Moving to a hub, getting older, and heading home
Intro and summary
“How many chickens spared from cages is worth not being with my parents as they get older?!”—Me, exasperated (September 18, 2021)
This post is about something I haven’t seen discussed on the EA forum but I often talk about with my friends in their mid 30s. It’s about something I wish I’d understood better ten years ago: if you are ~25 and debating whether to move to an EA Hub, you are probably underestimating how much the calculus will change when you’re ~35, largely related to having kids and aging parents. Since this is underappreciated, moving to an EA Hub, and building a life there, can lead to tougher decisions later that can sneak up on you.
If you’re living in an EA hub, or thinking about moving, this post explores reasons you might want to head home as you get older, different ways to get the most out of a hub, why this might or might not apply to you, and how to think about this more.
Mandatory EA forum caveat: literally everything I say in this post only applies to some of the people some of the time. I’ll still hedge a bit throughout because I can’t help myself but keep this caveat in mind. Also, I didn’t do any research on the literature on any of this; it’s all anecdata and vibes. Feel free to add literature if you have any in the comments.
A big thanks to Emily Grundy, Michelle Hutchinson, Patrick Gruban, and Jian Xin Lim for making this post much better. Claude on the other hand was no help. I asked it to turn my bullet points into a post and it made up fake stories and conversations.
Why move to an EA Hub in the first place?
For many people in the effective altruism ecosystem, there is a big pull to move to an EA hub, like London, Oxford, the Bay Area, or DC. It’s often recommended as an obvious step for someone looking to have a big impact (e.g. see this post).
For me, I worked out of the EA coworking space in Oxford for 6 months, and then lived in London for 4 years. I met lots of smart, ambitious, evidence-based nerds. After a while, many of my close friends and extended social scene were EAs. I knew dozens of new people I could learn from, ask for advice, and grow with. For example, at one point I had to conduct interviews with six donor advisor organisations. I had a good friend at each one to ask. When it came time to look for a new job, I asked friends for advice, insights into different organisations, etc.
All things considered, I think moving to an EA Hub is a great choice for many people. And yet…
How things change as you get older
If you’re ~25 and debating whether to move to an EA Hub, you’re probably underestimating how much the calculus will change when you reach ~35.
This list comes from reflecting on my own shifting values in my early 30s, speaking to people around me, and seeing my sisters raise their kids, one living 10 minutes from my parents, and another a 3 hour flight from them.
Here are some ways your utility function might shift over time towards heading home:
Your parents can be a monumental help if you have kids. If you haven’t seen up close what it is like raising a baby, and the role that grandparents often play, it’s huge. It can mean someone looking after a baby one afternoon a week, dropping off groceries, stepping up when people are ill, having nights to yourself as the kids get older, and a million other things big and small.
There’s something powerful about being near family when there are kids on the scene. People describe having kids as transformative; the you that comes out the other side has a different utility function to the you that chooses to have kids. New priorities can emerge: you might really value your kids having strong and meaningful relationships with their aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Although not quite the same, I cherish playing every other week with my nieces and nephews, and the relationships I have with them. There were moments living in the UK and thinking I might never come home, or saying goodbye to my nephew as I went off to the airport again, that were heartbreaking.
Parents get older, and they will need support. When my buba (grandmother) got older, some of the things my mum and auntie did for my buba included driving her to doctor appointment, paying bills, bringing over groceries when she could no longer drive, visiting her when she moved to a nursing home, bringing my nieces and nephew to the nursing home, and being there for her trips to the hospital. London is a 24-hour flight to Melbourne and the reality of living in London as my parents need support and company was tough to think about.
Each year in an EA Hub makes moving home harder. Each year:
My friendships and community in London got stronger.
My professional network and connections got stronger.
My friendships in Melbourne got further away, and harder to re-establish.
The chances of meeting ‘the one’ overseas got stronger, and then things get really hard as you get to decide between the Hub, your home, theirs, or breaking up…
Why YOU might be more likely to feel the pull to head home
I’m making claims about a version of you that doesn’t yet exist, and implying you should trust me. And yet I know lots of people living in EA Hubs and it’s clearly the right decision for them. Here are some reasons why you might be more likely to feel the pull to head home:
You plan to/end up having kids.
You expect your parents to be active and involved grandparents.
Your family is all in one place you can return to.
You’re close with your family.
The tradeoff is less stark because home is a place with some of the benefits of an EA Hub (e.g. a big city with career opportunities, an EA community of some size, etc.)
You find living in an EA Hub difficult for other reasons. See this great post on some of the challenges of moving to an EA Hub.
It’s hard to secure work in an EA Hub due to your passport (e.g. this post)
A strong community/friendships back home.
The impact you have with your career is a smaller priority relative to other things you value like being near family.
How did I decide? How should you decide?
I spent 2018-2021 avoiding the question of whether to move home or not. How many chickens spared from cages (in expectation) was worth my kids having an in-person relationship with my parents? It was too difficult and scary a question to stare at. It overwhelmed me. So, I kicked the can down the road. Inertia kept me in London.
In 2022, I decided this had gone on for too long. I set the intention that year to decide whether to stay or head home. I was inspired by Ben Kuhn’s great post, appropriately called ‘Staring into the abyss as a core life skill’. It talks about the virtues of staring into the abyss which means “thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner.”
For me, staring at the abyss was hard to do solo. So I worked with a life coach. It was with this life coach that I realised how profound a loss it would be for me to live away from my family. At the same time I looked at what I could do for work, and got a job offer as Head of Community at EA Australia. After lots of conversations with friends, I decided to accept the role and head home.
So what’s my advice here? It’s to actively make the decision of where to live. Confront it head on. If heading home is the right decision for you, it is far easier at 28 and single than 42 and married with two kids. I guess this post falls into a similar category as ‘consider freezing your eggs’; life advice that older people tell younger people, trying to help people see what’s coming next a little bit faster, hoping it will help.
Consolation prize—moving to a Hub isn’t all or nothing
One consolation prize is that, the way I see it, there’s a spectrum between staying at home and living in a hub. Many of the benefits of living in a hub accrue from living there for a stint.
Some options along the spectrum in order of duration:
A short trip/EA conference
A 6-8 week internship/fellowship
Working for a few years
Moving permanently
I think all of the above options help you build your network. The longer you stay in a hub, the bigger and stronger your network. I’d expect the marginal benefit would drop quickly after the first 6-12 months as you make fewer connections and the trust is high enough to work remotely. However, in my experience, the watercooler benefits of living in a hub, only really last while you’re in said hub, and mostly fade when you leave.
Conclusion
I’m writing this blog post from my home office in Melbourne. I now spend half my time at EA Australia, and half at Farmed Animal Funders, a US based nonprofit where I wake up for 7am team meetings and miss out on other meetings. There are things I love about both jobs, and I feel grateful I get to do work I find important and meaningful from Melbourne. Being home, I love being around my nieces and nephews as they grow up. I missed Australian culture, and I feel at home back in Melbourne.
Still, the downsides of coming home are real. For me they’ve been saying goodbye to a tight knit community of likeminded friends who helped me grow in many ways, missing out on the network of London, and that it’s harder to do impactful work from Australia. More of the big opportunities are in the US and Europe. Even those that are remote usually require a US/EU friendly timezone.
I wrote this post with the hope of shedding light on an underdiscussed and underappreciated problem. Since I do think this post is underdiscussed, I’d love you to share your experiences in the comments, helping people see the spread of answers to this challenge.
Thanks for writing this. It feels like the implicit messaging, ideas, and infrastructure of the EA community have historically been targeted towards people in their 20s (i.e., people who can focus primarily on maximizing their impact). A lot of the EA writing (and EAs) I first encountered pushed for a level of commitment to EA that made more sense for people who had few competing obligations (like kids or aging parents). This resonated with me a decade ago—it made EA feel like an urgent mission—but today feels more unrealistic, and sometimes even alienating.
Given that the average age of the EA community is increasing, I wonder if it’d be good to rethink this messaging/set of ideas/infrastructure; to create a gentler, less hardheaded EA—one that takes more seriously the non-EA commitments we take on as we age, and provides us with a framework for reconciling them with our commitment to EA. (I get the sense that some orgs—like OP, which seems to employ older EAs on average—do a great job of this through, e.g., their generous parental leave policies, but I’d like to see the implicit philosophy connoted by these policies become part of EA’s explicit belief system and messaging to a greater extent.)
I do think the messaging is a little gentler than it used to be, such as the 80k content and a few forum posts emphasising that there are a lot of reasons to make life choices besides impact, and that that is ok. This is hard in general with written content aimed at a broad audience because some people probably need to hear the message to sacrifice a little more, and some a little less.
I summarised Elliot’s post in my mind as a form of reflecting on how a decision affects you over differing time horizons, as well as the second-order consequences of a decision. I would add to his bullet list of reasons to return home if you plan on having kids: going home for kids retains more of your discretionary time.
Having kids is a transformative experience and as such by its very nature you can’t fully predict how you’ll come out the other side of it. Elliot’s post does a good job of stepping that out for us, and lilly’s comments ask some valuable questions about messaging: appealing to older folks that are not EA-aware could be better reached. I resonate with both paragraphs of lilly’s comment. At the time of my reply I can see three detractors from lilly’s comments—I’d like to have read their responses here why they disagreed.
This one hit close to home (pun not intended).
I’ve been thinking about this choice for a while now. There’s the obvious network and work benefits in living in an EA Hub yet in my experience there’s also the benefit of a slower pace leading to more time to think and reflect and develop my own writing and opinions on things which is easier to get when not in a hub.
Yet in AI safety (where I work) all of the stuff is happening in the Bay and London and mostly the Bay. For the last 3 years people have constantly been telling me “Come to the Bay, bro. It will be worth it, everything is happening here”. So there’s a lot of FOMO and also literal missing out involved in this decision.
I had been thinking that I would delay this decision until later but like 6 of your 9 criteria are fulfilled for me and I find that it feels more value aligned and that it might also be smart to plan with this in mind from an earlier age. (I’m 23 from Sweden)
So I’m leaning on Sweden as a home base and to visit the other places for conferences and work, maybe some longer work stances but generally living in Sweden and having it as a base.
It feels a bit drastic (and we’ll see if this holds) but it kind of feels like you helped me resolve one of my larger questions in life so thanks? :D
Wow that’s gotta be one of the fastest forum post to plan changes on record. I’m glad to hear this resolved what sounds like a big and tough question in your life. As I mentioned in the post, I do think stints in hubs can be a great experience.
This couldn’t be more salient for my partner and me, literally trying to decide between staying indefinitely in London and returning to Australia, with kids and aging parents being key considerations. We’ve been staring the abyss dead in the eye and it’s not backing down! :S
Ah man I feel you. To be honest I’ve been avoiding the abyss recently with some recent career vs family dilemmas. Lemme know if you want to have a chat sometime.
My husband and I realized that we both likely would have moved to the Bay for work if we weren’t married to each other and putting down roots in his home city. There’s a lot of benefit we’ve had from living near his family, and near the folk dance community through which we met—Boston is a hub of that.
We’re lucky that one of us was from a city that has turned out to be a pretty good location for EA involvement, and a good location for in-person work in biosecurity. I have a lot of empathy for people who didn’t happen to have that as a starting point.
Thank you for this—as someone who lives with my wife and kids on the other side of the world from the “optimal” place to live, around the corner from the grandparents and cousins, I very much appreciate people raising the flag for this being an acceptable choice in the community.
That said, I think there’s another aspect that is worth flagging; the implicit expectation that the commitment for EA is utilitarian, and so you won’t have your own priorities other than the minimum needed to keep yourself happy and motivated, or if not, at least the (mistaken) interpretation of “giving 10%” where it means you are supposed to do at least 10% as much good as you can possibly do. I have said repeatedly in the past that this is unhealthy as a community norm, and we should normalize people prioritizing other things, alongside their commitment to EA. (And it’s very clear to me that the community has not always done this well in the past!)
Hi David, if I’ve understood you correctly, I agree that a reason to return home as for other priorities that have nothing to do with impact. I personally did not return home for the extra happiness or motivation required to stay productive, but because I valued these other things intrinsically, which Julia articulates better here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zu28unKfTHoxRWpGn/you-have-more-than-one-goal-and-that-s-fine
Really well put Elliot, and great to hear someone’s else’s thoughts on this.
I wonder, do you wish you had thought about this sooner, and potentially have moved back sooner, or do you think your mid 30s is a good time to take action on it?
This is a good question. I’m honestly not sure what I would have done differently overall. My guess is I would have gone back a little sooner, and invested a little more in maintaining friendships in Melbourne while away.
Thinking about this sooner also might have changed how I approached dating while in London if I would have known in advance I was always heading home.
Thanks for the wonderful insight. I’m 38 and have lived with my wife for the last 12 years in the EA hub of Northern Uganda. Although yes it’s the perfect place to deeply understand and work on solving tricky development issues (come live with us!), I’ll admit there are a few reasons why people might not want to move here permanently, including most you listed ;).
Although our experience has been that if you live somewhere long enough, the place can become home and then you get some of the best of both worlds....
Muchos hugs for this one. I’m selfishly glad you were in London long enough for us to meet, fwiw :)
I feel like this is a specific case of a general attitude in EA that we want to lock in our future selves to some path in case our values change. The more I think about this the worse it feels to me, since
a) your future values might in fact be better than your current ones, or if you completely reject any betterness relation between values then it doesn’t matter either way
b) your future self is a separate person. If we imagine the argument targeting any other person, it’s horrible—it states that should lock them into some state that ensures they’re forced to serve your (current) interests
I hope over time you reshift your networks to your real home <3
Surely this proves too much? Any decision with long-term consequences is going to bind your future self. Having kids forces your future self onto a specific path (parenthood) just as much as relocating to an EA hub does.
I guess in general any decision binds all future people in your lightcone to some counterfactual set of consequences. But it still seems practically useful in interpersonal interactions to distinction a) between those that deliberately restrict their action set/those that just provide them in expectation with a different access set of ~the same size, and b) between those motivated by indifference/those motivated specifically by an authoritarian desire to make their values more consistently with ours.
Seems like a reasonable distinction—but also not sure how many people move to an EA hub expressly because it binds their future self to do EA work/be in said hub long-term?
Well, between relocating and having kids, one of those decisions is far more irreversible so should be more carefully made. It’s one of those rare one-way doors, and you won’t pass through many of those over your life.
Great post, thank you so much for putting it out!
Adding as another option: Splitting your time between an EA hub and your home base. This obviously depends a lot on your comfort with travel, distances involved and costs but if you can make it work it can be great. This can look like working during the week in the EA hub and spending the weekend at home, when most social stuff is happening anyway. Or traveling for a week every month or so to co-work with people can also give you lots of benefits if you are strategic about it.
For me moving completely to an EA hub was never really an option because of various social ties, so I am grateful to have found people that showed flexibility around working arrangements.
Thank you for writing this up. I resonate with this a lot. I live in Serbia, work in AIS, and the pull to the Bay is incredibly high. No good solution, coming there 2-3x per year helps somewhat, but also just increases the feel of missing out—it seems as if I get months worth of “unstuck” every time I visit.
At the same time, one thing you did not mention, but that I think is underappreciated, is that family and not living in a hub are great for not burning out. I think being in a hub, being around EAs all the time, having your livelihood tied to EA—all of it makes it hard to stop working due to fear of losing literally everything in your life right now if you “fail”.
For sure. I think Chana does a good job of talking about some of the downsides of living in a hub similar to what you mention: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZRZHJ3qSitXQ6NGez/about-going-to-a-hub-1