I love EAs but sometimes I think I actually liked my life better when EA was something I did online when I was feeling ambitious. Then when interacting offline, I could relax more.
I live in an EA hub now. I loved it at first but now I’m kind of tired of it, like I can never relax.
If I wanted to try out living somewhere else sunny, pleasant, and with no EA group, do any obvious places come to mind?
I’m considering Central and South America, Asia, and the Mediterranean.
The first guess that comes to mind (might be overindexing on availability bias) is picking one of the poorer Caribbean island countries. There are EAs in the Carribean, but they tend to congregate in the more developed islands with better infrastructure.
My second guess is deeply conservative/religious places, like rural places in the US Bible Belt, or maybe smaller cities in Iran.
Unfortunately both may have issues with being e a culturally good fit.
More broadly unfortunately your task here is nontrivial: you’re trying to use community building infrastructure to anti-congregate, which is a hard thing to do!
The Bible Belt generally has really unpleasant weather in the summer, FYI, unless you’re used to hot & humid climates. Plus the winters can still be pretty cold. I think OP will have better luck living somewhere sort of resort-y but not one of the major tourist hubs. Perhaps someplace like Belize or Peru, or one of the lesser-known Greek islands. In the US, a smaller Californian city like San Luis Obispo or a lesser-known East Coast beach town like St. Augustine, FL might work.
Have you just tried not hanging out with EAs so much where you are? Most EA hubs are big cities, there are lots of other people!
This is true. I appreciate you taking a minute to make a supportive comment!
I got downvoted but I’m not hating on the community at all.
Even more than my previous IRL communities, EAs are consistently kind, interesting, share my values, and offer events that I think are likely to do some actual good. I am drawn to the real life EA community like moth to flame whenever there is one available. But it’s also not sustainable for me to be so involved in EA. That’s not the community’s fault. It’s a quirk of my own psychology.
I’d like to live somewhere sunny where IRL EA hangouts is not an option so I’m incentivized to make other connections.
If you like the location you’re currently in, it seems pretty worth it to try to hang out with other people in your current community first. Join a sports team or games club or something. If you’re worried about incentives, then ask a friend for accountability. Say you’ll pay them $20 if you don’t actually go to the event and ask them to follow up on it.
I’m a bit worried you’re underestimating how difficult it would be to move to an entirely different continent on your own. Life as an expat can be expensive and alienating.
Fortunately this is an easily reversible change, assuming OP is financially well-off (which appears to be the case given their casual willingness to move continents to begin with).
It’s slightly less reversible socially. I find my core social connections in a city have fallen to one side by about two years after I’ve moved somewhere else, and take several months of effort to pick up again.
Of course, that might suggest a new solution: move for a year or two, then come back to your city and just don’t talk to the EAs!
No, this is a fair point. I’m well off compared to many people (high savings), but I don’t have a high salary. I’m considering cheap places to live.
It does seem reversible though, and might be worth a shot.
I am worried about alienation but I feel alienated where I currently am too so a new scene might not be much different.
That’s true, good point. Depending on what they’re looking for, I can actually see myself encouraging more people to try this out.
I’m curious what are the things that would lead to you encouraging someone in this direction?
I think ~99.9% of cities don’t have in-person EA hangouts.
Maybe you can just find the best cities for you and only later filter out the few ones with an EA group?
You can also check https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/community for places to avoid
This isn’t my experience in the US anymore! Most major cities have an EA meetup or it feels inevitable to me that they soon will. EA is still small overall, but increasingly ubiquitous. It’s a credit to the success of movement growth. It’s also a bit overwhelming for me. See comment below; even Tulsa is likely to have an EA group soon!
The incentive to make other connections is already there: you can tell it would make you happier. It’s a question of coming up with a good plan and then executing it.
Some possible ways to make connections in your city:
No EA events for the next six months. If you’ll miss your EA friends, tell them you’re interested in making friends outside the EA community, and that you’d like to hang out but you’d rather go to a bar or for a hike or something than to an EA meetup, and that they’re welcome to invite anyone who would enjoy whatever the activity is.
Start doing activities which are good for making connections: start playing football or another social sport; do some volunteering for something local; maybe get involved in politics, amateur dramatics, stand-up comedy, country dancing, etc. You don’t have to stick to any of these things long term if you don’t want to, but they’re good ways to meet people in your city—and then you can make friends with them, and make friends with their friends and so on.
Host a few dinner parties—this is fun, and will get you invited to dinner parties, house parties etc. When people have had a lovely evening, they like to reciprocate.
If you’re currently working from home and going into the office is an option, do that, try to build connection with your colleagues. If you’re working remotely, consider going to a co-working space or coffee-shop. If you’re a student, talk more to people on your course, join some clubs at your university. If you’re not currently working or studying—look for opportunities to start doing one of those things.
These are all quite generic suggestions: I don’t know enough about your situation to give more targeted advice. My instinct is that something else is causing you to feel alienated, and the presence of the EA community is not as significant a factor as you think it is. You should talk to a few people you’re close to about what’s going on, and what you might be able to do about it. There probably isn’t one drastic action that’s a silver bullet that will fix everything; you will have to put some work in.
This seems like good advice
Not sure about best places, though I have a friend who’s working on setting up an EA community in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
It might be worth pointing out that, in my experience, EAs seem quite unusual in tending to talk about EA almost all the time, e.g. at parties and other events as well as at work. I’ve often found this inspiring and energising, but I can also understand how someone could feel overwhelmed by it.