EA - Counterproductive EA mental health advice (and what to say instead) by Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Counterproductive EA mental health advice (and what to say instead), published by Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen on October 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. They tell me: eat and drink! Be glad to be among the haves!But how can I eat and drink whenI take what I eat from the starving andThose who have died of thirst go without my glass of water?And yet I eat and drink. (Bertolt Brecht: An die Nachgeborenen) Many people in EA at least occasionally struggle with feelings of worthlessness and urgency or have the tendency to self-sacrifice to an unhealthy level. Many other people in EA would like to help them out by outlining how feeling worthless is not strategically good. However, in these discussions, people are often talking past each other, without making any progress on the actual issues. In this post, I point out why some seemingly motivational fixes on the feeling of worthlessness can actually be counterproductive. I also give some tips on how to better support your EA friends who are struggling with these issues, and say some words to those who are facing the issues themselves. Examples of counterproductive advice “It’s actually altruistic to be happy, because happiness makes you more productive” Most people are in fact more productive if they are feeling at least ok, so at face value, this statement is true. Despite this, it is not necessarily good advice for someone who is not feeling happy and would like to be more productive. Inside the not-happy person’s head there is a to-do list that looks something like this: do more EA! people are dying also read up more EA to know how to actually do EA I’m so tired but I must hold through and do my EA stuff because if I don’t it means I don’t actually care, and I really don’t want anyone to die So whenever you tell them to be more happy in order to be more productive, the to-do list starts to look like this: do more EA! people are dying also read up more EA to know how to actually do EA I’m so tired but I must hold through and do my EA stuff because if I don’t it means I don’t actually care, and I really don’t want anyone to die become happier! you cannot actually help when you are feeling like this, so stop it and get on with all the other stuff; people are dying, remember! Redefining happiness as an instrumental goal for becoming more productive is rarely going to make anyone more happy. It is actually likely to put additional pressure on the person who is already feeling guilty about not being productive enough, thus making them unhappier in the progress. “If you’ve donated $3400 (or $5000 or whatever the current estimate is) you clearly deserve to live” I haven’t seen this advice much online but several people around me have come up with it independently. This is probably because I occasionally have thoughts about not deserving to be alive and talking about them to people around me sometimes helps. In this advice, the advisor is trying to debunk a depressed misguided belief by reason and evidence (sort of). The concept is related to climate (or perhaps animal welfare) compensation: “if you think you are not worthy of living, just buy your way out of it by saving another person – tada, you have compensated for your life!” There are many dangers to this line of thought such as: how do I know that saving one person is a sufficient compensation amount? if I haven’t donated that much, does it mean I deserve to die? if I have donated that much, what does it actually matter that I continue to live – it won’t change anything about my previous donations anyway? if I ever lose my ability to produce impact in the future (for example because I need to stop working due to disability), does it mean I deserve to die then? do all people who have not donated x amount deserve to die? These questions are all good, because the life comp...