(just some bullshit intuitions I have, ymmv)
Obviously, optimizing for doing good isn’t the same thing as optimizing for personal happiness. And I think to whatever extent you can rewire your brain to value and seek out the first rather than the second, that’s good. I’ve been trying to do a lot of that especially the past couple years: training myself to get more pleasure and reward out of work, shaping my aesthetics and intuitions to be more utilitarian and more agentic.
But also, I think I probably won’t end up having much effect on the world either way, and I really should be going for the few cases where I have a lot of impact. And I suspect those scenarios just look, for lack of a better word, awesome: I’m awesome, my work is awesome, and my life is awesome. Maybe my life doesn’t look exactly like my or society’s preconceived notions of a good life, but it’s something I’m super excited about.
And like–I think there’s an extent to which talking about tradeoffs too much actually makes them real. I see this at work a lot. When someone says “what if we did X?” it feels like the correct and rational thing to do is to consider how valuable X is per unit time, rank it next to all existing projects, consider the other costs it might have beyond time and factor those in, and eventually slot it in on someone’s stack.
When the alternative is to say, “yeah, X sounds awesome, let’s just do it.”
Yeah, you’re always going to need at least some of the first thing; you can’t “just do” literally everything. But in practice it feels like a lot of the time the first thing just means not much gets done and the second one means a ton of shit getting done.
So anyway, I get that feeling a bit when listening to both sides of these debates. Whether it’s “people should make sacrifices” or “people shouldn’t make sacrifices,” my instinct is that maybe we shouldn’t give the sacrifices the benefit of believing in them. Maybe we should try harder to believe that we can do all the things, and then do them.