In all my research, the single most important supportive factor is healthy, positive relationships with others. The Harvard Grant Study is a great resource. I even borrowed the name for a conjecture I crafted.

I have been in the EA space for a decade and have been more actively engaged since I started professional coaching nearly 5 years ago. I admit I'm more low-pressure and responsive in my coaching business. But outside of EAGs, I've fielded maybe a dozen inquiries from the EA community interested in coaching, and I formally coached less than half of them. I have also been involved in the EA Coaches and Therapists community. There are 122 members of the #role-coaches-and-therapists channel on EA Anywhere, and 80 providers listed on MentNav.

We have the therapist and coaching capacity. And—as elucidated in this article—we have a need. But for whatever reason, the people who need the services are not proactively engaging with the professionals providing the services, so…
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

FYI, this is the canonical source of all things mental health in the EA community (Google Sheet). Please use it and make additions or changes if anything is missing or inaccurate ❤️

I am interested in hearing what your ideas are for your next zero to one venture 🍿

I don't donate to any "EA" animal welfare charities, but I 100% support vegan advocacy; about a quarter of my donations go to Vegan Outreach. 

I'm all for having the good data backing up various interventions. But stepping back, killing sentient animals unnecessarily for taste preference is morally indefensible. The easiest way to solve this problem is to reduce demand.

Sometimes the simple and obvious answers are the ones worth investing in.

I know this is likely an unpopular view, but what makes the human species so precious? Going back in evolutionary time, what if Neanderthals or T. rex or even jellyfish decided they were the pinnacle of evolution and closed the door behind them?

I'm not saying I want humans to go extinct, but it is speciesist to say we are as good as it gets and halt the process of natural selection. 

This dropdown is clipped for me in Chrome on my laptop. I can't read the full text of the options

The other major problems with trying to calculate your way to a neat and orderly table of "the best" interventions:

1. There is no single absolute objective perspective on value weights. Just listen to conversations at EAG or in the forum. There will never be full consensus on the value of a quadrillion crustaceans vs. billions of mammals, or on the value of future sentient beings vs. current ones.
2. Preferences matter. And in fact, a diversity of preferences is essential. If we only used the final ranking, in the extreme case we devote 100% of our resources to Program A. But not everyone is passionate about A, and the world probably can not handle the capacity for everyone to productively contribute to A. So we need people to have a preference for all projects, even and especially those further down the list so we have reasonable coverage of interventions across the entire problem space.

For some, spending can be a soothing activity, but being a shopaholic is harmful, like many other addictions. The hole most people are trying to fill with any addiction: a lack of strong, close, healthy relationships. You must have at least one relationship (and ideally 3–5 according to Dunbar) where you can regularly be vulnerable and talk about all your feelings. If you don’t, work on that 😇 You can start with therapy or a support group to help you build up your skills. That's what I did, since I didn't learn this in my family of origin.

Good.store showed the Profit for Good model works (100% of profits go to charity). They continued to grow, expanding from coffee, socks, and soap into tea, undies, and cleaning products. The big milestone in 2025: they opened the maternal health center in Sierra Leone.

I bring it up because I think anyone who cares about being compassionate and effective (you 😇) should consider voting for maternal health in Africa over contributing to the profits of large international conglomerates.