How did this unusual lifestyle choice affect the way you present yourself to others? Opinion conformity is a common impression management technique, and do-gooder derogation is a well documented phenomenon. Do you think earning-to-give affected your career or relationships, compared to the earning-to-spend hypothetical?
Overall, I don’t think it has hurt me, and it’s helped me in a few ways.
Work:
When I was working in tech (mostly Google) as far as I could tell people either didn’t care (there are a lot of eccentric engineers) or found it inspiring. It also made it easier for me to negotiate hard for more compensation both psychologically and without risking my relationship with my management chain: I don’t think I would have been able to say with a straight face “I just don’t think $400k is an appropriate total compensation” if it had just been for myself, but I could do “while this is far more than what I need to live on, you know I work this job so I can donate and I think $400k is below market”.
Optimizing for income got me to switch to Google, avoiding my natural preferences for satisficing, in a way that ended up being way better for my career.
When I did decide to switch into direct work I think people took me more seriously because I had a track record of putting my beliefs into practice through donating.
Personal:
I don’t think this has affected my relationship with non-EA friends and family. Both are, as with tech, groups that are very tolerant of weirdness. I do think some of this is being lucky with my particular friends and family: making a lot of money and then donating instead of sharing is something that I’ve heard from other EAs as causing a lot of tension, and even doing direct work at well below your maximum earning capacity can have the same issues. I’m just very lucky how my extended family has a good culture of boundaries while staying unusually close for Americans.
I’ve met a lot of really interesting people through EA, and have a lot of great conversations. A non-EA me would probably have other friends, but probably drawing more from the contra dance and traditional music communities and I think the variety is great.
While I do think my wife and I have the kind of relationship where we could have made an EA/non-EA pairing work, I think we both get a lot out of having a partner with such close value alignment.
How did this unusual lifestyle choice affect the way you present yourself to others? Opinion conformity is a common impression management technique, and do-gooder derogation is a well documented phenomenon. Do you think earning-to-give affected your career or relationships, compared to the earning-to-spend hypothetical?
Overall, I don’t think it has hurt me, and it’s helped me in a few ways.
Work:
When I was working in tech (mostly Google) as far as I could tell people either didn’t care (there are a lot of eccentric engineers) or found it inspiring. It also made it easier for me to negotiate hard for more compensation both psychologically and without risking my relationship with my management chain: I don’t think I would have been able to say with a straight face “I just don’t think $400k is an appropriate total compensation” if it had just been for myself, but I could do “while this is far more than what I need to live on, you know I work this job so I can donate and I think $400k is below market”.
Optimizing for income got me to switch to Google, avoiding my natural preferences for satisficing, in a way that ended up being way better for my career.
When I did decide to switch into direct work I think people took me more seriously because I had a track record of putting my beliefs into practice through donating.
Personal:
I don’t think this has affected my relationship with non-EA friends and family. Both are, as with tech, groups that are very tolerant of weirdness. I do think some of this is being lucky with my particular friends and family: making a lot of money and then donating instead of sharing is something that I’ve heard from other EAs as causing a lot of tension, and even doing direct work at well below your maximum earning capacity can have the same issues. I’m just very lucky how my extended family has a good culture of boundaries while staying unusually close for Americans.
I’ve met a lot of really interesting people through EA, and have a lot of great conversations. A non-EA me would probably have other friends, but probably drawing more from the contra dance and traditional music communities and I think the variety is great.
While I do think my wife and I have the kind of relationship where we could have made an EA/non-EA pairing work, I think we both get a lot out of having a partner with such close value alignment.