The Altruistic Retreat

By JoeJones @ 2024-06-24T09:37 (+18)

EDIT: I intend to re-write this post in the next few months to improve the structure. 

Or, Is EA actually effective altruism for you right now?

Summary: If EA has become too meta in your head, consider either taking concrete action or taking a break. 

Also available on my blog. 

This is my first post on the forum. I’m a long-time aspiring EA and rationalist lurker. It’s not fully ‘worked-out’, and constructive criticism is appreciated. It’s closely related to topics touched upon in other posts on value drift, such as these: It’s ok to leave EA, Don’t Be Bycatch, and Elements of EA: your (EA) identity can be bespoke. 

Introduction

The post is aimed at people for whom EA is no longer helping them be Effectively Altruistic. People who ruminate about EA, or some aspect of EA as it relates to them. These are people who haven't lost the desire to do the most good, but who would do more good in the long run if they took a break from EA, or from thinking quite so much about EA. I think it's easy for some people to end up in that position, as I was for a very long time. To end up thinking about EA a lot in a ruminative way, without taking action. To have EA become some highly unproductive meta-concept in your head. 

I think there’s a spectrum to this concept, too. Some people are likely working towards good things, but still hold EA as a slightly amorphous concept in their heads, and this is likely affecting their thinking to varying degrees. 

Basically all I want to say in this post is that it’s possible for thinking about EA to stop you from actually being EA, if you’re not processing it correctly. 

My Experience

For me, it was OCD that kept the rumination going. For you, it could be just general anxiety, or depression, or some combination of various things. It could be that you don't need mental health support - you're just burnt out, or unproductive. Or you don't like your job. Or you think you might be a better fit for a different career, or different job, but can't seem to get around to making it happen. 

I ended up essentially ruminating about EA unproductively for years. 

It's possible for people to hear about EA too early. That happened to me. I wish I'd done what I'm proposing here - done it properly - a long time ago. I'm not sure how feasible it would have been, but had I been able to, it would almost certainly have helped me long-term. 

Of course, it's better for more people to hear about EA than never hear about it at all. I'm not suggesting that community building is bad. Far from it.

My Pitch 

What I want is for people in a rut to consider - is EA actually Effective Altruism for me right now?

If the answer is no, I have two recommendations, depending on your situation: 

• 1) Take concrete action. Sign up for a fellowship. Apply for that job. Go to a talk. Read a book. Draft a career plan.

OR 

• 2) Take a break.

It's the second recommendation I want to talk about in this post.

If you find yourself both a) thinking about EA a lot and b) not actually doing much good, it could be the case that thinking about EA less is the optimal strategy, especially if you're a ruminator like me, without strong connections in the community. (It could also be the case that you just need to take concrete action, so think about that, too). 

I’ve been thinking for a long, long time about my relationship with EA. 

For the longest time, it was my stated aim in life to do the most good. I was on the EA Oxford committee for a term, I read various EA books, I went to lectures and seminars, and so on and so forth. 

And then I graduated. But I graduated without particularly strong EA connections, without too many people who I was in regular contact with expecting me to achieve greatness, particularly, within EA. 

And the value drift came a bit. But it was manageable, and I thought it would be easy to get myself back on track. For me, it was tangled in with a lot of other things, particularly OCD.

But I’ve discovered, to my despair, that if you only had shallow connections to begin with, and especially if you have mental health issues, a bit of value drift can quickly become the thin end of a great big wedge of value drift, if you're not really careful. I had read about value drift, and I knew it was an issue, and I knew some steps people can take to stop it, but it still happened to me. That might be because my situation was odd, and I had a mental health issue, but nonetheless, it's some evidence at least that that can happen.

But being isolated from the community - heck, not even really a part of it, any longer - has had its side-benefits. Not just for myself, but for my impact, too. Don't get me wrong, I wish it hadn't happened - I really wish it hadn’t happened - but it has its silver linings, and they are what I want to discuss in this post. 

Throughout this time, I’ve realised that things got to a point in my life, probably many years ago, when EA was no longer really Effective Altruism for me. Things would certainly have turned out better, I think, if I’d found out about EA when I was 20, say, rather than 18. And I've got plenty more to write about that. 

EA helped me to upskill and become more knowledgeable up to a point, and then it just became an obstacle to actually doing altruistic things. It became more of a God to be frightened of. To worship, almost. At university, EA was ‘the thing I will do in the future, when I’m more sorted out’. After university, that future had come, but I failed to sort myself out. But I still felt EA, even though I wasn’t doing very much. As long as I said my daily prayers to the EA God, as long as I thought ‘I am an EA’, that was enough. But EA is not, never has been, and never will be about ‘being an EA’. It’s about doing the most good. 

EA means nothing without its referent. If you let yourself feel that EA is more special than it really is, and lose your connection to the community (or worse - lose your connection to the real world), you can lose the A almost entirely, never mind the E. And that’s No Good. 

Others have made it clear that it’s OK to leave EA, and many have written about the experience (see here, here and here). I highly recommend reading those posts. The case I’m trying to make is that for many, it could be best to do a move I’d like to call the ‘Altruistic Retreat’. I know that might seem confusing as a name, but there's a reason why I use that word. 

It may seem obvious, but I think it does need to be spelled out to some people. When you realise that EA is not actually helping you do the most good, EA is no longer EA for you. And I think the best thing to do for many people in that situation is to leave, do some good, and then come back.

Why 'Retreat'? 

Taking a break from EA isn't a novel concept, so why give it this ‘retreat’ label? 

1. Retreat is not giving up. It's tactically withdrawing, to get stronger, to fight another battle. 
2. I want to distinguish what I'm talking about from just ‘taking a break’, because I do think it's a subtly different thing. It's more of a reframe. A nudge. It's realising that EA is actually just about doing the most good. It's not about Effective Altruism. Writing those words on your bottom line in capital letters rather than lower-case can be a very bad idea. 

The Altruistic Retreat happens in your head. It’s a refresh. You might want to take some other practical step associated with it, like taking time off work, or taking a holiday, but all I'm suggesting here is the reframe. What you do after that is your call.

Benefits & Pitfalls 

Potential benefits of doing this, each of which could be a post in and of itself:

• Actually sorting out any mental health issues you may have that are connected to EA, rather than trying to fight them from ‘within’ EA.
• Realising your nervous system will be OK outside of EA. It's possible to make that happen - trust me, I made it happen, and my nervous system was totally obsessed with EA. Then you can come back with a more balanced and more productive, less scared attitude.
• Realising that EA is a bit special but not, like, that special. (Don’t get me wrong, it is special, but people who fall into EA-meta-spirals like I did can start to mentally carve the world in their heads into EA and not-EA in a way that is very unhelpful and leads to inaccurate beliefs.) 
• Reconnect with your own desires and interests.
• Internalising the fact that no-one is coming to get you if you fail at EA (but that you should still try anyway).
• Internalising the fact that time wasted ruminating about EA will just make it harder for you to be effective in future.
• Realising you have other responsibilities (and that not meeting those will make your EA work harder, and that it may be worth paying more attention to them at least for a while).
• Realising that just because EA is hard, that doesn't mean life outside EA is easy (it isn’t).
• Realising that just because a lot of EA means working hard, that doesn’t mean people don’t also work very hard for non-EA things or straight-up selfish things. 

I did an Altruistic Retreat, but not on purpose. And because it wasn’t on purpose, I didn’t do it properly. I am coming back, but I’m coming back a bit bruised, because I’ve lost time, and career capital, and confidence. I see EA as the Whole Point of My Life, and a necessary condition for living a good life. And there’s a big hole in that for me now, and I’m not sure how long it will take to repair it. 

And that’s a really horrible situation to get out of. Because even if I do a lot of good from now on, there’s no way of knowing how much better it could have been. It could have been orders of magnitude better. 

My Altruistic Retreat was a bit like taking an unregulated drug, I suppose. In the sense that there was no clear pathway - nobody had told me I should do it, nobody had told me I could do it, and I didn't even do it on purpose. And so it was impure, and there was not much of a safety net if it went wrong - at least, no safety net for my confidence. 

It’s been totally shocking to me, given how absolutely steeped in EA my thought processes used to be, how much I’ve been able to detach from it. And this was not on purpose, and it would have been better for it not to happen. 

And in a sense, I haven’t detached. I've thought about EA every day, most of the time. Or rather, I've thought about the fossilised, worn-out, idiosyncratic idea of EA I had in my head, which is what I'd been doing for years previously anyway. My thinking became warped, and I optimised for strange things, or barely optimised for anything at all. I've been doing exactly the thing I'm telling people to get out of. So don't be like me. Do your Altruistic Retreat properly.

But the silver lining even from my weird experience is that I am coming back to EA from a calmer place. I’ve experienced what it’s like to exist largely separated from EA. And I know I can do it, and I've had all the benefits listed above, sort of. My situation was odd for a lot of reasons, but everyone's situation is at least a bit odd in some respects. 

Now, I’m no longer so much of a prisoner trying to escape. I’m a free man, I hope, realising that prison was never the right place to be, and that I was actually free all along. EA is no prison. The prison was in my mind.  

So, I want to take a step towards Altruistic Retreats becoming regulated. I know that EA Retreats are already a thing, but this isn’t the type of retreat where you talk about cause prio and plan your career and play card games. Those are fine, but this is a different type of Retreat. 

Of course, an Altruistic Retreat of the type I’m suggesting comes with its own risks of value drift, and you have to genuinely be in a position where EA is not serving to make you more altruistic any longer. Where it’s become an Idol, rather than a friend. Where you're trying to be an Effective Altruist, when you're trying to try to do the most good. It's much better to do some good, and then improve it, rather than keep EA in the back of your mind and go about your business, letting it stop you from doing much good at all. 

And if that really is the case for you, as it was for me, then simply: take a step back. Retreat. Do something concrete. Do some good.  

And then, and only then, think about how to Do Good Better.