If you only observe EA culture from online interactions, you get the impression that EAs think about effective altruism much more regularly than they actually do. This will extend to activities like spend lots of time “doing EA-adjacent things”, including the forum, EA social media, casual reading, having EA conversations, etc. Many people in that reference class include people volunteering their time, or people who find thinking about EA relaxing compared to their stressful day jobs.
I agree.
However, if we’re referring to actual amounts/hours of work done on core EA topics in their day job, EA org employees who are less active online will put in more hours towards their jobs compared to EA org employees who are more active online.
I don’t have an opinion about this either way. My argument was about people who were org employees vs. interested in doing EA work but not actually employees of EA orgs (the latter being the group somewhat more likely to talk online about feeling bad in the ways Sasha described).
By comparison, when EA feels like the biggest thing in your life and there’s no clear “part of it” for which you are responsible, it’s easier to feel like you should be doing everything, and harder to heed the messages about work/life balance...
“No clear part of it” = “no one job that belongs to you, so you may feel vaguely like you should be contributing to everything you see, or doing everything possible to figure out a career path until you find one”.
“Requires” was imprecise language on my part — I just meant “they are actually working 45 hours, rather than just completing <45 hours of work in what looks like 45 hours.” Your response satisfies me w/r/t people seeming to have more than a 45-hour workweek of “actual/required work”.
I agree.
I don’t have an opinion about this either way. My argument was about people who were org employees vs. interested in doing EA work but not actually employees of EA orgs (the latter being the group somewhat more likely to talk online about feeling bad in the ways Sasha described).
“No clear part of it” = “no one job that belongs to you, so you may feel vaguely like you should be contributing to everything you see, or doing everything possible to figure out a career path until you find one”.
“Requires” was imprecise language on my part — I just meant “they are actually working 45 hours, rather than just completing <45 hours of work in what looks like 45 hours.” Your response satisfies me w/r/t people seeming to have more than a 45-hour workweek of “actual/required work”.