EA - Story of a career/mental health failure by zekesherman

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: Story of a career/mental health failure, published by zekesherman on April 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I don't know if it should be considered important as it's only a single data point, but I want to share the story of how my EA career choice and mental health went terribly wrong.My career choiceIn college I was strongly motivated to follow the most utilitarian career path. In my junior year I decided to pursue investment banking for earning to give. As someone who had a merely good GPA and did not attend a top university, this would have been difficult, but I pushed hard for networking and recruiting, and one professional told me I had a 50-50 chance of becoming an investment banking analyst right out of college (privately I thought he was a bit too optimistic). Otherwise, I would have to get some lower-paying job in finance, and hopefully move into banking at a later date.However I increasingly turned against the idea of earning to give, for two major reasons. First, 80,000 Hours and other people in the community said that EA was more talent- rather than funding-constrained, and that earning to give was overrated. Second, more specifically, people in the EA community informed me that program managers in government and philanthropy controlled much higher budgets than I could reasonably expect to earn. Basically, it appeared easier to become in charge of effectively allocating $5 million of other people's money, compared to earning a $500,000 salary for oneself. Earning to give meant freer control of funding, but program management meant a greater budget. While I read 80k Hours' article on program management, I was most persuaded by advice I got from Jason Gaverick Matheny and Carl Shulman, and also a few non-EA people I met from the OSTP and other government agencies, who had more specific knowledge and advice.It seemed that program management in science and technology (especially AI, biotechnology, etc) was the best career path. And the best way to achieve it seemed to be starting with graduate education in science and technology, ideally a PhD (I decided on computer science, partly because it gave the most flexibility to work on a wide variety of cause areas). Finally, the nail in the coffin for my finance ambitions was an EA Global conference where Will MacAskill said to think less about finding a career that was individually impactful, and think more about leveraging your unique strengths to bring something new to the table for the EA community. While computer science wasn't rare in EA, I thought I could be special by leveraging my military background and pursuing a more cybersecurity- or defense-related career, which was neglected in EA.Still, I had two problems to overcome for this career path. The first problem was that I was an econ major and had a lot of catching up to do in order to pursue advanced computer science. The second problem was that it wasn't as good of a personal fit for me compared to finance. I've always found programming and advanced mathematics to be somewhat painful and difficult to learn, whereas investment banking seemed more readily engaging. And 80k Hours as well as the rest of the community gave me ample warnings about how personal fit was very, very important. I disregarded these warnings about personal fit for several reasons:I'd always been more resilient and scrupulous compared to other people and other members of the EA community. Things like living on a poverty budget and serving in the military, which many other members of the EA community have considered intolerable or unsustainable for mental health, were fine for me. As one of the more "hardcore" EAs, I generally regarded warnings of burnout as being overblown or at least less applicable to someone like me, and I suspected that a lot of people in the EA ...