This post resonated a lot with me. I was actually thinking of the term ‘disillusionment’ to describe my own life a few days before reading this.
One cautionary tale I’d offer to readers is don’t automatically assume your disillusionment is because of EA and consider the possibility that your disillusionment is a personal problem. Helen suggested leaning into feelings of doubt or assuming the movement is making mistakes. That is good if EA is the main cause, but potentially harmful if the person gets disillusioned in general.
I’m a case study for this. For the past decade, I’ve been attracted to demanding circles. First it was social justice groups and their infinitely long list of injustices. Then it was EA and its ongoing moral catastrophes. More recently, it’s been academic econ debates and their ever growing standards for what counts as truth.
In each instance, I found ways to become disillusioned and to blame my disillusionment on an external cause. Sometimes it was virtue signaling. Sometimes it was elitism. Sometimes it was the people. Sometimes it was whether truth was knowable. Sometimes it was another thing entirely. All my reasons felt incredibly compelling at the time, and perhaps they all had significant degrees of truth.
But at the end of day, the common denominator in my disillusionment was me. I felt all the problems in these circles very intensely, but didn’t have much appreciation for the benefits. The problems loomed 10x larger in my head than the benefits did. Instead of appreciating all the important things I got to think about, talk about, or work on, I thought about the demands and all the stress it brought. In my case, leaning into the disillusionment would only perpetuate the negative pattern of thinking I have in my head.
Granted, my case is an extreme one. I have a decade of experiences to look back on and numerous groups I felt affinities with. And I’ve had intense experiences with imposter syndrome and performance anxiety. I can confidently attribute most of these feelings to myself, reverse some of the advice Helen offered,[1] and lean away from disillusionment.
But I suspect I’m not the only one with this problem. EA seems to selects for easily disillusioned personality traits (as evidenced by our love of criticism). And I also suspect that these feelings are common for young idealistic people to go through while navigating what it means to improve the world. Not everyone should be leaning into that.
I’m practicing “maintain and/or build ties outside EA”. It requires intentional effort on my part since making + maintaining adult friends is always hard. However, it has helped me realize my disillusionment still exists outside EA. I’m partly reversing “anticipate and lean into feelings of doubt...” since I like the anticipating part, but not the leaning part. I’m reversing “assume EA is making mistakes and help find them” since I need to see more of the positive and less of the negative. I don’t have any thoughts on “defer cautiously, not wholesale” since this comes naturally to me.
Helen’s post also resonated a lot with me. But this comment even more so. Thank you, geoffrey, for reminding me that I want to lean away from disillusionment à la your footnote :-)
(A similar instance of this a few months back: I was describing these kinds of feelings to an EA-adjacent acquaintance in his forties and he said, “That doesn’t sound like a problem with EA. That sounds like growing up.” And despite being a 30-year-old woman, that comment didn’t feel at all patronising, it felt spot on.)
This post resonated a lot with me. I was actually thinking of the term ‘disillusionment’ to describe my own life a few days before reading this.
One cautionary tale I’d offer to readers is don’t automatically assume your disillusionment is because of EA and consider the possibility that your disillusionment is a personal problem. Helen suggested leaning into feelings of doubt or assuming the movement is making mistakes. That is good if EA is the main cause, but potentially harmful if the person gets disillusioned in general.
I’m a case study for this. For the past decade, I’ve been attracted to demanding circles. First it was social justice groups and their infinitely long list of injustices. Then it was EA and its ongoing moral catastrophes. More recently, it’s been academic econ debates and their ever growing standards for what counts as truth.
In each instance, I found ways to become disillusioned and to blame my disillusionment on an external cause. Sometimes it was virtue signaling. Sometimes it was elitism. Sometimes it was the people. Sometimes it was whether truth was knowable. Sometimes it was another thing entirely. All my reasons felt incredibly compelling at the time, and perhaps they all had significant degrees of truth.
But at the end of day, the common denominator in my disillusionment was me. I felt all the problems in these circles very intensely, but didn’t have much appreciation for the benefits. The problems loomed 10x larger in my head than the benefits did. Instead of appreciating all the important things I got to think about, talk about, or work on, I thought about the demands and all the stress it brought. In my case, leaning into the disillusionment would only perpetuate the negative pattern of thinking I have in my head.
Granted, my case is an extreme one. I have a decade of experiences to look back on and numerous groups I felt affinities with. And I’ve had intense experiences with imposter syndrome and performance anxiety. I can confidently attribute most of these feelings to myself, reverse some of the advice Helen offered,[1] and lean away from disillusionment.
But I suspect I’m not the only one with this problem. EA seems to selects for easily disillusioned personality traits (as evidenced by our love of criticism). And I also suspect that these feelings are common for young idealistic people to go through while navigating what it means to improve the world. Not everyone should be leaning into that.
I’m practicing “maintain and/or build ties outside EA”. It requires intentional effort on my part since making + maintaining adult friends is always hard. However, it has helped me realize my disillusionment still exists outside EA. I’m partly reversing “anticipate and lean into feelings of doubt...” since I like the anticipating part, but not the leaning part. I’m reversing “assume EA is making mistakes and help find them” since I need to see more of the positive and less of the negative. I don’t have any thoughts on “defer cautiously, not wholesale” since this comes naturally to me.
Helen’s post also resonated a lot with me. But this comment even more so. Thank you, geoffrey, for reminding me that I want to lean away from disillusionment à la your footnote :-)
(A similar instance of this a few months back: I was describing these kinds of feelings to an EA-adjacent acquaintance in his forties and he said, “That doesn’t sound like a problem with EA. That sounds like growing up.” And despite being a 30-year-old woman, that comment didn’t feel at all patronising, it felt spot on.)
Would be interested to hear what the problems/feelings in your case were :)