Hi Teo! I know your comment was from a few years ago, but I was so excited to see someone else in EA talk about self-compassion. Self-compassion is one of the main things that lets me be passionate about EA and have a maximalist moral mindset without spiraling into guilt, and I think it should be much more well-known in the community. I don’t know if you ever ended up writing more about this, but if you did, I hope you’d consider publishing it—I think that could help a lot of people!
Hi Ann, thanks for the reply! I agree that self-compassion can be an important piece of the puzzle for many people with an EA outlook.
I am definitely still working on reframing EA-related ideas and motivations so that the default language would not so easily lead to ‘EA guilt’ and some other problems. Lately I’ve been focusing on more general alternatives to ‘compassion’, because people often have different (and strong) preexisting notions of what compassion means, and so I’m not sure if compassion will serve as the kind of integrative ‘bridge concept’ that I’m looking for to help solve many (e.g. terminological) problems simultaneously.
So unfortunately I don’t have much (quickly publishable) stuff on compassion specifically, having been rotating abstract alternatives like ‘dissonance minimalism’ or ‘complex harmonization’. But who knows, maybe I’ll end up relating things via compassion again, at some point!
I’m not up-to-date on what the existing EA-memesphere writings on (self-)compassion are, but I love the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares (http://mindingourway.com/guilt), often mentioned on LW/EA. It has also been narrated as a podcast by Gianluca Truda. I believe it is a good recommendation for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed by the ambitions of EA.
Hi Teo! I know your comment was from a few years ago, but I was so excited to see someone else in EA talk about self-compassion. Self-compassion is one of the main things that lets me be passionate about EA and have a maximalist moral mindset without spiraling into guilt, and I think it should be much more well-known in the community. I don’t know if you ever ended up writing more about this, but if you did, I hope you’d consider publishing it—I think that could help a lot of people!
Hi Ann, thanks for the reply! I agree that self-compassion can be an important piece of the puzzle for many people with an EA outlook.
I am definitely still working on reframing EA-related ideas and motivations so that the default language would not so easily lead to ‘EA guilt’ and some other problems. Lately I’ve been focusing on more general alternatives to ‘compassion’, because people often have different (and strong) preexisting notions of what compassion means, and so I’m not sure if compassion will serve as the kind of integrative ‘bridge concept’ that I’m looking for to help solve many (e.g. terminological) problems simultaneously.
So unfortunately I don’t have much (quickly publishable) stuff on compassion specifically, having been rotating abstract alternatives like ‘dissonance minimalism’ or ‘complex harmonization’. But who knows, maybe I’ll end up relating things via compassion again, at some point!
I’m not up-to-date on what the existing EA-memesphere writings on (self-)compassion are, but I love the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares (http://mindingourway.com/guilt), often mentioned on LW/EA. It has also been narrated as a podcast by Gianluca Truda. I believe it is a good recommendation for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed by the ambitions of EA.