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.
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!