i achieved all of my goals by 32
then i had a mental breakdown; finding a better foundation in process
By age 32, I got my PhD in sociology with a focus on networks, worked a high profile job at Facebook where I developed a measurement strategy now used company-wide, published several academic papers, and worked on getting Joe Biden elected in 2020 (I built message testing models). You don’t have to believe me, but our internal analyses suggested our work actually did help Democrats win in 2020.
In retrospect, I was totally miserable. I don’t regret how I spent my time—in fact I am very grateful I learned to do a bunch of interesting stuff with good people, and I’m proud particularly of my elections work. But subjectively I wasn’t very happy. I was achieving things not because the process was fulfilling or meaningful, but because I hoped the end result—the achievement itself—would fill some kind of hole in me.
And that is just not how it works. If you try to get fulfillment via achievement (for me at least), it works more like a treadmill. You achieve a thing, and it is difficult, and then you feel weird and aimless and empty. You go hunting for the next thing to achieve. And on and on. At no point are you practicing enjoying the thing you are doing, or finding meaning in it. Fulfillment is always off in the future. And yes, we humans (or at least me!) need to practice enjoying what we are doing.
Another thing I was doing on this achievement treadmill was turning a lot of guilt from bad childhood experiences into a desire to “do the most good” with my job. This is a rabbit hole you find in Silicon Valley circles: am I doing enough good? Are you doing enough good? Around and around. You try to quantize and scrutinize your life and ritualistically purify parts of it: get your food ethically, have the right political opinions, be outraged about the right things, etc.
One thing this does is turn you sort of inside out, where you are subjecting all of your thoughts, desires, and practices to basically a committee of Twitter users. You may be shocked to learn this is in fact not a good way to live. It’s easy to lose yourself, to lose your own particulars. Even worse, it’s easy to deny yourself. Let’s say you feel called to be a musician. The Do The Most Good Committee might say to you: you can do more good being a software engineer that makes a lot of money and then donates to fund the arts.
In some abstract sense, this argument might have merit: if you turn out to be a bad musician and to not actually like playing music that much, then maybe software is a better use of your time. But maybe you are good at music, or just enjoy it. Those things have value and merit. Maybe you end up hating software engineering. There are a lot of unknowns here, and there’s a lot of hubris in thinking you can apply a top-down rubric to your life rather than like, feeling it out.
And what’s more, it is not the job of any particular person to fix all of the problems in the world. The desire to fix large structural problems is admirable, but it is beyond the capability of any individual to do it alone. Taking on responsibility to fix these structural problems yourself (rather than trying to contribute to fixing them as part of a movement) will inevitably lead to disappointment.
doing the thing to do the thing
As I learn to take care of my mental illness, one of the things I have realized is that the top-down rubrics I applied to my life were in fact harmful for me. It’s not that they lead me to do things that were wrong—getting Joe Biden elected is something that has been very positive for the world. But they lead me to do these things for abstract reasons rather than because of an inner desire to do them.
In other words, I was doing a good thing, but wasn’t feeling particularly good doing it. Everything was an obligation. As I learn more about how I work, I am starting to focus on things that feel good in themselves. My hope is that I will come up with things where I feel good about doing the thing in the moment, and as a side effect it has some positive larger effect. I say as a side effect because as much as we want to, it is hard to control the larger effects of what we do. Banking your feeling of success on large and hard to control outcomes is, again, a path to disappointment.
I find that I need to practice focusing on things themselves rather than on my bigger hopes. When I play music, I try to focus on the song itself rather than wondering if I will play for other people and how they will feel about it. When I code, I try to keep a sense of wonder at the logicalness of it all, and take pride in particularly elegant snippets. I’m not saying I have it figured out, this is very much a work in progress. But sometimes I get moments of present-ness, and they are very nice.
As a final note, I’ll say that I have become quite skeptical of things like Effective Altruism (EA) because of the certainty of it all. It’s true that it’s good to spend money on malaria nets, but how should we compare working a job you don’t like to buy malaria nets compared to working a lower paying job, perhaps as a teacher, that you enjoy and helps people in your immediate vicinity. It’s perilously tricky to weigh such things, not because we don’t have a system for weighing (utility theory is pretty good!) but because there are so many complex particulars that we could never hope to figure out the weights themselves.
At least for me, I think it’s better to look inward a little bit and ask: what do I feel like I am being called to do? Trying to answer that question with your own voice rather than with an off-the-shelf response is both difficult and worthwhile.