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by Eevee🔹
1 min read4 answers 3

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Career choiceCommunityDemandingness of moralityEffective altruism lifestyleSelf-care and wellbeing in the effective altruism community
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(Note: "DAE" is a common Reddit abbreviation for "Does anyone else".)

I often think about dilemmas that affect my work-life balance, like working for 32 hours a week instead of the standard 40, or taking a mini-retirement earlier in life. On the one hand, I am often reluctant to intentionally allocate less of my time to work, because the enormous good I can do with (the earnings from) each hour of work outweighs the personal benefit I get from using that time for my own enjoyment (except to the extent that not working too hard prevents burnout). On the other hand, I think there is virtue in "being the change one would like to see,"[1] i.e. one where most people have more leisure time but every hour of work is more productive. How do other members of the EA movement navigate these dilemmas?

  1. ^

    A phrase not actually said by Mahatma Gandhi, apparently.

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Imma🔸

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Yes, but at a different margin.

I live in a culture where working part-time (even among people who are healthy and are not parents, and have comfortable office jobs) is quite common. I sometimes feel that I need to justify myself that I choose to work full time. People talk about their vacations and hobbies all the time. That can trigger FOMO, but I do a lot of fun things myself too. My bar for unpaid leave is high (twice in my career a month in between jobs to find a new place and move).

Reducing my work hours from 40 to 32 would increase my happiness slightly but reduce my donation budget by a lot. I DO feel obliged to maintain my ability to work 40 hours. It is sustainable for me. Sometimes I struggle to work 40 hours and I feel bad about myself. As long as this recovers quickly, it's fine.

I DO NOT feel obligated to work more than 40 hours on my day job. Why:

  • cultural reasons
  • overworking is discouraged by my colleagues
  • longer presence at work does not make pay rises and promotions more likely
  • I tried and failed: experienced productivity loss and other issues when I worked more.

Note: for me "being the change I want to see" is actually working 40 hours rather than 32, given the circumstances I am in. YMMV.

Karthik Tadepalli

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I solve this problem by prioritizing my own needs over doing good. This is not necessarily appealing to the scrupulous people who face this dilemma.

huw

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During my last burnout, I realised that trying to push my working hours to the breaking point was making me substantially less happy (because of the pressure of that question—'could I be working right now?'), and substantially less productive (because without time to breathe, I was too focused on the wrong tasks). Cutting myself slack has really, genuinely improved the volume (quantity × quality) of value I produce. I don't think you need to accept a cop-out answer like 'just be happy', I believe that the conventional wisdom on knowledge and creative work is culturally over-moralised around 'hard work' (and particularly working hours in an American context), and isn't optimal for productivity. Just takes some time to shake it out of your system.

I can really recommend Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (or his Waking Up course), or Rework by Jason Fried & DHH for more pointers in this direction that have helped me 😌

ludwigbald

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I think you should not only care about impact. But yes, you will achieve more professionally in 80000 hours than in 40000 hours.

I personally think it's important to enjoy your own life on the way. No one else can do it for you.

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Larks5
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It seems strange to me to call a perfectly normal work week 'neglecting leisure'. Typically when people are thinking about the argument that altruistic considerations mean they should work more than normal people they are talking about unusually long work weeks.

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Chris Leong4
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I suspect that many people in the community would be both happier and more impactful if they decided to only work four days a week and spent the fifth day doing high-impact volunteering. One nice advantage of this system is that if you're feeling particularly run down or overwhelmed, it's easier for you to take a day off that week.

My claim about both happier and more impactful might not apply to folk right at the top of the income distribution, but I expect that it would apply to most folk here.

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Jason2
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While 40 is the US norm for "standard" full-time, it can be 35, 37.5, or some other number elsewhere (and those elsewheres often have more paid time off than the US). So I wouldnt give any moral or ethical significance to that number specifically.

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