More specifically: If you are not clearly happy with your life, you should be able to at least consider the hypothesis of quitting your job. By "considering the hypothesis" I mean being able to think about it for more than five seconds without the feeling that the conclusion is already fixed and or without a feeling of dread, aversion, "I can't", "no way" etc. It might in fact be that all facts speak against quitting but it's important to be able to look reality in the face.

I currently have the weakly held hypothesis that people don't quit their job (early) enough, at least when they work at an org for impact reasons and when they are not clearly happy with their life. (I would write unhappy but when I was clearly unhappy for months-years, I would have protested and said I'm not unhappy.)

Epistemic status: Speculation/Intuition; hastily written

Meta on anonymity: Disgruntledly decided to publish anonymously. I think there's a lot of value to having EA forum posts, including this type, published under one's clear name and am open towards bids to move this to my main account. Obviously don't just de-anonymise me.

Reasons I have this intuition:

I think this because of personal experience, anecdotes, reading this 80,000 Hours article, and theoretical argument/intuition. I haven't polled people or looked into the literature myself though.

Some theoretical arguments:

I have the same intuition about break-ups and the cases seem similar,
There are many reasons people might find quitting scary (financial security, uncertainty about the future, social discomfort and feelings of loyalty, you might have to admit to yourself that you've made mistakes or wasted your time in the past, there was a reason you took the job in the first place and it's hard to admit that something isn't working when it initially looked promising), so it's hard to think about,
I have the intuition that people in EA tend to not value their own welfare enough (even just instrumentally),
It's awkward to tell others that you think they should quit their job,
Status quo bias.
I was extremely surprised by the questions in this burn-out questionnaire (first link on google) and feel like many of my friends would score relatively high on them. I might write a post titled something "All my friends are burning out and they don't know it" in the future.
We see the upside of continuing our job very clearly but it's hard

...

Qwerty

Posts 1

Posts
1