Hi Gary. I hear your pain, and I know full well that you’re not alone in feeling this way.
First, I want to echo aarongertler’s point and ask you to consider reaching out to the suicide prevention lifeline. I volunteered for many years with one of its affiliates, and had some of the most meaningful and rewarding conversations in my life with some of the callers who rang my phone. I can’t promise that you’ll find a lot of people who will be familiar there with the principles of EA (though you may), but you will without a doubt find many caring and empathetic people, who will be eager to hear you out.
I also have to disagree with you: depressed You will not do the most good. Depression is a deadly but curable disease. I think I understand your reasoning for thinking that your suicide could be a net positive, but the argument is fallacious: the alternatives aren’t not living or living an entirely selfish life. The output of a long, productive life in which you work a little bit more than the average person to effect positive change in this world, either by donating a decent portion of your income or by working for good or both, can easily dwarf any one-time sum you’re considering, especially if that one-time sum is forthcoming anyway. You can be scrupulous about that sum, invest it wisely (and remember real estate is also an investment, one that you can typically have a fairly good likelihood of being able to liquidate and donate when it’s no longer useful to you), live a more frugal life, etc, but I’d strongly encourage you to not do so at the expense of your mental health. Non-depressed You can be a force of good for the world, for your direct community, and for your family. And your empathy can do a lot to support and grow the EA community as well. Remember that the problems we’re trying to solve will be here in the medium-term regardless of how much money you donate, so the work to do good is much more of a long marathon than a sprint to give the most away. So our pace has to be sustainable, we have to be kind to ourselves, we have to develop strategies that allow us to grow the number of people who can participate in this project of recognizing that even a small portion of the privilege we have can be tremendously helpful to many others. We need people who care as much as you do in this world. Your depression risks depriving the world of one such person, not to mention bring enormous pain and trauma to those who love you.
I’ll close by saying that I think the “most good” tagline can sometimes be very harmful, if read in the wrong light. I think of it as an encouragement for us to do the “most good” with the money that we donate or with the work we do, if the work we do is oriented in that direction. But probably a more reasonable heuristic is “do more good”. How can we do more good today that you were doing yesterday? And how can we do more good over the long run? Research on how to do the “most good” with a given skill or dollar amount is certainly hugely helpful in finding that direction, and that’s where a lot of the EA work comes in. But I don’t think you should take it as a commandment to do the absolute most good you could possibly do. All of us will fail at that, even those of us who are most committed and prepared to do so. I suspect you’re already aware of many of the ways in which you can take steps towards doing more good. I’m going to guess you have already taken some of them. And I’ll argue that non-depressed You will be in a better position to take more of those steps in the long-run.
Bottom-line: take care of yourself. You matter, even if you (like all of us) can always do better.
Hi Gary. I hear your pain, and I know full well that you’re not alone in feeling this way.
First, I want to echo aarongertler’s point and ask you to consider reaching out to the suicide prevention lifeline. I volunteered for many years with one of its affiliates, and had some of the most meaningful and rewarding conversations in my life with some of the callers who rang my phone. I can’t promise that you’ll find a lot of people who will be familiar there with the principles of EA (though you may), but you will without a doubt find many caring and empathetic people, who will be eager to hear you out.
I also have to disagree with you: depressed You will not do the most good. Depression is a deadly but curable disease. I think I understand your reasoning for thinking that your suicide could be a net positive, but the argument is fallacious: the alternatives aren’t not living or living an entirely selfish life. The output of a long, productive life in which you work a little bit more than the average person to effect positive change in this world, either by donating a decent portion of your income or by working for good or both, can easily dwarf any one-time sum you’re considering, especially if that one-time sum is forthcoming anyway. You can be scrupulous about that sum, invest it wisely (and remember real estate is also an investment, one that you can typically have a fairly good likelihood of being able to liquidate and donate when it’s no longer useful to you), live a more frugal life, etc, but I’d strongly encourage you to not do so at the expense of your mental health. Non-depressed You can be a force of good for the world, for your direct community, and for your family. And your empathy can do a lot to support and grow the EA community as well. Remember that the problems we’re trying to solve will be here in the medium-term regardless of how much money you donate, so the work to do good is much more of a long marathon than a sprint to give the most away. So our pace has to be sustainable, we have to be kind to ourselves, we have to develop strategies that allow us to grow the number of people who can participate in this project of recognizing that even a small portion of the privilege we have can be tremendously helpful to many others. We need people who care as much as you do in this world. Your depression risks depriving the world of one such person, not to mention bring enormous pain and trauma to those who love you.
I’ll close by saying that I think the “most good” tagline can sometimes be very harmful, if read in the wrong light. I think of it as an encouragement for us to do the “most good” with the money that we donate or with the work we do, if the work we do is oriented in that direction. But probably a more reasonable heuristic is “do more good”. How can we do more good today that you were doing yesterday? And how can we do more good over the long run? Research on how to do the “most good” with a given skill or dollar amount is certainly hugely helpful in finding that direction, and that’s where a lot of the EA work comes in. But I don’t think you should take it as a commandment to do the absolute most good you could possibly do. All of us will fail at that, even those of us who are most committed and prepared to do so. I suspect you’re already aware of many of the ways in which you can take steps towards doing more good. I’m going to guess you have already taken some of them. And I’ll argue that non-depressed You will be in a better position to take more of those steps in the long-run.
Bottom-line: take care of yourself. You matter, even if you (like all of us) can always do better.