Hi, I’m Evan Price,
I built a deep interest in EA through 5 five years travelling slowly through Sub-saharan Africa and other parts of the developing world by bicycle. Questioning intently the chasm of inequality between my own life and that of the people I met every single day.
This led me to learn about and thoroughly investigate the principles and ideas of the EA movement. And while it does not have solutions to a lot of the issues the world’s poorest experience (I’m not sure there are any), I strongly align with EA’s rigorously researched ideas and actions which do focus on all of current and future humanity.
I’ve thus transitioned from 18 years as an engineer and project manager into EA operations role, and am currently volunteering at a few EA organisations while attempting to find a permanent position.
Reading this post it dawned on me that this was exactly how my experience had transpired, albeit I was completely unaware that it was happening—I saved up and left my regular developed world existence to ride a bicycle across a fair amount of the world. My experiences on the bike and the time available to think deeply (as you suggest) led me to learning about and becoming very aligned with EA. While I’m still travelling, I’m now in the phase of figuring out how best to prepare myself for future work in an EA related field, and the financial and time freedom is giving me the means to do so.
All of which is to say that from personal experience this point has proved to be incredibly influential in allowing me to transform my thinking and future plans to be aligned with EA.