Aiming For The Minimum is Dangerous.

Effective altruism is often a maximizing philosophy. Not just “doing good better”, but “the most good you can do”. For many people, myself among them, this philosophy has a natural-feeling corollary: minimize anything non-altruistic in your life.

My goal in this post is to convince you that trying to spend as little time as possible on fun socializing, frivolous hobbies, or other leisure is a dangerous impulse. If you notice yourself aiming for the minimum amount of self-care, that’s a sign that you should reorient and reprioritize.

Argument from anecdotal breakdowns (including mine)

A few years ago, I had read Replacing Guilt and Cheerfully, and I sort of acknowledged that being miserable all the time couldn’t be sustained. Even though I wanted to live up to my altruistic values, I would need to make some room in my life for my friends and my frivolous hobbies.

How much room did I need, though? I felt a bit suspicious, looking at how I spent my time. Surely that long road trip wasn’t necessary to avoid misery? Did I really need to spend several weekends in a row building a ridiculous LED laser maze, when my other side project was talking to young synthetic biologists about ethics?

I started tracking my time down to the half-hour, little colour-coded squares on a spreadsheet, and I would gaze across weeks of weak impact and feel despair. I started cancelling plans with friends unless we could co-work together, but I was still spending hours a week playing Dungeons and Dragons and talking on the phone with my long-distance partner.

It’s almost funny, looking back on my calendar from 2018. In addition to my engineering job, I was doing things like coordinating volunteers for EA Global SF and running East Bay Biosecurity events. Right now, I feel like I was doing plenty of valuable work, but at the time I felt basically worthless. I was sure that a more altruistic person, given the same skills and opportunities that I’d lucked into, would be able to do more. There were so many broken things in the world― how dare I waste so much of my time?

This kind of thinking― what I’m calling aiming for the minimum― was really unhealthy for me. It was a contributing factor to a mental health crisis I had in mid-2018, during which I had a breakdown, nearly landed in hospital, and had to spend a month under family supervision in Ontario. This section is titled anecdotal breakdowns, plural, because this mindset doesn’t seem all that different from what Julia Wise describes in Cheerfully:

“My happiness is not the point,” I told him.

A few years later, I was deeply bitter about the decision. I had always wanted and intended to be a parent, and I felt thwarted. It was making me sick and miserable. I looked at the rest of my life as more of an obligation than a joy.

So my husband and I decided that it wasn’t worth having a breakdown over.

I think that for many types of people, doing the act of constantly self-monitoring, where you’re always asking, “Is that thing I have a desire for a little bit unethical? Is that thing unethical?” Being in that frame and mode, doing this self-monitoring and building this habit of self-criticism I think for some people is very mentally unhealthy. …  And that’s actually really hard for me. And there’s a very long time where it both felt so clear to me that I ought to be living frugally and giving away as much as I could, and that I had no right to all the money that just happened to be in my bank account because my job paid it to me.

While recovering from my breakdown, conversations with friends and therapists (and the fact that I’d had a breakdown) helped me accept that my mindset around doing the most good―deciding my happiness is not the point, constantly self-monitoring, desperation hamster wheels, aiming for the minimum, etc.― was not sustainable. In fact, it was downright dangerous.

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