Why Many EAs Probably Undervalue Their Happiness

By emily.fan @ 2025-10-20T06:47 (+19)

I had a draft of this post sitting around since 2022 so I thought that it'd be best to post this during draft amnesty week instead of allowing another few years go by.

TLDR;

Brief Personal account

For a long time, I didn’t think that my happiness mattered much. It’s not what society rewarded me for; I did well in school not by being happy, but by putting in the work. And it didn’t seem like it would make the world a better place; I did good not by making myself happy, but by preventing suffering in other people and making other people happy. Also, in the grand scheme of things, my happiness is just a drop in the ocean of conscious experience. So my happiness didn’t really matter. Or so I thought.

I suspect that this line of reasoning is not uncommon within the effective altruism community, which consists of people who tend to be both ambitious and altruistic. Both of these traits may lead to EAs underprioritizing their happiness. 

Possible Reasons

Tradeoffs Between Happiness, Success, and Altruism Exist

First, I will loosely define happiness, success, and altruism. Happiness is having pleasant subjective feelings; these feelings include hedonic pleasure, feelings of purpose, and general satisfaction with life^[1]. Success includes “conventional success” (wealth, popularity, prestige, job title) or “EA success” (amount donated, working in a EA org, EA forum karma, being effective at altruism); for the purposes of this post, happiness is not included as a metric of success.

Ambitious people may see happiness as only an instrumental goal to the ultimate goal of being successful. And in many cases, there is a direct tradeoff between happiness and success. For instance, it may mean that a student gives up doing a fun activity to study a subject they may not like to earn a good mark.

Similarly, altruistic people may care so much about the suffering and/or problems in the world that they think that their happiness is self-indulgent. For instance, the money spent on (vegan) ice cream could have been donated to the Against Malaria Foundation. 

In many situations, there is a direct opportunity cost to doing a fun^[2] activity or spending money on things that make you happy. 

Caveats

Short term tradeoffs between happiness and success, and happiness and altruism tend to be the most salient tradeoffs. The longer term dynamics between happiness, success, and altruism are much more complicated. At the current margin, for many people, optimizing directly for happiness will also increase long-term effectiveness. In subsequent parts of the post, I use the term success to encompass both success and altruism.

Unhappy people can be successful/altruistic

Many successful people, including many in the effective altruism community, struggle with poor mental health. These people may include students at top universities, professors, leaders, and more. They seem to provide evidence that happiness isn’t necessary to be successful/altruistic, even in longer timeframes. Combined with an obvious short-term increase in productivity and altruism of neglecting happiness, it becomes easy to fall into the belief that your own happiness doesn’t matter to be effective. The converse of this is also true. There are many happy people who are not successful and altruistic.

Caveats

Many people have been able to be successful while having poor mental health for long periods of time, but they are likely anomalies among the groups of unhappy people and successful peopleConsider the following probabilities for someone under the same conditions in two different universes except for happiness levels.

P(successful and altruistic | happy) vs. P(successful and altruistic | unhappy)

P(not functional | happy) vs. P(not functional | unhappy)

Here, being not functional roughly means operating at a 20% or less of normal capacity. Some examples include being so anxious that there is no way to focus on most responsibilities or so depressed/burnt out that there is not enough energy to do much if anything at all.

I claim

P(successful and altruistic | happy) > P(successful and altruistic | unhappy)

P(not functional | happy) << P(not functional | unhappy)

Therefore, E(positive impact | happy) > E(positive impact | unhappy)

And it seems like the research supports this as well.^[3]

Therefore, being happy is more likely to lead to being more successful and altruistic, and being unhappy is much more likely to become “not functional”. Even if it is slightly more likely to be successful and altruistic while being unhappy, the expected value of being happy is higher due to the significant difference between the likelihood of not being functional. 

Signaling

When someone is visibly happy or doesn’t seem stressed, some people may think that they aren’t trying hard enough, that they have more bandwidth to do more or to make personal sacrifices. In some workplaces, this indeed is the reality.

Some people often feel that their most important relationships professionally or in the EA community are contingent on perceived effectiveness. Combined with the above signaling effect, this creates a direct social incentive to burn your spare resources, including at times when saving them up is the optimal strategy. I hypothesize that this might be more relevant to people who might feel like their social connections in EA and work relationships are unstable and thus need to signal how hardworking or altruistic they are.

Caveats

The signaling argument assumes that doing good requires great sacrifice. Many people do not automatically think that being happy implies not trying hard enough, and ultimately, what matters is the work output rather than the amount of personal sacrifice. Environments where people look down on those who are visibly happy are unhealthy.^[4] 

There are other ways to signal that you care about doing good, such as being excited and intrinsically motivated to make a positive impact. Seeing others who are happy and making a positive impact can motivate others to make a positive impact and become more excited about doing good. Hence, being successful, altruistic, and happy is a positive signal! 

Unhappiness as a Motivator

Sometimes it’s easy for someone to be afraid that happiness and self-compassion can lead to complacency, and therefore lose motivation to become better or do more good.

Caveats

When unhappiness becomes the motivator to “do good” or “be successful,” the underlying motivator is often feeling ”not good enough” either about oneself or society. Hence, the feeling of “not good enough” becomes a proxy measure of success or how much good has been done, and the subconscious focus becomes disproving the feelings of “not good enough” rather than doing things that will actually make a positive difference. As a result, maladaptive behavior patterns can arise such as ruminating about being “not good enough,” avoiding constructive feedback or facts about the world because it means being “not good enough,” and falling into resignation or burnout because things will never be good enough. None of these behavioral patterns help with doing good or becoming a better person, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these behavior patterns are fairly common among people who are driven by unhappiness as the primary motivator.

An alternative does in fact exist, and I’ve met people who are intrinsically motivated to do good and grow as a person so that it becomes a fun process. Having a direct intrinsic motivation to doing good and growing eliminates the inefficiencies of using the indirect mechanism of motivation from “not good enough.”

Feelings of Not Deserving Happiness

People may feel like they are a “bad EA” for a variety of reasons, and they may self-inflict some suffering as a punishment for being “bad^[5].” In theory, negative reinforcement should prevent people from doing things that would make them a “bad EA.” In some cases, “bad” may be worse than someone else in the EA community. The rationale for this may also be similar to that of signaling.

In addition, a lot of the arguments above treat happiness as instrumental to being a “good EA,” whatever that means. Under certain philosophical frameworks, personal happiness might seem to not matter in the grand scheme of things.

Caveats

EA is a team sport, not a competition where only the best EAs are allowed to be happy.

Some questions worth considering:

• Given that you likely care about the happiness of people in the global south you don’t know, people who don’t exist yet, and/or animals suffering in factory farms, why is it that you don’t deserve happiness?
• Is happiness something to be earned when you attain some level of success? What kind of society would we live in if only the most successful people were allowed to be happy?
• Do you judge others as harshly as you do yourself?

And as discussed in “Unhappiness as a Motivator,” using negative reinforcement is less efficient to getting positive outcomes.

Transitioning Towards Happiness is Costly

Perhaps it is possible to realize happiness does matter either instrumentally or intrinsically, but prioritizing it can be extremely difficult. Good therapy and psychiatric care can be incredibly expensive. Often, the transition to happiness involves cutting some slack in certain areas of life to be able to learn how to be happy rather than resort to overcommiting and using stress to get things done.

Caveats

I won’t deny that it is hard to change decades-old patterns of deprioritizing your happiness, and every step towards prioritizing it contributes to a habit of prioritizing happiness over time.

There are resources that are more accessible. The EA Mental Health navigator lists apps, books, workshops, online communities, and lower cost programs including those from outside of the EA community.

Even if it does take a lot of effort to invest in your happiness, I argue it is an investment with high returns. Not only will you do good sustainably, but you will also show others that you can do good and live a good life.

Recap (TLDR copy pasta)

Acknowledgments

I appreciate Alex, Aron, Jalex, Juan, Kathryn, Mathias, Patrick, Sev, Sofie, Tara, and Tazik reviewing a draft of this post, providing feedback, and encouraging me to post it. I take responsibility for all errors in this document.

And thank you for taking your time to read the post! I’d love to hear from you in the comments or DMs. :)

1. ^{^}

    I realize I am defining happiness broadly here. From a draft commenter: These components differ quite a bit and there is a substantial philosophical debate to be had about which of them matter for making a life good. I suspect most EAs do quite well on feelings of purpose even if they are unhappy by the standards of pleasure/suffering or overall life satisfaction.

2. ^{^}

    Friend recommended book: The Power of Fun by Catherine Price

3. ^{^}

    One of my draft readers linked a bunch of research supporting my argument that happiness is good for productivity:
   https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/35451/1/522164196.pdf

   https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/77864/8/MPRA_paper_77864.pdf

   
   And happiness is good for altruism:
   https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28837957/

   https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-11018-015

   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354635655_Subjective_Well-Being_and_Prosociality_Around_the_Globe_Happy_People_Give_More_of_Their_Time_and_Money_to_Others

4. ^{^}

    From a draft commenter: I strongly believe that it's pretty off-putting to people outside the inner circle of the cult if every dedicated EA (hyperbolically) is a cranky burnt-out adderall zombie who lives exclusively off astronaut food.Personally, I tend to intuitively avoid the hardest-working EAs because they are not very pleasant company. Some of them tend to believe I'm a hedonistic slacker who's dangerous to the culture though.

5. ^{^}

    From a draft commenter: in therapy, there is a notion that when we feel guilty, we seek punishment. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=guilty+seeking+punishment&btnG=