I agree with some of the key ideas of your post, such as that working more than what is sustainable would be counterproductive. I also think that this is a message that some people need to be reminded of.
However, regarding your stated goal:
“My goal in this post is to convince you that trying to spend as little time as possible on fun socializing, frivolous hobbies, or other leisure is a dangerous impulse.”
As I was reading the post, I thought that the lesson from some of the ideas and examples you give is not that you shouldn’t aim to minimize these leisure activities. But rather that you should build in some leeway in case you have overestimated the levels of work that you can sustainably work at and underestimated the levels of leisure activities that you need.
We sometimes talk about making sure you have enough “financial runway” where, once you’re over a certain threshold this enables you to take a much lower paying role than you might ordinarily take (if you weren’t motivated to maximise your impact).
Maybe there’s some comparable metaphor of something like “motivational runway” where, once you’re over a certain threshold this enables you to work much longer/harder than you might ordinarily take (if you weren’t motivated to maximise your impact).
Yeah, I think you’re right that a possible takeaway here is “try to minimize your leisure time, but leave yourself generous slack”, and I like the idea of building up a “motivational runway” that you can burn down when you need to push really hard on something.
I just still think that most people (sure, probably not Sam Bankman-Fried) are going to cause themselves needless pain by aiming for minimum leisure/fun/etc instead of prioritizing more important uses of a smaller number of impact-oriented hours.
To reverse your financial metaphor, I feel like I see a lot of people doing the equivalent of only buying beans and rice at the grocery store so they can donate more money to their local children’s hospital and I’m like… hey, if you’re interested in saving children’s lives, you might want to consider buying bednets? Also, have you looked into whether you might be able to increase your earnings, rather than focusing on not spending? I worry that “minimize leisure time”, like “minimize grocery bill”, is a goal that feels easy to optimize for while both distracting from more important goals and potentially doing some health damage.
I agree with some of the key ideas of your post, such as that working more than what is sustainable would be counterproductive. I also think that this is a message that some people need to be reminded of.
However, regarding your stated goal:
“My goal in this post is to convince you that trying to spend as little time as possible on fun socializing, frivolous hobbies, or other leisure is a dangerous impulse.”
As I was reading the post, I thought that the lesson from some of the ideas and examples you give is not that you shouldn’t aim to minimize these leisure activities. But rather that you should build in some leeway in case you have overestimated the levels of work that you can sustainably work at and underestimated the levels of leisure activities that you need.
We sometimes talk about making sure you have enough “financial runway” where, once you’re over a certain threshold this enables you to take a much lower paying role than you might ordinarily take (if you weren’t motivated to maximise your impact).
Maybe there’s some comparable metaphor of something like “motivational runway” where, once you’re over a certain threshold this enables you to work much longer/harder than you might ordinarily take (if you weren’t motivated to maximise your impact).
Yeah, I think you’re right that a possible takeaway here is “try to minimize your leisure time, but leave yourself generous slack”, and I like the idea of building up a “motivational runway” that you can burn down when you need to push really hard on something.
I just still think that most people (sure, probably not Sam Bankman-Fried) are going to cause themselves needless pain by aiming for minimum leisure/fun/etc instead of prioritizing more important uses of a smaller number of impact-oriented hours.
To reverse your financial metaphor, I feel like I see a lot of people doing the equivalent of only buying beans and rice at the grocery store so they can donate more money to their local children’s hospital and I’m like… hey, if you’re interested in saving children’s lives, you might want to consider buying bednets? Also, have you looked into whether you might be able to increase your earnings, rather than focusing on not spending? I worry that “minimize leisure time”, like “minimize grocery bill”, is a goal that feels easy to optimize for while both distracting from more important goals and potentially doing some health damage.
I like that analogy a lot!