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There was this voice inside my head that told me that since I got Something to protect, relaxing is never ok above strict minimum, the goal is paramount, and I should just work as hard as I can all the time.
This led me to breaking down and being incapable to work on my AI governance job for a week, as I just piled up too much stress.
And then, I decided to follow what motivated me in the moment, instead of coercing myself into working on what I thought was most important, and lo and behold! my total output increased, while my time spent working decreased.
I'm so angry and sad at the inadequacy of my role models, cultural norms, rationality advice, model of the good EA who does not burn out, which still led me to smash into the wall despite their best intentions. I became so estranged from my own body and perceptions, ignoring my core motivations, feeling harder and harder to work. I dug myself such deep a hole. I'm terrified at the prospect to have to rebuild my motivation myself again.
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STEM people can look at it like an engineering problem, Econ people can look at it like risk management (risk of burnout). Humanities people can think about it in terms of human genetic/trait diversity in order to find the experience that best suits the unique individual (because humanities people usually benefit the most for each marginal hour spend understanding this lens).
Succeeding at maximizing output takes some fiddling. The "of course I did it because of course I'm just that awesome, just do it" thing is a pure flex/social status grab, and it poisons random people nearby.
1Have you considered antidepressants? I recommend trying them out to see if they help. In my experience, antidepressants can have non-trivial positive effects that can be hard-to-put-into-words, except you can notice the shift in how you think and behave and relate to things, and this shift is one that you might find beneficial.
I also think that slowing down and taking care of yourself can be good -- it can help build a generalized skill of noticing the things you didn't notice before that led to the breaking point you describe.
Here's an anecdote that might be interesting to you: There's a core mental shift I made over the past few months that I haven't tried to elicit and describe to others until now, but in essence it involves a sort of understanding that the sort of self-sacrifice that usually is involved in working as hard as possible leads to globally unwanted outcomes, not just locally unwanted outcomes. (Of course, we can talk about hypothetical isolated thought experiments and my feelings might change, but I'm talking about a holistic relating to the world here.)
Here's one argument for this, although I don't think this captures the entire source of my feelings about this: When parts of someone is in conflict, and they regularly are rejecting a part of them that wants something (creature comforts) to privilege the desires of another part of them that wants another thing (work more), I expect that their effectiveness in navigating and affecting reality is lowered in comparison to one where they take the time to integrate the desires and beliefs of the parts of them that are in conflict. In extreme circumstances, it makes sense for someone to 'override' other parts (which is how I model the flight-fight-fawn-freeze response, for example), but this seems unsustainable and potentially detrimental when it comes to navigating a reality where sense-making is extremely important.
The main part of the issue was actually that I was not aware I had internal conflicts. I just mysteriously felt less emotions and motivation. That's the main thing all the articles I read of sustainable productivity did not transmit me, how to recognize it as it happens, without ever having my internal monologue saying "I don't want to work on this" or something.
What do you think antidepressants would be useful for? I don't expect to be matching any clinical criteria for depression.
1The main part of the issue was actually that I was not aware I had internal conflicts. I just mysteriously felt less emotions and motivation.
Yes, I believe that one can learn to entirely stop even considering certain potential actions as actions available to us. I don't really have a systematic solution for this right now aside from some form of Noticing practice (I believe a more refined version of this practice is called Naturalism but I don't have much experience with this form of practice).
What do you think antidepressants would be useful for?
In my experience I've gone months through a depressive episode while remaining externally functional and convincing myself (and the people around me) that I'm not going through a depressive episode. Another thing I've noticed is that with medication (whether anxiolytics, antidepressants or ADHD medication), I regularly underestimate the level at which I was 'blocked' by some mental issue that, after taking the medication, would not exist, and I would only realize it previously existed due to the (positive) changes in my behavior and cognition.
Essentially, I'm positing that you may be in a similar situation.
Yesterday, I was searching for posts by alignment researchers describing how they got into the field. I was searching specifically for personal stories rather than guides on how other people can get into the field.
I was trying to perform Intuition flooding, by reading lots of accounts, and getting intuitions on which techniques work to enter the field.
I only managed to find three which fit somewhat my target:
- Neel Nanda: How I Formed My Own Views About AI Safety
- Kevin RoWang: Lessons After a Couple Months of Trying to Do ML Research
- TurnTrout: Lessons I've Learned from Self-Teaching
- Nate Soares: The mechanics of my recent productivity
Neel Nanda's post was the central example of what I was looking for, and I was surprised to not find more. Does anyone know where I can find more posts like this ?
I think this is a good thing to do! I reccomend looking up things like "reflections on my LTFF upskilling grant" for similar pieces from lesser known researchers / aspiring researchers.
Thank you for the pointer ! I found the article you mentioned, and then found the tag Postmortem & Retrospective which led me to three additional posts:
TIL that the expected path a new user of LW is expected to follow, according to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rEHLk9nC5TtrNoAKT/lw-2-0-strategic-overview, is to become comfortable with commenting regularly in 3-6 month, and comfortable with posting regularly in 6-9 month. I discovered the existence of shortforms. I (re)discovered the expectation that your posts should be treated as a personal blog medium style ?
As I'm typing this I'm still unsure whether I'm destroying the website with my bad shortform, even though the placeholder explicitly said... (\*right click inspect\*)
Write your thoughts here! What have you been thinking about?
Exploratory, draft-stage, rough, and rambly thoughts are all welcome on Shortform.
I'm definitely rambling ! Look ! I'm following the instructions !
I feel like a "guided tour of LW" is missing when joining the website ? Some sort if premade path to get up to speed on "what am I supposed and allowed to do as a user of LW, except reading posts ?". Could take some inspiration from Duolingo, Brilliant, or any other app trying to get a user past the initial step of interacting with the content ?
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