I find working on longtermist causes to be – emotionally speaking – hard: There are so many terrible problems in the world right now. How can we turn away from the suffering happening all around us in order to prioritise something as abstract as helping make the long-run future go well?
A lot of people who aim to put longtermist ideas into practice seem to struggle with this, including many of the people I’ve worked with over the years. And I myself am no exception – the pull of suffering happening now is hard to escape. For this reason, I wanted to share a few thoughts on how I approach this challenge, and how I maintain the motivation to work on speculative interventions despite finding that difficult in many ways.
This issue is one aspect of a broader issue in EA: figuring out how to motivate ourselves to do important work even when it doesn’t feel emotionally compelling. It’s useful to have a clear understanding of our emotions in order to distinguish between feelings and beliefs we endorse and those that we wouldn’t – on reflection – want to act on.
Yeah, I liked that post and do think it’s relevant.
There are also a whole bunch of other posts with the Motivation tag, some of which could perhaps be of interest to readers of this post. (I’ve now applied that tag to this post as well.)
The article “Why I find longtermism hard, and what keeps me motivated” by Michelle Hutchinson seems related:
Yeah, I liked that post and do think it’s relevant.
There are also a whole bunch of other posts with the Motivation tag, some of which could perhaps be of interest to readers of this post. (I’ve now applied that tag to this post as well.)