something like “doing the most good you can” — to coin a phrase — every moment of the day.

Rob Wiblin: [laughs] Hypothetically. Sounds tough.

Tim LeBon: It does sound very tough. So you’d worry about not doing it. You would procrastinate. You might even avoid some tasks, because you avoid being in the public glare because you fear you might fail. If then you didn’t succeed, or you thought you hadn’t succeeded in reaching that target — which of course you won’t, because it’s such a tough target, and sometimes you won’t succeed in having a really fantastic outcome in everything you do — then you’ll be very harsh. Harsh self-criticism.

And very often, a result of that is shame. And shame is one of the least constructive emotions. Guilt can be quite a useful emotion, but shame is where you just feel like hiding away. Very often you just feel like escaping, so you don’t get help. You’re just left with this feeling of very often self-hatred, self-loathing — because remember, your whole identity is wrapped up with being this really good person. You’ve set yourself an incredibly high, unfeasible standard to do that. You haven’t achieved it. And so you’re just left there on your own, thinking that you failed and that you’re a terrible person.

Luisa’s intro [00:01:32]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hey listeners, Luisa here. You were just listening to therapist Tim LeBon from episode #149 on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating.

Personally, I got a lot out of that episode: Tim was just so good at describing how a lot of his high-achieving patients end up beating themselves up for not maximising the good they can do — in a way that’s actually totally counterproductive in terms of their long-term impact.

Over the years we’ve also heard from charity directors, researchers, psychiatrists, therapists, and career advisors — all wrestling with the kinds of mental health challenges that tend to come up when you’re trying to do a lot of good, and what can help.

So today we’ve got another compilation of some of the most insightful bits of wisdom from 16 past guests from the show. Coming up you’ll hear from:

• 80,000 Hours’ former CEO on how he manages anxiety, self-doubt, and a chronic sense of falling short
• Psychiatrist Randy Nesse on why we evolved to be anxious and depressed in the first place
• Therapist Hannah Boettcher on how always optimising can quietly distort our sense of self-worth
• Charity director Cameron Meyer Shorb on how guilt and shame became his biggest source of suffering (and what helped)
• Therapist Tim LeBon on the trap of moral perfectionism, and why we should strive for excellence instead
• Researcher Hannah Ritchie on feeling like an imposter, even after writing a book and giving a TED Talk
• Moral philosopher Will MacAskill on why he’s five to 10 times happier than he used to be after learning to work in a way that’s genuinely sustainable
• Researcher Christian Ruhl on pursuing a high-impact career while managing a stutter
• Mercy For Animals’ CEO Leah Garcés on why it’s so important to insist on self-care when witnessing trauma regularly
• Vox journalist Kelsey Piper on recognising that you’re not alone in your struggles

I hope you enjoy revisiting these moments as much as I did!

80,000 Hours’ former CEO Howie on what his anxiety and self-doubt feels like [00:03:47]

From #100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

Howie: Basically, I’m dealing with mental illness just about every day of my life, even when I’m not having an acute episode of anything in particular.

Part of it is just having a lower mood set point than most people. I experience a wide range of emotions, but my baseline is just lower than a more mentally healthy person’s would be. I think that that’s one bit of it. I struggle with maladaptive amounts of guilt pretty frequently.

I have a very bad case of imposter syndrome. At the end of the year we do our performance evaluations. You have a self-evaluation, and then your boss and people who work with you evaluate your performance. And the difference between the way that I see my work and the way that people around me apparently see my work is laughable. I go around day by day just thinking I’m doing a very bad job, which sucks.

And then I struggle with anxiety a lot. So I think I probably lose hours of work time to anxiety in an average normal week when I’m doing what’s like “doing well” for me.

To give an example of what that means for me, I’d have weekly check-ins with my boss. At some points in time it was Holden, who runs Open Phil, at some points it was Elie, who runs GiveWell. And the hour before those check-ins, I would basically not be able to work because of the level of anxiety that I felt. And it was guilt and anxiety, because every time I had to reflect on, “How did the last week go?” the answer was always, “You didn’t do enough, you didn’t meet your expectations of yourself. Now you have to tell this person that.”

It wasn’t really about telling them though. It was more about having to confront the fact that you failed again. And so every week before that meeting, I’d have to lose an hour of being productive to this really un-useful negative self-talk.

Keiran: So, for people who’ve never had that kind of experience before, is there a way to get a sense of what that actually feels like, that hour?

Howie: It varies for different people. Anxiety generally has both physical symptoms and cognitive and psychological symptoms. Some people only have one or the other, some people have both. For me, the physical symptoms basically feel like being chased by a bear, or chased by a lion, or something like that.

So, it’s like having your fight or flight response, which is supposed to be adapted for being out in the savannah and having a predator going after you. Except the thing that you’re actually worried about is can I, in the last hour before this meeting, get three more projects done so I can feel good about my week? Which is just unreasonable in the first place.

And then also, you’re sitting at a computer, trying to reason through some difficult research papers while it feels like there’s a lion chasing you the entire time. That was basically my experience with it.

And there’s a cognitive cycle associated with it too. So for me, it’s just a lot of repetitive thoughts of, “You fucked up again, you’re not going to be able to do this. You fucked up again, you’re not going to be able to do this.” That flavor of thing. Or, “OK, you said that you would get this much done in the next hour before the meeting, it’s now been two minutes. You weren’t productive in those two minutes. Oh god, does that mean you’re not going to be productive for this entire time?”

And the lion just gets faster. And then it’s like “Oh, well now the lion is faster. So I’m even less able to write it.” And so now it’s been 10 minutes and I haven’t started. Now the lion really fucking speeds up. So there’s a real feedback loop between the cognitive stuff and then the physical symptoms for me.

Evolutionary psychiatrist Randy Nesse on what emotions are for [00:07:35]

From #179 – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

Randy Nesse: So I’d looked at evolutionary approaches, and most of them were saying, “What’s the function of anger? What’s the function of anxiety? What’s the function of depression?” And I asked myself, how do these emotions come to be? And the answer is that they’re suites of coordinated responses that change lots of things, physiologically and cognitively and behaviorally, to cope with a particular kind of situation that’s recurred over evolutionary time.

So people who felt the hot breath of a tiger on their shoulder and the lion salivating in front of them, who experienced the emotion of awe: those genes didn’t stick around at all; they became lion lunch. While people who had this coordinated response that we call a panic attack or a fight/flight reaction — where they start sweating, and they run really fast, and they breathe really fast, and their heart pounds, and their muscles get tight — those people were more likely to survive. So natural selection shaped a very specialised emergency response we call a panic attack.

And all of a sudden, with that insight, which I’d never quite had before, I realised that every emotion needs to be understood not in terms of its function — which was the prevailing evolutionary view and the still continuing evolutionary view by many people — but instead, in what situation is this emotion useful, or was it useful for our ancestors? This also solved one of the biggest conundrums about emotion research: are the emotions separate little entities, or are they all overlapping on dimensions? No, you think about this from an evolutionary viewpoint, and they’re like overlapping boughs on a tree, because they all evolved from each other. So this made sense of emotions.

So the question is: in what situation is anxiety useful? And the answer to that is: in situations where you’re in danger of losing something, it’s good to have a special mode of operation that alerts you to the possible loss, where you can take preventive action and avoid that situation in the future.

And the next thing that happens is, hey, is there only one kind of loss? No. You can lose your finger, you can lose your friend, you can lose your mate’s fidelity, you can lose your money, you can lose your health, you can fall off a building. And this helps to explain why there’s so many different kinds of anxiety. Natural selection has gradually and only partially differentiated kinds of anxiety to cope with those different kinds of possible losses.

I always thought that natural selection would shape us for health and happiness and cooperation and long, happy lives. And anything different from that meant there’s something wrong with the system.

But once you start studying how evolution shapes behaviour-regulation mechanisms, you realise that it doesn’t give a damn about us, that doesn’t give a damn about anything: it’s a mindless process that any genes that make individuals do things that benefit transmitting more genes — which basically means having more children and taking good care of them and getting resources to do that — any genes that make that happen will become more frequent. Any tendencies genetically to do things that make your life end sooner, or have fewer offspring, or have fewer resources, those are going to go away — and the whole system doesn’t care at all.

I mean, a lot of our bad feelings are about things that have to do with reproduction. And we should pause just a moment and note that Freud was right about one thing for sure: he said that ultimately, it all comes down to sex. And it’s not sex — it’s reproduction. Sex is just one small part of having offspring, and taking good care of them, and raising them to a point where they can reproduce. But fundamentally, all of these systems are designed to maximise numbers of offspring and the benefits to relatives.

And a lot of times that makes us miserable. Bad things happen to our kids. Hey, that’s not us, but we’re wired — appropriately so — to feel really, really bad if our kids are not doing well, and we try to help them. So these are things that are built in. You don’t want to change them because they’ll be awful to lose that kind of feeling.

For sex, it’s more of a different matter. When people can’t have sex, they really, really hate it. And that’s prewired, I think. It’d be nice to just tell yourself, “I shouldn’t care about that, because that’s about my genes and not me.” But actually, that doesn’t help a bit.

Striving for status, however: a lot of your work with 80,000 Hours, I think, has to do with people pursuing careers. And it’s always a challenge to figure out how grand a goal to set, and what to do when you’re not making progress towards a relatively grand goal.

This whole line of research has made me change how I see patients. And it used to be that I would always encourage patients, “Keep trying, never give up. Your difficulty trying to do this is because of your depression. Don’t let the depression get the better of you.” And as I got older and I saw that not everybody can succeed in everything they’re doing in life, I started just listening more, and being more sympathetic and saying, “Can we talk more about why you feel you really have to apply to medical school for a fifth time?” Or to somebody else, “Can we talk more about why this is the only woman for you in the world, and you feel like you shouldn’t go on living unless this person will love you?”

So often people are pursuing something that’s very, very important and you sympathise with them. I think the key to good therapy in these situations is not just to tell them, “Don’t pay attention to your depression,” and it’s not to just tell them, “You’re never going to succeed at that. Give up.” The thing is to talk with them about, “Do you think that’s working? How much effort do you want to keep putting into this? Are there other things that would be better for you and your family than continuing to put in this effort towards getting that particular promotion or making that particular person respect you?”

On the other hand, it’s not simple, because we all spend our lives pursuing unreachable goals. And the people who succeed grandly very often are the people who do pursue giant goals, and fail over and over again and keep trying. So nothing is simple here.

Therapist Hannah Boettcher on how striving for impact can affect our self-worth [00:13:45]

From Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impact

Hannah Boettcher: I also think there are some cultural norms that are common in high-impact spaces that can amplify imposter syndrome a bit. So the sorts of questions that people are well-practiced asking about their projects — things like: “Where are the top problems? Which of these is neglected? How could we be doing better? If we’re doing things that aren’t a value add, we need to stop doing them” — these sorts of questions that are useful for impact can easily start being applied to the self, where they pull for a deficit frame.

Then there’s also this sort of cultural norm or virtue around self-critique and humility. So if you’re complimented for your work, somebody in a high-impact space is probably going to be ready with an internal, “Yeah, but…” Right? Because that’s a move that’s really well-practiced in these spaces.

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally. Just to dig in a bit more on a few of those things, some people are trying to do a lot of good, and some people are trying to do the most good they can — and in either case, maybe much more than is typical, we end up asking things like: “Is what we’re doing good enough? Could we be doing more good? Do we have the right beliefs, or could we have the righter beliefs? Is this project that I’m working on going fine? How can I guess all the ways it could go wrong, so that it could go better?”

And I guess it’s such an optimisation framing that ending up anywhere below optimal — which we don’t even know what optimal is, oftentimes, so it’s often pretty easy to tell a story where we are below optimal — then we’re setting ourselves up to feel inadequate, I guess.

Hannah Boettcher: Exactly.

Luisa Rodriguez: I think I stand by the goal of trying to find ways to do better and to do more good. But how do you do that in a way that doesn’t also end up making you feel kind of chronically inadequate? Because you could always have done the project better or you could always be kind of reflecting more on your beliefs to make sure that you’ve got the right ideas about what the most pressing problems are or something.

Hannah Boettcher: I have a few thoughts on this. I think we are aiming for a place where we can decouple the scorecard from our worthiness. So it’s of course the case that in trying to optimise the good, we will always be falling short, right? The question is how much, and in what ways are we not there yet?

And if we then extrapolate that to how much and in what ways am I not enough, that’s where we run into trouble. And I think that we miss the fundamental difference between performance and worthiness, and that we want to keep that difference vivid.

Luisa Rodriguez on grieving the gap between who you are and who you wish you were [00:16:57]

From Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shame

Luisa Rodriguez: I believe it would be better for me to feel less guilt. Because we’re making this assumption that I do think is totally plausible — and probably even likely — that me feeling less guilt about this would just be better in the long run. And I believe that I’m just kind of along for the ride of how much my brain and body want to work.

Then what would it be like to, on the day to day, try to conjure those ideas up when feeling guilty? I’m just trying to remember a time last week, for example. There was a day when I felt stressed and sad. I could tell I was getting really distracted when trying to work, and that it wasn’t working, and that I should go for a walk instead. But I felt a bit guilty about that walk, because it was in the middle of a workday and probably people would have expected me to be at my computer.

I guess that’s kind of an easy case, because upon reflection, I really think it was just good for me to take the walk. If it gets a bit more ambiguous, and I just really want to go for a walk. Which sometimes happens if it’s like a really gorgeous day. I live in Oxford, and so if it’s good weather, I’m really drawn to it.

Keiran Harris: So with a lot of these ones, to me, whenever you talk about stuff like this, I think what you are feeling guilty about is not being a different person. That’s what you’re saying. You’re saying, “I should be a different person.”

I think that makes about as much sense as me saying, “I wish I was really tall and amazing at basketball, because then I could join the NBA and I would make millions of people happy and they would watch me and they would buy my jerseys.” We both agree that is ludicrous. That’s what it reads to me when you’re saying, “I wish I was the type of person who didn’t want to go for walks during the day.” It’s like, but you are.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right.

Keiran Harris: I also independently think that’s like a totally fine and good and healthy thing to do.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure.

Keiran Harris: But even if it wasn’t, it’s like, well, that’s the world we’re in. We’re in the world where you like to take walks. What is there to feel shame about? I mean, that’s just who you are. You can’t do anything about it.

Luisa Rodriguez: This is getting to the daylight between us. I think we did get in the direction of, like, “Will I endorse this or won’t I, upon reflection?” But I feel enormous grief about the things that I am not, in a way that you don’t, and in a way that, for the most part, I don’t think is adding anything to my life. It’s just taking away. It’s not making things better.

But I feel grief that I’m not smarter. I feel grief that I’m not more curious. I feel grief that I don’t work harder. So I guess often on the day to day, it feels like guilt. But even if I look through this lens and I’m like, “But you can’t have done otherwise,” then I’m just like, “Ugh, that’s so disappointing. I’m the kind of person who has my features. And they’re unchangeable.”

Keiran Harris: Yeah. There’s two things that I think of here. One is asking you: Do you ever feel joyful and appreciative of the fact that you are very smart and very curious and very hardworking, even if you think you could be even smarter and even more curious and even more hardworking? Or that’s off the table?

Luisa Rodriguez: Do I feel appreciative of those things? Doesn’t really come up, no.

Keiran Harris: No. OK. The world we’re in is one where you are at least a 9 out of 10 on all these things, right? And yet you feel grief even for not being a 10 in these things. If you just grant me you’re a 9 and that you’re not a 10, I would just say, “Well, you’re in the body of someone who has a 9 on all of these things, and you’re also someone who values these things. That seems pretty great.”

But yeah, you can’t go to a 10; you can’t go to an 8 — you’re a 9. It’s not possible to change. But it’s also not a shame. There’s no problem to this. There are some things about most people’s lives that really are a shame, like chronic knee pain or something. You’re like, “Oh, that sucks. That’s really bad.” But you don’t feel the same thing, right? If you had chronic knee pain, you wouldn’t feel this shame of like, “Why don’t I have good knees? Why aren’t my knees perfect? Why don’t I have 10 out of 10 knees?”

Luisa Rodriguez: But I would feel grief, I would feel sad, I would feel loss.

Keiran Harris: But not shame or associated guilt. Because you’re saying, like, “I wish I was harder working, and then I feel guilty for not working harder.” It comes back to this, like, “I feel bad for not being a different person.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think I’m actually able to make that move with you, but then what I’m left with is the sadness, and that also feels bad. I feel like there’s actually another move we have to make before Luisa just feels a bunch less pain.

Keiran Harris: Totally. So here’s my next attempt.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, great.

Keiran Harris: OK. I don’t know if you endorse this. I think that the important thing is just good being done in the universe. That’s the thing that ultimately matters, and I am truly indifferent between you or I doing good. If I did one unit of good and you did 99 units of good, or it was 50/50, it’s like, whatever, it’s just good being done in the universe. I’d be happy either way. It wouldn’t matter to me. It seems like you wouldn’t be happy that way.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, which I feel shame about.

Keiran Harris: You feel shame about. But one thing is, you don’t hold me to these standards, right? Of me not working hard enough. It’s all just internal. Which I understand I’m risking causing more shame here by you being like, “Oh, why am I so egotistical?”

And then I want to say that you couldn’t do otherwise. You really literally couldn’t do otherwise. It’s not like you could sort of do otherwise — it’s you could not do otherwise. You’re you; I’m me — we will do exactly as much good as we’re going to do. We’re just along for the ride. Hopefully it’s good for the sake of the universe, but there’s just nothing you can do.

Charity director Cameron Meyer Shorb on managing work-related guilt and shame [00:24:01]

From #210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals

Luisa Rodriguez: You reached out with the loveliest email of all time to let us know that you got a lot from the chat that Keiran and I had about free will and guilt. Do you want to say what your experience with work-related guilt and shame has been like?

Cameron Meyer Shorb: Yeah, partly this is because my life is generally pretty good, but also it’s partly because my guilt is so bad that work-related guilt and shame is by far the biggest source of suffering in my life. Maybe it’s not every day, but it is almost every week that I feel really just caught up in worrying about whether I’ve done enough, or how bad it was of me to not do enough, or am I working enough hours?

And there are varying degrees of this. It’s an almost constant presence. Like a lot of my experience of my work day-to-day is like, “Remember, you would be a bad person if you didn’t do more of this.” And then sometimes it has gotten so bad where I’ve lost entire afternoons or entire days to procrastinating, because this turns into such an aversive set of feelings.

Once, in 2020, this kind of merged with my proclivity for depression to get bad enough that I was, I think, a liability to the organisation. I asked my manager to consider firing me, and to lay out a plan for what improvement would look like. And then I got therapy and medication at just the right time. But it can get really, really bad. So that is part of why it was so cool to hear an episode about it.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s really very moving to me. Thank you for sharing. And also really wonderful to hear that the episode resonated. I guess some listeners had this worry that you still need guilt and shame to create the kind of determined motivation to be productive. Did you have any of that reaction, or do you have a way of thinking about that for yourself?

Cameron Meyer Shorb: That was definitely my inclination for a long time. First of all, this might not apply to everyone; people vary a lot. But for me, the bittersweet reality is guilt and shame just do not work at all. Or maybe they work sometimes, but there’s a lot of times when they’re just really counterproductive, when they make my experience of work so aversive that I end up avoiding work because I want to avoid the guilt and shame. And then that just destroys the thing. So for me, for better or for worse, it’s just simple enough: just like, no, this doesn’t work. I’ve tried so many ways of trying to make this work, and it doesn’t.

The reason I think that this might apply to many or all people — or at least that I think it’s really worth taking these ideas seriously and trying this out, even if it’s not what you end up sticking with — is that guilt and shame, they’re just inaccurate feelings. They tell a story about the world that is not true. The story they tell is: “If I tried harder, then I would have worked more.” So then you learn the wrong lesson, which is, “Oh! Next time I’m just going to magically be a person that tries harder.”

Whereas if you step away from the guilt and shame, and you just look at every moment or hour as a retrospective, then you can actually identify the actual conditions or mechanisms that are leading you to be more or less productive. And you can notice, like, I was less productive on days when I was more tired or on tasks that I enjoyed less, or when I was thinking about these other things. And those things aren’t always in your control, but sometimes they’re in your control, inasmuch as you can ever control things. And I really feel like it has helped me just learn better how to set myself up for work.

I noticed too there was something about a sense of self or identity that the shame was reinforcing. Something about, “I’m a person who cares so much! Surely I only would have made this mistake if I wasn’t trying hard enough.” But actually the answer is like, “No, I’m a dumb meat machine that is subject to physical and emotional constraints, and I should just really learn how to work this machine, not magically be a better martyr.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, I resonate with that a lot.

Cameron Meyer Shorb: And I think the flip side of this is it’s a more useful way of thinking about things, but it is also a harder question to answer, the question of, “Why didn’t I work long enough or hard enough?” If you just, “Because I just didn’t try hard enough” — bam! There’s your answer, there’s your certainty. And you give yourself this illusion at least of knowing how to fix it next time.

But dang, there are so many confounding variables when you look at how productive you are at any one day. And it’s really frustrating to not know and not have that sense of control about how to set yourself up perfectly the next day. But important work is worth doing, and worth doing well, and worth spending a while studying how you do it and what sets you up to do it well. So I think it’s worth asking the more complicated question.

Therapist Tim LeBon on aiming for excellence rather than perfection [00:29:18]

From #149 – Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating

Tim LeBon: What is this moral perfectionism? It would be very similar [to ordinary perfectionism], except instead of focusing just on achievement, it would be focusing on your moral worth: your identity is linked with how good you are as a person. The standards would again be unfeasibly high and inflexible. Maybe something like “doing the most good you can” — to coin a phrase — every moment of the day.

Rob Wiblin: [laughs] Hypothetically. Sounds tough.

Tim LeBon: It does sound very tough. So you’d worry about not doing it. You would procrastinate. You might even avoid some tasks, because you avoid being in the public glare because you fear you might fail. If then you didn’t succeed, or you thought you hadn’t succeeded in reaching that target — which of course you won’t, because it’s such a tough target, and sometimes you won’t succeed in having a really fantastic outcome in everything you do — then you’ll be very harsh. Harsh self-criticism.

And very often, a result of that is shame. And shame — I’m sure there are lots of listeners out there who’ve listened to Brené Brown and similar TED Talks and writings — shame is one of the least constructive emotions. Guilt can be quite a useful emotion, but shame is where you just feel like hiding away. Very often you just feel like escaping, so you don’t get help. You’re just left with this feeling of very often self-hatred, self-loathing — because remember, your whole identity is wrapped up with being this really good person. You’ve set yourself an incredibly high, unfeasible standard to do that. You haven’t achieved it. And so you’re just left there on your own, thinking that you failed and that you’re a terrible person.

So that would be moral perfectionism. I don’t know if that makes sense at all.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, completely. You could see how this could be both an intoxicating mix to start with, and also creates a positive feedback loop that can get people into serious trouble — where feeling ashamed and feeling terrible about yourself is not super conducive to then going and working really hard. Or at least a lot of the time that’s going to be an impediment to reaching those standards, because you’re just having negative thoughts all the time and worrying that you’re not going to meet the standards, and then maybe actually will stop even reaching ordinary people’s standards. You’re stuck in this negative feedback loop of negative self-image and not being able to act and so on.

Tim LeBon: That’s exactly it, yeah. So depression and anxiety, sometimes at clinical levels, can come out of the bottom of this. Then, as you said, once you’re in that, it’s actually very hard to just reach the normal standards. Then that would go back to saying, “Oh god, I really am such a terrible person,” because people like that tend to also have a very high sense of responsibility and tend not to make allowances for themselves. And then as I said, if they also are full of shame, they won’t actually get positive feedback from other people so much because they’re hiding it. So it’s a really difficult mixture.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. What’s distinctive about treating people with this issue as opposed to other mental health issues that people come to you with?

Tim LeBon: I have to say — and not just because some of them might be listening — that it is a pleasure to work with people who identify as effective altruists, and that includes many of them who might be perfectionists. And why is that? It’s because they’re bright, they’re conscientious, they’re super motivated, and they’re generally nice people.

What you’ve got is people who are super motivated with a real problem. We’re not just talking about people who are just having therapy as a luxury — this is something that can very often cause clinical levels of depression and anxiety, and stop them doing what is most important to them, which is making a positive impact on the world.

So I enjoy working with effective altruists — and of course, from my own perspective, if I do help them, then it means I’m helping people who will then go on to do a lot of good. That’s another little benefit.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, nice. You mentioned that many people come in with this cluster of issues — I guess identifying that something is not going great in their life, but they don’t necessarily think of themselves as perfectionists. Are there any who do? Or is it hard to persuade people that they have perfectionism if they’re reluctant to think that? Do you think it’s your place to try to persuade people to see their life that way if they don’t view themselves as having this issue?

Tim LeBon: I think there’s the word “perfectionism” to get over. And if they haven’t said they were a perfectionist, but they talk about some of these maintaining processes happening — which would be things like, “Often people tell me that I set the bar too high, and sometimes I procrastinate, and I’m quite harsh with myself when I don’t meet them” — then you’d be picking up possible clinical perfectionism. And there would be a discussion about whether this was a good thing or not.

Very often an important phase very early on in therapy for perfectionism is the pros and cons of their current way of being. Sometimes we draw out a little table of perfectionism versus excellence, because they’re not the same thing. Perfectionism is aiming at something perfect, and search for excellence is something excellent — they’re not quite the same thing.

Rob Wiblin: One of those is more achievable.

Tim LeBon: One of them is more achievable. Perfection would be something that was very subjective as well, and ultimately unattainable, whereas excellence is something that you can have certain skills and you can train yourself to achieve it.

You can say, “Which would you rather go for? All this stuff on the left-hand column, which is the perfection stuff, which is generally unattainable? Or this stuff on the right-hand column, which is excellence?” Generally they would say, “Yeah, let’s go for excellence.” Then you’re kind of getting people to understand that it might be the search for perfection that’s the problem.

Because what people don’t want to be is mediocre. They’re saying, “Tim, you just want me to be rubbish? I know X, Y, and Z who just don’t do anything. They waste their lives. Do you want me to be like that?” They don’t say that usually, because they’re too polite, but you see that in their body language.

It’s not even necessarily about lowering your standards that much; as I said, it’s about standards perhaps being more flexible and attainable. So for instance, if someone has a physical health condition, then it wouldn’t be fair to then assume that they can reach the same standards, do the same things as they would if they didn’t have it.

Rob Wiblin: Or just always be hitting the same level, regardless of how their physical health issue is going.

Tim LeBon: Exactly.

Author Cal Newport on making time to be alone with our thoughts [00:36:03]

From #106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

Rob Wiblin: Something that’s generally true of the books, I think, is that they’re very good for people who need to notice that the way that they’re setting goals, or the way that they’re working to achieve those goals doesn’t make the most sense and can be improved.

But I think there’s another, somewhat independent, driver of unhappiness at work or low productivity that there’s somewhat less aimed at addressing, which is emotional, personal barriers that people have to doing what matters.

And these can come in a lot of different forms, but a few which I think most people will find relatable to some degree is things like not wanting to do the most important thing in your to-do list because it’s challenging, and it’s high stakes. And so you’re scared or anxious about finding out that you’ve done a bad job, or doing a bad job. And so you put it off and put it off.

Or like wanting to obfuscate how things get done, because you’re scared that you’re not actually as productive as your colleagues. I mean, maybe you are, maybe you aren’t, but either way that really worries you, kind of brings social anxiety. Or finding it’s hard to say no to doing things because you want to please people, and it generates this immediate self-esteem boost to say yes.

In your mind, is there an important distinction between these organizational systems issues that push people to spend time unproductively and these emotional, personal motivations that pull people to check Slack and email all day, even if no one’s really making them do it?

Cal Newport: Yeah. I think they are both really important. On my podcast, for example, I talk a lot about the ‘deep life,’ as a sort of goal or approach, or a philosophical adaptation of how you approach life that deploys some of these systematic or systems-based thinking as part of this larger, I think more philosophical goal.

One of the things, for example, that I think is an issue with what you’re just talking about, is that the answer to a lot of those comes in part from a better self-awareness built through sort of extensive self-reflection and development. And one of the things that we’re increasingly losing right now… It’s this interesting techno-experiment we’re doing… We’re increasingly losing time alone with our own thoughts, because we have a portable supercomputer with a ubiquitous high-speed broadband internet connection, the servers that are optimized to show us exactly what we want to see in any moment that’s going to be entertaining or engaging.

That gets rid of the necessity of having to be alone with our own thoughts — but being alone with our own thoughts is critical, because it’s how we make sense of ourselves, it’s how we make sense of what scares us, what we’re proud of, what’s not going well, what we want to go well. It’s how we get in touch with these intimations we have about what’s good and what’s not, and what’s important and what’s not.

Self-reflection is how we actually make sense of those and build a structure for our life around them. And these are structures with which we can actually do the scary thing, we can make forward progress. It’s the structure on which we can build the application of all these types of systems. But without it, we’re just flying from thing to thing, driven by emotion. Emotion, and anxiety, and numbing.

And so one thing I think we should all prioritize is getting to know ourselves better. Time alone with ourselves. What is this thing I just saw or this interview I just heard, this book I just read, what does that make me feel? What do I think about it? Am I going to file some of that away in my brain? Or am I completely rejecting this? What do I care about? How do I feel about these things? We have to have those internal schemas of self-understanding.

And when those are lacking, I completely agree with you. I mean, you can hear all the words about career capital and deep work and about the hyperactive hive mind and cognitive optimization — and to what end, if you don’t actually have a firm foundation on which you’re actually building what you want to build with your life?

Rob Wiblin: Do you have a book recommendation for people who feel like they relate to this as being a key barrier for them?

Cal Newport: Well, my book recommendation would be to read a lot of books. And not like pragmatic nonfiction books or advice books: read good literature, read good nonfiction that’s more interesting or memoir based, that’s going to push big ideas. You can read the classics like Viktor Frankl, but read like Matt Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, read thought-provoking, engaging books, read philosophy. If you’re not comfortable with hard philosophy yet read the secondary sources about the philosophy.

And then think. You need to start to create a life of the mind. The life of the mind is where you can actually start to construct a conception of the self. And when you have a conception of the self, you can start to do good things. So we need to think more. We need more things to think about. So my book I recommend is lots of books.

Rob Wiblin: Self-reflection then.

Cal Newport: Yeah. What I recommend is going from, “I don’t read books just for provocative self-reflection,” to “I do.” That’s the biggest recommendation I would give.

80,000 Hours career advisors Michelle Hutchinson and Habiba Islam on prioritising mental health over career impact [00:40:28]

From #122 – Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam on balancing competing priorities and other themes from our 1-on-1 careers advising

Habiba Islam: One other thing that comes up is talking about people’s prioritizations around different priorities in their life, and impact is not the only thing that you are aiming for in your career. Often I just give people a message that if they’re struggling with mental health-related things, to prioritize that and put that first. Obviously we’re not a counseling service, and don’t have expertise in this area, but this is something I do try and emphasize to people, and give people permission to focus on that kind of thing — I think it’s helpful to have an outside person sometimes say that. I often recommend the podcast that Keiran did with one of the 80K staff members on their own journey there.

Michelle Hutchinson: Yeah. I think that’s really important. There’s definitely some subset of people that we talk to who feel like they’re only doing what they ought to if they do the most impactful thing they possibly could, and spend all their time and all their money helping others. And that doesn’t seem like a recipe for actually having an impactful career, because you’re likely to burn yourself out.

I don’t think we should be in the business of pushing ourselves and each other that hard — I think it’s very important to find a career that’s actually going to be fulfilling and sustainable for you, and that allows you the amount of time off that you need. And then also for us to support each other insofar as we can. The wider world also isn’t always that good at really taking seriously the amount of mental health help that people need.

I feel pretty fortunate to be in a community of people where people are pretty happy to talk through mental health challenges that you might have, and what kinds of things you can do about them — whether it’s a good idea to try meditation, or try a CBT app, or go to counseling, and that kind of thing.

As Habiba said, we’re not counselors and therefore pretty careful about the kinds of things that we say, but I definitely want us to encourage people to be open and seek help, and kind of destigmatize mental health as much as possible.

Rob Wiblin: Sounds like a trap that some people might fall into is that they’re having some personal problem — potentially a health issue — and they feel like despite that, they still have to focus directly on trying to have an impact right away. Potentially that can be putting the cart before the horse. What they need to do is deal with their health problems or whatever is making it difficult for them to progress in their life or their career, and then once they’ve dealt with the underlying challenges, then they can get back to thinking about the career aspect.

Habiba Islam: Yeah, absolutely. There is the analogy of in an airplane, putting on your own oxygen mask first before you then help the people that you’re traveling with or your children or something — that’s always the standard advice.

Rob Wiblin: I guess people might feel like it’s self indulgent in some way, or potentially that’s negative self-talk that people can get into — that taking care of themselves is just selfishness and silliness.

Habiba Islam: I think that’s very unhelpful self-talk, and isn’t going to lead to the best outcomes in general. If the thing that you care about is having the most impact, it’s counterproductive self-talk.

Michelle Hutchinson: Yeah. I think it’s also just incredibly hard when you are in this mindspace to zoom out. While I was pregnant, I felt very tired and lethargic and not very inclined to work. And I found that difficult from my identity point of view, because I felt like somehow I had turned into a lazy kind of person, and not like I could cut myself slack for that. In that case, it was just very directly obvious what was causing it and that it was time-bounded, but it was still very hard to just say, “OK, I just won’t work as hard for these few months.”

I think it’s just so much worse when you have a chronic health problem where you don’t know when it’s going to get better, and you feel like you really have to push through now. When in fact it could be better to zoom out and say, “Well, this year is going to be a year when I focus on figuring out whether I can do anything about my underlying health, and maybe don’t even do that, but just cut myself slack and have an easy year of it.” When looked at from the point of view of a 50-year career, that’s just totally reasonable.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Another thing that could be psychologically helpful is to think about this from the perspective of the community again, as a group of people. We should have some kind of trade system, where people who have good mental health or good health in any given year, they work extra hard and push themselves a bit more. And people who are having a hard time, they do a trade across time where they’ll work harder when they’re doing better again personally, but then this is the year when they get to chill out a little bit more and think more about getting back on track personally.

Michelle Hutchinson: Yeah. I think being part of a community is hugely helpful. Another way in which the community can be helpful is just reminding each other: when you are not the one in the difficult space, it’s much easier for you to take the zoomed-out point of view.

I had a late-term stillbirth, which was pretty difficult for me, and I was really grateful to the people in the community who were just, with hindsight, very sensibly telling me to take things easy, and not having any specific expectations of what I would do. And suggesting a bunch of things like, Should I go traveling? Should I just take things easy for ages? Should I work if I actually want to? I think having people around you at those kinds of times who clearly share your values and so aren’t just being totally biased, but are saying, “Hey, now’s the time to zoom out and look after yourself” can be incredibly useful.

Charity founder Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on the ups and downs of founding an organisation [00:45:52]

From #207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead

Sarah Eustis-Guthrie: I think part of it is that when you run an organisation, you feel very personally responsible for what’s happening with that organisation. I think this felt extra strong for us because not only had we decided to found this organisation, but we decided to found this organisation as opposed to other organisations that could have been really good. So that was my cofounder and I kind of staking our claim for like, “We think that this is good. We think that this is so good that we want you to give money that you otherwise could give to these other really compelling organisations.”

And then not only that, but I’m good friends with a lot of other folks in the Charity Entrepreneurship community — which is great, they’re an awesome group of people — but what that means is that sometimes I’ll be chatting with someone, and in the nicest possible way, it’s like their programme’s going phenomenally, they’re helping so many people, they’re getting this huge grant. And even though I think people make an effort to make it non-stressful and non-competitive, it’s such a warm community, it also just is inherently, you’re sitting there and you’re thinking, “Man, is it the intervention or is it me?” Yeah, not the best feeling ever.

I think my overall experience with Charity Entrepreneurship, with founding an org, was that the benefits were a lot bigger than I’d expected and then the downsides were a lot bigger than I expected. I think I would go back and do it again, and I would recommend other people do it. But also I did not comprehend how big of a change in my life it would be.

And I don’t want to say that this happens for everyone, because I think people have very different experiences with it. But I think for me, that sense of responsibility, that sense of feeling like the results really reflected on me — which I don’t fully endorse as a take, and was something that I was trying to shift away from — I found really tough. Because it was just true that for some aspects of the programme, how well they went were a direct reflection of how good of a job I did — and sometimes I would make a mistake, and that would have bad effects in the world, and that was really stressful. And then some aspects of the programme had very little to do with how hard I was working or how smart I was about making a particular choice.

And I found that to be immensely stressful, and I found it hard to turn off thinking about the organisation. I would try to do these things like, “I won’t check Slack after I stop work for the day” and that kind of thing. But what I found is I’d just be walking around in my life, and because this was the most interesting and felt like the most important thing coming up in my life, that’s what I would think about.

So yeah, I did have this experience of, I would wake up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water, and before I was even fully conscious I would find that I was thinking about the organisation, or I was thinking about some of these issues, and then it would be hard to fall back asleep. And I’ve talked to other people who say, “Yeah, I have that exact same experience.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. Yeah. I’m trying to think of an analogy, and I’m finding it hard to. But it sounds closer to like having a child or something. Like you’re trying to create this thing, and there’s so much responsibility and personal ownership in a way that you just don’t have in most cases when you are employed by a place to do a thing, and the bottom line responsibility isn’t with you.

Sarah Eustis-Guthrie: Right. And I think there’s a lot of jobs where people have that sense of real responsibility. I do think that there are good aspects of this. I found it deeply satisfying and deeply fulfilling. I remember when I was thinking about applying to jobs before this, I was thinking, I want to have this feeling that if I’m working extra hard, that that’ll make more good things happen in the world. I don’t want to have this feeling of, I’m accruing additional profit to a corporation, or it doesn’t really matter that much how hard I work. But this is the flip side of that: when it matters how good of a job you do, it’s hard to let go of.

And also I do just think there is a big difference between being the person who’s running the organisation and being someone who has a really substantial role. Because ultimately so much of your job is making these really tough calls — tough calls that you could potentially invest infinite time into. So it’s really hard to know when did I make a good decision? When did I invest the correct amount of time into making a decision? There’s a lot that’s really tough.

And I think having a cofounder does make a big difference. There are some folks that solo found. I have so much respect for that. I could not have done that with MHI. But having a cofounder makes a big difference, because you can really share that burden.

And I also think having a community makes a big difference, where I would talk to other folks running orgs and say, “I found this thing immensely stressful, and I don’t know if I made the right call,” and they would say, “I felt the exact same way.” And then also having advisors who we could turn to. I think that helps take on some of that responsibility. That’s similar to having a manager, but I didn’t totally trust that our advisors would be telling us in the frankest possible way if we were totally messing up.

So it was hard. I felt like I had to carry that burden myself. I ended up doing a lot of second guessing myself, a lot of asking myself, “Am I messing up? Am I doing a good job?” And in retrospect, I wish I’d done more to try and offload that, but I think it’s fundamentally just a super tough challenge.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it sounds brutal.

Our World in Data researcher Hannah Ritchie on feeling like an imposter as a generalist [00:51:28]

From #160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment

Luisa Rodriguez: Is there anything else that feels particularly hard about your work?

Hannah Ritchie: I feel this personally, but I think it’s also something that I’m sure affects other people at Our World in Data, especially in recent years: the platform has grown a lot in recent years. In large part to do with COVID, because we became the COVID data people. We had a large audience before that, but I think it’s just shifted a lot. And now there’s just this really intense pressure to get things right — people take our work very seriously. Often, they’ll frame it as like, “I look at Our World in Data and I take as gospel what I see on the website, and I just assume that’s true.”

Luisa Rodriguez: I have the same worries at 80,000 Hours. But yeah, go on.

Hannah Ritchie: Which is a very high bar. And obviously, we do a tonne to make sure that we are getting everything right, but there is a lot of pressure there, and concern that one error could have pretty bad consequences — either in terms of a decision that’s made or just reputationally. Like, I think at Our World in Data, we always feel like we’re just one mistake away from our reputation being bashed.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. Yeah. That sounds really anxiety-inducing. It’s like you’re doing a bunch of excellent work, but it could just be one or a few mistakes that make it all, I guess, reputationally tarnished.

Hannah Ritchie: Exactly. And on a personal level, part of what’s difficult is we cover so many different topics; it’s really broad, the topics that we cover. But I also straddle a lot of disciplines in some sense. Like, we’re researchers, we’re data analysts, we’re writers, we do data viz. So I think there’s this imposter syndrome that comes from straddling so many different things at once.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I’ve totally found that with work that feels kind of generalist-y — where you try to be good at many things, but then you’re never exceptionally good at a single thing — so when you’re in a space about that thing, you feel like you don’t know as much as other people. And you in fact probably don’t.

To solve problems like agricultural productivity and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, you must need to think about like 10 different disciplines, and then I can totally imagine how you’d then just feel like you don’t know enough about any one of them.

Hannah Ritchie: Definitely. That’s definitely the feeling, where in that sense, in the back of my head, I’m like, the agricultural economist is not going to agree with what I say; probably the soil scientists are not going to agree with what I say; the agrotech company is not going to agree. So when you straddle so many different disciplines, it almost feels like none of the experts are really going to agree with what you’re saying, because you’re trying to mix them up and come up with a true — but in some sense, simplified — narrative that people can understand.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. That sounds really hard. And I guess the flip side is none of those experts can come up with a full multidisciplinary, multidimensional solution. Like, the soil expert will have advice on soil, but they won’t be able to look at the problem as a whole and think about what all the possible solutions are, and point to some of the best ones. Which feels like a huge limitation, but I guess it sounds like your brain is — understandably, and mine would too — focusing on the ways that you’re not as expert as them, even though you might be able to offer more insights into big problems.Have you made any progress on feeling less impostery? Has anything helped?

Hannah Ritchie: I think the way I respond to it sometimes differs a bit. I think to some extent, the imposter syndrome has benefited me professionally. Like, my imposter syndrome often leads to anxiety, as I said, about getting stuff right that often seems very high stakes. And I think professionally, it’s just very good if I’m really paranoid about getting stuff right.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. If you’re meticulous and perfectionist.

Hannah Ritchie: To that extent, it’s benefited me professionally, even if personally it has quite a high toll on how I feel.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s interesting. In my own struggle with imposter syndrome, I’ve found overall it’s hindered my ability to do good work more than it’s helped. But I guess in some types of roles, that type of anxiety — where you’re worried about making a mistake, if mistakes really are just extremely, extremely bad — can be helpful.

Hannah Ritchie: Yeah. I think there’s two sides. So I think overall, it’s been a benefit. And I read your essay on imposter syndrome, and I loved it. I think there’s some cases where my reaction was similar to yours, where I would opt out of doing stuff.

A key example here is interviews. So I do a lot of interviews, often with news media, because they want to get the facts straight for their articles, which is great. Or on the radio. And I do a lot of them, but I often also turn down a lot of them. Some of them I turn down because I just can’t possibly do them all, but some of them I turn down because I either feel like I’m not the expert that they should be speaking to about that — which is sometimes right, but sometimes I think it’s not right, and I could very easily answer the questions.

So I either reject it because I feel like I’m not expert enough, or also because I just know that to them, it seems like I’m giving them 10 minutes of my time to give them the answer, but because I’m so paranoid about getting the stuff right, I probably check it then five times, and then I come back to it later to check it. And then I probably have a sleepless night in case I gave them the wrong number and they put it on the radio. So sometimes I just say no because I’m like, I actually want to sleep tonight.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. That sounds terrible. And I know the feeling of the sleepless night, when you’re worried you’ve made a mistake, or might make a mistake, on some fact you’ve been asked about. And it sucks. It really sucks. So yeah, I’m really sorry to hear. You said that you feel like you’ve kind of made some progress on it. Is there a single thing that you feel like has helped most?

Hannah Ritchie: Yeah. I think it’s definitely gotten a lot better. I’ve actually done therapy, and it was one of the big parts of therapy. And I think there’s a couple of things we worked through, which I’ve found helpful. One is, I actually think it’s to some extent the opposite from you, because I think it was one of the things you said was really a hindrance for you, the catastrophising thing.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah. Imagining the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Hannah Ritchie: Yeah. Where I actually find it quite useful sometimes to do that, and to work through, like, “OK, I get the number wrong. I go on the radio and I say the wrong number. What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Like, someone points out that I got the number wrong. I have to apologise to the BBC because I got the number wrong. They’re understanding, because people get numbers wrong — even the best people get the numbers wrong. And I can’t do that all the time, and I probably have a limited number of lives on that, but if I do that once, it’s fine, and it’s not the end of the world.

And I think there, another big thing has just been building an evidence base for the fact that I’ve done all this stuff, it hasn’t gone wrong, and it’s going fine. Like, I am careful with the numbers. I’m not going to just pluck one out of thin air. I know that I’m careful, and I try to base everything on the research, and I have evidence of doing these perfectly fine. So often I should just draw on that and trust myself that this time I’m also going to do fine.

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally. That exercise of being able to recall all the times that you did the things, and they went fine, seems huge.

Well, I’m glad it sounds like that isn’t causing you as much anxiety, which feels really hopeful to me. I mean, you’ve written a book; you’ve given a TED Talk. So it sounds like you’ve made enough progress to be able to still do really ambitious things, not have your anxiety be horribly painful. And I think that’s just great, given that it sounds like we’ve struggled with some of the same feelings. Thank you for sharing.

Hannah Ritchie: Yeah. No problem.

Moral philosopher Will MacAskill on being proactive about mental health and preventing burnout [01:00:46]

From #130 – Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure

Rob Wiblin: One thing that is always a little bit hard to make sense of when I’m updating your little bio at the top of the episode every time we do an interview, is just that you seem to have so much stuff going on at any point in time. There’s so many competing priorities pulling you every which way.

At the moment, you’ve got the whole book thing coming up and you’ve been working on the book. You’re still at the University of Oxford, right? You’re still a philosophy professor as I understand it. You’re helping to run the Forethought Foundation, which you also helped to set up. And I know whenever 80,000 Hours has a particularly thorny problem that we can’t figure out between the 20 of us, you are one of the people we turn to for advice. And I think we’re in good company there.

When I solicited questions for this episode, quite a lot of people responded with this similar sort of disbelief at the lifestyle you lead, the amount of work responsibilities that you have. People were curious, how are you doing on a personal level? How do you cope with it all?

Will MacAskill: It’s a good question. I very often feel too thinly spread and that is a cause of stress. We’ve talked a lot on previous podcasts about “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” — the importance of looking after yourself and making sure that you’re working in a way that’s sustainable over the long term.

I will acknowledge the last four or maybe six months have not been sustainable in terms of how hard I’ve been working. In particular, I really did a big sprint to finish the book over the course of 2021. I just really got quite obsessed by it. I was working extremely hard.

I think the fact that I had been so attentive to the idea of “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” for many years before that did allow me to pull out the extra gear for these last few months. I also will return to that again. I’m taking some time off literally next week. Obviously the book launch will be intense, but I’m going to move back to a more sustainable state. But I think the fact that I had invested in myself, I just now am far happier than I was say 13 years ago. And progressively so: I estimate I’m five to 10 times happier than I was.

Rob Wiblin: So you’re public about having had depression for quite an extended time, as a teenager, as an undergraduate as well, and having spent a lot of time working on that. How have you ended up five or 10 times happier? It sounds like a large multiple.

Will MacAskill: One part of it is being, still positive, but somewhat close to zero back then. But also now I would say that if I think of my peer group, say friends from university and so on, I’d probably put myself in the happiest 10% or something. So that’s really pretty good.

Rob Wiblin: That’s so good.

Will MacAskill: I mean, I feel happy about it. And that’s been from just a wide variety of things, just over a very long time period. There’s the classics, like learning to sleep well and meditate and get the right medication and exercise.

There’s also been an awful lot of just understanding your own mind and having good responses. For me, the thing that often happens is I start to beat myself up for not being productive enough or not being smart enough or just otherwise failing or something. And having a trigger action plan where, when that starts happening, I’m like, “OK, suddenly the top priority on my to-do list again is looking after my mental health.” Often that just means taking some time off, working out, meditating, and perhaps also journaling as well to recognize that I’m being a little bit crazy.

Rob Wiblin: Overriding the natural instincts.

Will MacAskill: Exactly, yeah. So perhaps I’ll be feeling on a day, “I’m being so slow at this. Other people will be so much more productive. I’m feeling inadequate.” Then I can be like, “OK, sure. Maybe today is not going so well. But how is the last six months or something? Think about what you have achieved then.” And then it’s like, “OK, that does seem better.”

So I’ve just gotten better at these mental habits, and that’s just been this very long process, but it’s really paid off, I think.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Was it a matter of finding out that that was something that’s important to do? I think a lot of people who tend to beat themselves up about work, or just about their performance in life in general, they might know in principle that those are exactly the moments when they need to ease off on themselves and focus on their wellbeing and their mental health.

But of course, that’s the last thing you want to do if you feel like you’re not being productive. The natural instinct is, “Now I need to double down. I need to pull an all-nighter to finish this project.” And that instinct can be so strong that it can override what you’ve read in any mental health books.

Will MacAskill: I think this was a huge realization for me. And I have to thank a very excellent therapist, who I have subsequently put a bunch of EAs onto. I think she was really confused with why she gets so many referrals from me. Because when I came in there — in 2012, 2013, probably even earlier, 2011 — I definitely had this mindset that the self-flagellation, the negative blame propaganda was very important. I remember she said, “Well, you seem very stressed.” I was like, “Of course I’m stressed. I’m a utilitarian!”

Rob Wiblin: “We have to suffer!”

Will MacAskill: Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: That’s the core part of the philosophy.

Will MacAskill: Exactly. It felt like it’s a sacrifice of my own wellbeing, but it’s in order to achieve things. And she just called bullshit on that. And I think she was just totally correct. She was like, “No, you’re just beating yourself up. And you would do that, whether or not you were trying to do good in the world.”

Rob Wiblin: Did you only just start doing this when you discovered moral philosophy?

Will MacAskill: Exactly. No, I was doing it when I was a teenager and I wanted to be a poet. So that was the fundamental insight: “Oh no, actually, maybe this is bad for me doing good in the world.” And I started in that lesson, and it took a very long time, because you’ve built up by that point this mental habit.

Rob Wiblin: Such a strong urge.

Will MacAskill: This whole set of mental propaganda to back that thought of, “No, this is important, and the things you really care about, you will drop.”

Rob Wiblin: If you express any kindness to yourself.

Will MacAskill: Exactly. And so it was helpful having some role models as well. I think Holden [Karnofsky]’s really good in this regard. He’s always someone I’ve always looked up to and respected an enormous amount, and just is hugely productive. And he would be like, “Yeah, I never feel guilt. I never beat myself up. How do I decide how many hours I do? Well, I look at what’s my average number of hours that I’ve worked the last few months and I work that number. Or I’d maybe try and be higher than that number.” I was like, “You can do this? It’s possible?”

Rob Wiblin: And when does the suffering come in? When do you schedule that?

Will MacAskill: Exactly. I think it is just important, and having those mental habits in place from this long time period of investment does mean that if there are particular moments, opportunities, where it’s like, “Oh wow, I can have real impact here,” you do have this extra kind of gas canister to use.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, we should really do an episode on self-compassion at some point soon. I feel like I know a lot of people, because of the seriousness of the problems that we’re dealing with or trying to solve, who are extremely harsh on themselves all the time, and exactly have this mentality of, “If I wasn’t harsh on myself, if I wasn’t beating myself up all the time about ensuring that I get my work done, then I wouldn’t get anything done.”

There’s a lot of research into this now, which shows that is mistaken and it’s very counterproductive, which is unsurprising in a sense. If you had someone who was managing someone in an organization through a difficult project, a difficult time, that they’re taking on a big challenge professionally, you would never have them follow this person around and denigrate their efforts all the time. “You’re not working hard enough. You need to go harder. This just shows your stupidity, the work that you’ve done today.”

Obviously you’ll get a lot more done if you had someone who was supportive, coaching you through the challenges. Sometimes maybe geeing you on a little bit and saying, “No, you can do better” — but being brutal to someone is terrible management. And yet that is the thing that people are saying to themselves in their head all the time.

Will MacAskill: It’s incredible how much of an asymmetry people can have — certainly I had, and still have, with respect to other people versus myself. I remember I did a meditation that really had quite a big impact on me, which was just a gratitude meditation. I was very used to being grateful for other people and feel that very strongly. The meditation got me to be grateful for myself, asked me to do that. I’d never thought of doing that before. And I was like, “Yeah, man, I really am thankful for the things earlier Will did.”

And it was pretty striking that an attitude I would so easily have towards other people, I hadn’t even thought to have towards myself. And that’s just absolutely the same as well with being critical and forgiving. Very different attitudes by disposition to other people and myself.

Rob Wiblin: I used to do a bunch of this. I think I was never quite at the level that you were back in 2011, but I used to beat myself up pretty regularly about, “I’m too lazy. I’m messing this and that up.” I think antidepressants made a huge difference for me, and just breaking that habit of waking up in the morning and spending half an hour in bed, just thinking about how I’m failing to achieve various goals.

And letting go of that did not damage my productivity at all, or not getting as much done. I’m more energetic and more enthusiastic to do things, because it doesn’t bring with it this anxiety and self-denigration.

Will MacAskill: That’s great to hear. And you do just seem a lot happier and more zen than back in the day.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It is just such a revelation to realize that it was completely unnecessary all along.

Grantmaker Ajeya Cotra on the psychological toll of tackling big open-ended research questions [01:11:00]

From #90 – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be

Rob Wiblin: So working on big open-ended reports like this can be a bit of a mess, and I think difficult for people intellectually — and I guess also psychologically. What are the biggest challenges with this work? How do you think that you almost got tripped up, or that other people tend to get tripped up?

Ajeya Cotra: One thing that’s really tough is that academic fields that have been around for a while have an intuition or an aesthetic that they pass on to new members about, what’s a unit of publishable work? It’s sometimes called a ‘publon.’ What kind of result is big enough and what kind of argument is compelling enough and complete enough that you can package it into a paper and publish it?

And I think with the work that we’re trying to do — partly because it’s new, and partly because of the nature of the work itself — it’s much less clear what a publishable unit is, or when you’re done. And you almost always find yourself in a situation where there’s a lot more research you could do than you assumed naively, going in.

And it’s not always a bad thing. It’s not always you’re being inefficient or you’re going down rabbit holes if you choose to do that research and just end up doing a much bigger project than you thought you were going to do.

I think this was the case with all of the timelines work that we did at Open Phil. My report and then other reports, it was always the case that we came in, we thought, I thought I would do a more simple evaluation of arguments made by our technical advisors, but then complications came up. And then it just became a much longer project.

And I don’t regret most of that. So it’s not as simple as saying, just really force yourself to guess at the outset how much time you want to spend on it and just spend that time. But at the same time, there definitely are rabbit holes, and there definitely are things you can do that eat up a bunch of time without giving you much epistemic value. So standards for that seemed like a big, difficult issue with this work.

Rob Wiblin: OK. So this question of what’s the publishable unit and what rabbit holes should you go down? Are there any other ways things can go wrong that stand out, or mistakes that you potentially made at some point?

Ajeya Cotra: Yeah. Looking back, I think I did a lot of what I think of as defensive writing, where basically there were a bunch of things I knew about the subject that were definitely true, and I could explain them nicely, and they lean on math and stuff, but those things were only peripherally relevant to the central point I wanted to make. And then there were a bunch of other things that were hard and messy, and mostly intuitions I had, and I didn’t know how to formalise them, but they were doing most of the real work.

One big example is that of the four things we talked about, the most important one by far is the 2020 computation requirements: how much computation would it take to train a transformative model if we had to do it today? But it was also the most nebulous and least defensible. So I found myself wanting to spend more time on hardware forecasting, where I could say stuff that didn’t sound stupid.

And so as I sat down to write the big report, after I had an internal draft… I had an internal draft all the way back in November 2019. And then I sat down to write the publishable draft and I was like, OK, I’ll clean up this internal draft. But I just found myself being pulled to writing certain things. Knowing that fancy ML people would read this, I found myself being pulled to just demonstrating that I knew stuff. And so I would just be like… I’d write 10 pages on machine learning theory that were perfectly reasonable intros to machine learning theory, but actually this horizon-length question was the real crux, and it was messy and not found in any textbook.

And so I had to do a lot to curb my instinct to defensive writing, and my instinct to put stuff in there just because I wanted to dilute the crazy speculative stuff with a lot of facts, and show people that I knew what I was talking about.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. That’s understandable. How did the work affect you personally, from a happiness or job satisfaction or mental health point of view? Because I think sometimes people throw themselves against the problems like this and I think it causes them to feel very anxious, because they don’t know whether they’re doing a good job or a bad job, or they don’t feel they are making progress, or they feel depressed because they worry that they haven’t figured it out yet and they feel bad about that.

Ajeya Cotra: Yeah. I had a lot of those emotions. I think the most fun part of the project was the beginning parts, where my audience was mostly myself and Holden [Karnofsky]. And I was reading these arguments that our technical advisors made and basically just finding issues with them, and explaining what I learned. And that’s just a very fun way to be. You have something you can bite onto, and react to, and then you’re pulling stuff out of it and restating it and finding issues with it. It’s much more rewarding for me than looking at a blank page and no longer writing something in response to somebody else. You have to just lay it all out for somebody who has no idea what you’re talking about.

And so I was starting writing this final draft — the draft that eventually became the thing posted on LessWrong — in January of 2020. And I gave myself a deadline of March 9 to write it all. And in fact, I spent most of January and half of February really stressed out about how I would even frame the model. And a lot of the stuff we were talking about, about these four parts, and then the first part is if we had to do it today, how much computation would it take to train? All of that came out of this angsty phase, where before I was just like, how much computation does it take to train [transformative AI], and when will we get that? But that had this important conceptual flaw that I ended up spending a lot of time on, which is like, no, that number is different in different years, because of algorithmic progress.

And so I was trying to force myself to just write down what I thought I knew, but I had a long period of being like, “This is bad. People will look at this, and if they’re exacting, rigorous people, they’ll be like this doesn’t make sense, there’s no such thing as the amount of computation to train a transformative model.”

And I was very hung up on that stuff. And I think sometimes it’s great to be hung up on that stuff, and in particular, I think my report is stronger because I was hung up on that particular thing. But sometimes you’re killing yourself over something where you should just say, “This is a vague, fuzzy notion, but you know what I mean.” And it’s just so hard to figure out when to do one versus the other.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think knowing this problem — where often the most important things can’t be rigorously justified, and you just have to state your honest opinion, all things considered, given everything you know about the world and your general intuitions, that’s the best you can do. And trying to do something else is just a fake science thing where you’re going through the motions of defending yourself against critics.

Ajeya Cotra: Yeah. Like physics envy. I had a lot of physics envy.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I’m just more indignant about that now. I’m just like, look, you don’t necessarily have to agree with me, but I’m just going to give you my number, and I’m not going to feel bad about it at all. And I won’t feel bad if you don’t agree, because this unfortunately is the state-of-the-art process that we have for estimating, is just to say what we think. Sometimes you can do better, but sometimes you really are pretty stuck.

Ajeya Cotra: Yeah. And I think just learning the difference is really hard. Because I do think this report, I believe has made some progress toward justifying things that were previously just intuitions we stated. But then there were many things where I hoped to do that, but I had to give up.

I think also, doing a report that is trying to get to a number on an important decision-relevant question is a ton of pressure, because you can be really good at laying out the arguments and finding all the considerations and stuff, but your brain might not be weighing them right. And how you weigh them, the alchemy going on in your head when you assign weights to lifetime versus evolution versus things in between make a huge difference to the final number.

And if you feel like your job is to get the right number, that can be really, really scary and stressful. So I’ve tried to reframe it as my job is to lay out the arguments and make a model that makes sense. How the inputs get turned into outputs makes sense and is clear to people. And so the next person who wants to come up with their views on timelines doesn’t have to do all the work I did, but they still need to put in their numbers. My job is not to get the ultimate right numbers. I think reframing it that way was really important for my mental health.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Because that’s something you actually have a decent shot at having control over, whether you succeed at that. Whereas being able to produce the right number is to a much greater degree out of your hands.

Researcher and grantmaker Christian Ruhl on how having a stutter affects him personally and professionally [01:19:30]

From Christian Ruhl on why we’re entering a new nuclear age — and how to reduce the risks

Luisa Rodriguez: You have very generously offered to talk about the experience of having a stutter. So I’m curious to just basically dive right into that, if you’re up for it, starting with what is the experience of stuttering like, from the inside? What does it feel like to not be able to say what you want to say sometimes?

Christian Ruhl: It’s kind of like your thoughts are trapped inside of your body. So let’s back up a little bit. Stuttering: what is it? It’s this neurological disorder. We don’t really understand it, but it’s now understood to probably have some pretty strong genetic component. It affects about 1% of the population. Most people grow out of it.

And from the outside, it often looks like people are repeating, they’re blocking — so they’re stopping in a specific thing — or they’re prolonging their words. I think from the outside, it sometimes looks like somebody is at a loss for words. But in fact, what’s happening is I have no trouble forming sentences, either in mental language — concepts, images, whatever — or in English in my head. The issue is there’s some sort of disconnect between what I want to say and what my body is doing. It’s not working right.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Do you literally have the English word in your head, or is it more that you have the general ideas in your head, and then it’s somewhere between ideas and words? Or is it more like you could literally hear the sentence in your head and it’s about speech?

Christian Ruhl: It’s a really good question. I feel like we could go on a long tangent about this question, about the language of thoughts. I think “mentalese” is a word that people sometimes use. So it’s both. I’m able to form ideas and concepts in mentalese in my head, and I’m able to consciously say them “out loud” in my head fluently. The issue is really translating that into vibrations of the air.

Luisa Rodriguez: Got it, OK. So that’s what it feels like, kind of intellectually. Has your stutter had much of an impact on you emotionally?

Christian Ruhl: Yeah, 100%. I think it can be really emotionally draining. I’m personally fundamentally an outgoing person, and it totally blocks that impulse.

So maybe we can think about your average day, and think about the moments every day that you rely on speaking fluently. Maybe it’s the morning. It’s like 7:30. You want to have a coffee. You go to your coffee shop, and you’re like, “OK, I’m going to order a coffee.” What kind of coffee should we order?

Luisa Rodriguez: I would like a soy latte with vanilla and peppermint.

Christian Ruhl: OK, that’s great. A soy latte with vanilla and peppermint. Or as I might say it when I try to say it, “A ssss” — that’s what the person behind the counter might hear — and I’d like, totally block. Stand there with an open mouth, looking helpless. And what does the other person see? You think in your head, what are they thinking? Do they think, “Is that guy having a stroke? Should I call an ambulance? Is he on drugs?” Right?

So maybe in the end, you manage to get out the word, or you point towards the board, and it’s like, “Ugh, that was bad,” but you get the point across — like, “I want this specific thing.” And then they ask me, “What’s the name for the order?” And a frustrating thing that a lot of people who stutter have is that they block on their own name.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh my gosh.

Christian Ruhl: So do I make up a fake name that’s easier to say? That’s crazy. Or do I try to say my own name and can’t, and then their response is like, “Oh, did you forget your name? Ha ha.” Right? This is like, the morning.

Luisa Rodriguez: That sounds so frustrating.

Christian Ruhl: But let’s imagine you have your coffee in hand, walking out and your hands are full. And you suddenly maybe remember something you wanted to write down for a report you’re working on about nuclear war. Maybe you try to use the voice assistant on your phone. And it’s not designed to work for you.

But that’s kind of what it feels like, to try to paint a picture there. Small moments. Compared to the things that are happening to many people, it’s not a big deal, but there’s all these small moments throughout your life where fluency would be really helpful.

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally. To what extent do you get desensitised to the feeling of like, “That was frustrating. I couldn’t get the word out again.” Or does that get limited at some point, and maybe you feel a bit less frustrated, but it is just still freaking frustrating to not get the words out?

Christian Ruhl: It remains really frustrating. Getting desensitised to it is hard. As I understand it, the latest approach to speech therapy is about this, just being OK with stuttering openly. But that’s easier said than done. Or in my case, both hard to say and hard to do.

Luisa Rodriguez: Imagining it for myself, it is really, really hard to imagine. Just really hard to imagine just accepting this isn’t going to get easier, it’s going to keep happening.

I guess even more personal: do you feel like it had an impact on you growing up? I’d imagine feeling especially awkward as a kid when I didn’t understand the thing quite as well, and maybe other kids didn’t understand the thing quite as well.

Christian Ruhl: Yeah. So I was fortunate enough to grow up in a really loving home with great parents and so on. So that’s wonderful. But you can imagine still, in school, the kid who can’t say his own name or who can’t get a word out when called on in class is going to have a hard time.

So I tried for a while doing speech therapy. For some people that works; for me, it didn’t. At one point, I don’t remember if it was at Cambridge or Oxford, but I’m a big fan of self-experimentation, so I participated in this experimental trial where they were investigating transcranial direct current stimulation and trying to figure out if zapping your brain a little can help. It didn’t, but it was still interesting.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. I’m both curious if you think the actual stutter has gotten better, and then I’m also curious if your experience of it has gotten better. I’m just super impressed that you were like, “I’m going to go on a podcast.” And I have to believe that it took a bunch of emotional work at least to get to the point where you were like, “Yes, I want to do that.”

Christian Ruhl: Thank you. Yeah, I hope we didn’t give 30 minutes of content in 90 minutes of time. But the stutter itself has not gotten better for me personally. Again, as I mentioned, a lot of kids grow out of it. I just didn’t.

My emotional response to it I think has gotten better, in the sense of at some point you just have to try being comfortable with being uncomfortable. And like, “I manage this philanthropic fund. It would be good for more people to know about it because I think it does a lot of good in the world, and if more people know about it, maybe they’ll give money to it. So I should go on a podcast so people can hear about it. Ugh, I have to go on a podcast.” So I’m trying to do that more.

And in terms of stuttering less, there’s this concept of stuttering freely — of just like, communication is a two-way street, and it’s not just on the speaker to speak fluently, but also on the listener to be patient. And I think we all have speech patterns of ums and ahs.

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally. Yeah, I like that a lot. And then, you’re kind of touching on it already, but to what extent has having a stutter affected your career?

Christian Ruhl: Maybe I would do more podcasts. This is fun. But one part might be job interviews. Those can be really challenging.

Actually, to go back: other things that are in a similar boat are talking to police or talking to immigration services.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, that sounds like a nightmare.

Christian Ruhl: It’s the absolute worst. Because they think you’re hiding something, and they get suspicious. And I already don’t like them.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. I’m terrified of talking to customs people.

Christian Ruhl: Yeah. But anyway, back to job interviews: those can be really frustrating and challenging. I have to give a bit of a shout-out to the Founders Pledge hiring process here. I think a lot of organisations working on these kinds of issues really emphasise a work task — like, “do expected value calculations on this difficult problem,” or “write a short essay on this philosophical issue” — so it’s entirely about skills, and was like the meat of the hiring process. And I think that, for somebody who has a speech or hearing disability, is super helpful. And once you do that, I feel fine in interviews being like, “By the way, I stutter. I have this thing. I don’t think it keeps me from doing good work.”

Back to how it affected my career, if I had to think about it, maybe it’s pushed me more into a career focused on writing as an outlet for the language part of my brain.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense. Has it stopped you from applying to things? Just the fear of interviews or something?

Christian Ruhl: In the past it has, yeah. Now I’m definitely trying to catch myself and be like, “Nope, I should just apply. I should be in this panel.” Recently, Haydn Belfield and I had written this article and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gave us a prize. They were like, good job on the article, and part of it was speaking at the annual meeting they have, the Conversations Before Midnight. And I was like, “That’s terrifying.” But then I caught myself and I was like, I should just do it. And I stuttered and it was uncomfortable, but it was fine.

Luisa Rodriguez: I mean, that sounds great. I guess my experience of repeatedly forcing myself to do things that sound really terrifying and costly is like, in some cases, it gets easier over time. It’s still really exhausting being like, regularly, I am going to stifle my own fear about doing this, do this terrifying thing like speak at a conference, and then have all the panic afterward about whether I did a good job. And even if it does get easier, it gets easier so slowly over time that it still means that the first 30 times of speaking at a conference are kind of torturous.

I’m impressed that you have the stamina. I feel like there are some things I’ve just given up on. I have a default email that’s like, “I don’t speak at conferences because it makes me too anxious.” So I think it’s really cool and inspiring that you push yourself. Do you feel like it’s important to set limits? That sometimes you give yourself an out to be like, “I don’t have to do that really hard thing”?

Christian Ruhl: Yeah, for sure. I’m totally with you there. We don’t have to be too hard on ourselves.

Luisa Rodriguez: And then how do you decide?

Christian Ruhl: One thing that’s helpful with my job is, in terms of motivation, it helps that I feel like I’m genuinely doing good in the world. So let’s say I’m interviewing an expert about pandemic preparedness. It’s much easier to kind of get over myself, because I know that maybe philanthropists can help make grants to mitigate these risks if I write a good report or whatever. So that’s one way of deciding.

Mercy For Animals’ CEO Leah Garcés on insisting on self-care when doing difficult work [01:32:39]

From #99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry

Rob Wiblin: A lot of people who fight against factory farming struggle with mental health challenges. And I think it’s not just because they’re working a lot. It’s also because the work is so confronting, constantly having to think about the horrible suffering that you’re working to prevent. Have you ever become kind of despondent or anxious because of this? And I guess, how did you approach that and maybe how do you recommend that other people in the organization approach it?

Leah Garcés: Yeah. I definitely have become despondent and depressed because of the severity of the injustice that we’re trying to work on. And I really hit a wall last summer. It was the first trip I took out during the pandemic, and I went to visit a factory farm of one of the Transfarmation farmers. I’d been locked up, holed up in my office for nine months, and then the next thing I know I’m inside of a factory farm filming some of the worst atrocities in the world, in my mind. Chickens with sores, lame chickens, just horrific overcrowding, ammonia, unable to breathe myself, and then let alone the chickens.

And it really hit me hard. To realize that this continued. I think during the pandemic maybe I’d been able to ignore it more. And I hit a real period of depression.

And I think that I did a lot to change my life at that point. So I think there are a number of things. You have to prioritize self-care. This means exercise regularly, get eight hours of sleep, eat healthy. I don’t drink at all right now, which maybe surprises people, but I stopped drinking at that point.

You have to do what makes you show up your best self, because the work we do is witnessing trauma every single day. We are bearing witness to trauma that is a normalized atrocity in our society. So it’s heavy. It is heavy and we’re already a movement of empaths in many cases. So people who already feel more than others and absorb more than others. Because we’re already responding to this atrocity when others aren’t.

So we are especially sensitive to it. And you add into that deaths during the pandemic, and #metoo, and the racial uprising issues. It’s been a difficult year. It’s a lot.

And so I think you have to prioritize self-care. And I model that for everyone. I insist on vacation. I follow up with my staff and say, “I can see you haven’t taken any vacation. You need to take a break.” I’m the type of person who thinks that advocates need more vacation, not less because we need to last. We have to last the whole time that factory farming exists. And to do that, you need to pace yourself. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And self-care is really critical.

Rob Wiblin: Do you have an approach either as an individual or as an organization for what you do when a staff member is starting to show signs that maybe they’re becoming depressed, maybe they’re having serious anxiety? It can be very hard for a workplace to know what to do at that point. Do you encourage people to take sick time off, or…?

Leah Garcés: Yeah, we have a lot of resources that we offer staff, but we also have maintenance. For example we have courses that we regularly offer to staff on compassion fatigue. And then within that workshop, which we ask people to attend, there’s resources, books and different approaches that we suggest people take.

We also offer $700 per team member for self-care — and that can be for therapy, it can be for a gym. It’s not a whole lot, but it’s something. And we have mental health leave. And we also have our regular leave. We have quite a number of vacation days, more than most in the United States, 25 days, and in Brazil, it’s even more. In Mexico, it’s around that too.

Rob Wiblin: Well thanks to you and all of your colleagues for the very difficult work that you do, work that I think would certainly challenge my mental health. But, it seems like it’s bearing fruit, and hopefully everything’s going to be better in a couple of decades. You might even see the back of this thing.

Leah Garcés: I hope so. My goal is to put us out of business and retire on the beach somewhere, put my feet up.

80,000 Hours’ former CEO Howie on balancing a job and mental illness [01:37:12]

From #100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

Howie: There is this difficult balance of wanting to keep the things that are giving you structure and meaning and purpose in your life, and then also wanting to make sure you’re not putting yourself in a life situation that’s self-destructive, or where you’re setting yourself goals that you just can’t possibly meet. That just means different things to different people.

I think there is one meme out there that I really strongly disagree with that’s like, “Your mental health is the most important thing in the entire world. Do whatever it takes to get that fixed. If you’re feeling bad, take a break, focus on yourself. That’s your priority until you get healthy.” There are things close to that that I agree with. But some of us aren’t going to have a moment where it’s like, alright, you’re healthy now. You are officially normal, and you get a certificate or something. It’s just going to be a lifelong struggle.

And so I, at least, don’t want to put off living my life, and doing the parts of my life that will matter to me until this is fixed. That’s really important to me. Years where I’m trying to fix this thing are also years of my life. So it feels important to consider that. Some people are the type of people who can be super functional and be really anxious at the same time. And I think for some of them, the right choice is to just keep doing what you’re doing.

Also, one of the most valuable things you can possibly do is to get your mental health treatment better, and we’ll talk about that later. I just think it’s so, so valuable to see if there’s a way that you can do that. But also, just keeping your life the same is the right decision for some people. And for some people it’s, this is putting me at risk of failing in a way that is going to make me self undermine, and I just need a break. Or just need the space, the headspace, to think things through, and actually work on myself, instead of every day being focused on the next deadline. I think it just varies a lot by person.

Questions that I have tried to ask myself, and sometimes suggested to other people they ask themselves is, think about the sort of things that they get out of their job that are important to them. That are important to their wellbeing, that are important to making sure that they stay, to the extent it’s possible, out of a spirally, horribly depressed zone. And ask, what is the minimal viable project that will get you what you need? And when you’re depressed and facing a rough patch, I think lowering your expectations of yourself, and lowering other’s expectations of you, is basically something that you owe the world.

It’s really hard to look the thing in the face and admit that it’s happening, but it just may be the case that you can’t do what you used to be able to do. So, I think it’s just very good to lower expectations, lower your responsibilities. That might mean reducing your hours. It might mean quitting a job. And so thinking about, “What are the most responsibilities I could possibly drop while still making sure that I have a sense of meaning and structure?” is one framing that I find useful.

Therapist Hannah Boettcher on how self-compassion isn’t self-indulgence [01:40:39]

From Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impact

Luisa Rodriguez: I’d actually love to talk more about self-compassion. I have to admit that I, for a long time, have just really bounced off the idea of self-compassion and off of compassion-focused therapy. It came up a number of times, and I kept being like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” My reaction to the idea of being more compassionate toward myself was like, that sounds like lowering my standards or letting myself off the hook, or like some kind of over-the-top self-care that I don’t identify with. A little bit of like, “That sounds weak. I want to be strong.”

Hannah Boettcher: Yeah. That sounds like things I’ve heard inside my head and from clients before.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so it’s not just me. To some extent, I’ve made some progress on this. I don’t have those associations quite as strongly. But for listeners who do still have some of that, can you help us have a different framing?

Hannah Boettcher: Absolutely. The thing we’re aiming for is not “anything goes” or “my standards don’t matter.” The thing we’re aiming for is: “No matter where I’ve set the standard, how can I show up for treating myself well and kindly and effectively along the way?”

And let’s also be clear that self-compassion is actually useful. First of all, it’s justified. We’ve said this already: we are the sorts of creatures that suffer, and we suffer for reasons out of our control that we didn’t choose. In my view, that justifies compassion.

But even separately from that, self-compassion works better than self-loathing and self-berating. When you’re in a constant state of self-criticism, this is kicking up additional suffering that you then have to metabolise. Whereas when you can relate as a matter of self-compassion, this actually enhances performance more than self-criticism does, and it makes for a better subjective experience.

Luisa Rodriguez: A better experience. Yeah, OK. That sounds totally right. Then I guess we’ve got to go all-in on self-compassion. Something more like: You are doing something super important, super brave, super valuable. Thank you for doing it.

Hannah Boettcher: Yes, yes. And you are materially creating a world where a lot of people are pushing toward impact, and that is worth being part of.

Journalist Kelsey Piper on how to communicate about mental health in ways that resonate [01:43:32]

From #53 – Kelsey Piper on whether journalists have room to write about important things

Rob Wiblin: So you’ve written lots of things on The Unit of Caring, your blog, over the years. I noticed one thing that is kind of related to EA, though it’s not directly about EA, is dealing with mental health issues or dealing with challenges in your life. And I think probably hundreds of people it seems have written in to you with questions about like, “I’m struggling with this or that problem in my life. How do you think I should deal with it?”

And you answer with a lot of wisdom. People really respect your opinions on this for that reason. Are there any general lessons you think you can take away or share from people dealing with very difficult circumstances in their life for someone?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah I think one thing I get out of that is seeing all of the ways that people can be hurting, and all of the ways that the narratives and advice available to them can fail to resonate. And that’s just made me more aware of how many ways you need to communicate something to successfully get it across.

But things that seem to often be important to communicate are that results-oriented thinking, that what matters is figuring out how to get outcomes you want and not to beat yourself up over whether you’re having the right thoughts or the right feelings or whether you care for the right reasons, or whether your justifications are valid; trusting yourself more, feeling like in a situation where you can’t believe your own thinking and your own reasoning processes and your own senses. Those are just very destructive situations for people. It’s important to prioritize feeling like your opinions matter, and feeling like you have the ability to reason about reality.

And then just that everybody’s going through a lot. I find work hard sometimes because there are days when I actually just can’t get out of bed and find it very hard to do anything at all. That’s probably a little bit unusual, but the impression I’ve gotten through talking to enough people is that almost everybody has stuff with that amount of difficulty that they’re dealing with. If you’re imagining, “I’m the one person who deals with stuff like that,” then of course you’re going to despair of having a successful, healthy, fulfilling life. But if you know that everybody else is also dealing with stuff then it can be easier to be like, “OK, but some of them do have lives that I could aspire to and that I could have.” I think it’s good for people to be aware that there’s lots of really great lives out there that don’t involve fixing everything, but just figuring out how to work around what you’ve got.

Luisa’s outro [01:46:10]

Luisa Rodriguez: If you liked that episode, I highly recommend you check out the full episodes from Randy Nesse, Tim LeBon, and Hannah Boettcher — we have links to all of those in the blog post for this episode.

And last year my colleague Cody Fenwick put together a blog post called Mental health and your career: our top resources that’s really worth checking out — it includes some of these episodes, as well as articles we’ve written over the years about how to pursue impactful careers without sacrificing your wellbeing.

All right, thanks to the production team for putting that compilation together. We’ll be back with a fully new interview very soon!