Back On The Horse
December 18th, 2009
Two months ago I experienced some burnout and had to scale back my efforts at existential risk reduction. I was optimizing every single bit of my time towards that end, and for a possible variety of reasons I couldn’t sustain it. That was acceptable, as long as I knew I couldn’t do it. When it comes to saving billions of lives – as well as both our future and our past – I can’t accept applying anything other than my best effort. If that meant taking some more time for relaxation, so it was.
Even so, this went again my grain in a little. We are entering the single most pivotal time in the history of our civilization, species, and Earth, and as long as I can do something about it, it seems a little silly to sit around playing video games. In addition I’ve never been good at balancing really entertaining games and work, beyond getting homework in on time. Months ago I made a policy against playing any new video games, and I came back to decide that again; these days I’m most satisfied if I keep myself grounded in this world. In addition, any sort of role model I have would be fighting tooth and nail to protect the beauty of our present and the potential of our future. I could accept doing less if I had to, but it felt very off.
For about a month now I’ve been back at spending more and more time and effort on “saving the world”. I’m happier because of it, and I think I’ve got things figured out this time, I’m a little surprised I didn’t see it before. When I was going through that burnout, all the things I most wanted to do were social things. As I pointed out even then, I was doing fine until I got into a situation where my optimizations didn’t take me on their own into proximity with others. Now I’m back to optimizing all my time towards existential risk reduction, with the one exception of occasional social events. I think I actually had tried this earlier, but by that point I was already coming down and didn’t have the time to see it work.
What’s more, I’m now an aspiring rationalist, and despite some fair assumptions by others, I did not really consider myself one before. A few readers may not fully realize what I’m talking about, which is kind of a pity. I’d suggest reading LessWrong, but even doing that I didn’t “get it” for months. Reading some good sci-fi also helped. For about a year I had been working at being maximally productive with my actions, but only recently am I working to be maximally productive with my thoughts. This is where the very significant gains lie.
If there ever was a time for us to become heroes, it is now, and it’s satisfying for me to be more directly back on that path.
Tags: Akrasia, Existential Risk, Heroism