I've done this for over a decade, and "Effective Altruism" does NOT prevent midlife crises. There's more nuance to it. (In my case, my day job that paid VERY well involved things that are very much against my ethics. Even giving away 20% of the money to good causes didn't stop the guilt. So now I'm "retired" but mostly just wallowing in guilt of enabling horrific things while lying to myself about "making the world b…
Damn dude what did you do? Sell Ads to teens?
There's plenty of worse things you can do in eg the chemical industries or in public relations.
Seems like a good way to avert a midlife crisis is to explicitly make helping others a non-trivial part of one's life. Focusing on effectiveness on helping others is probably an important component as well. I recommend looking into Effective Altruism - "a philosophy and community focused on maximising the good you can do through your career, projects, and donations" https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ In my case I've…
I've done this for over a decade, and "Effective Altruism" does NOT prevent midlife crises. There's more nuance to it. (In my case, my day job that paid VERY well involved things that are very much against my ethics. Even giving away 20% of the money to good causes didn't stop the guilt. So now I'm "retired" but mostly just wallowing in guilt of enabling horrific things while lying to myself about "making the world b…
I wonder some of the time what role self deception can play in finding meaning. If we only have so much agency to make a difference in the world, how much should we beat ourselves up over the inability to change it?
5% real return is a scary thing to try to tie the rest of your life to.
Perhaps they can buy an annuity or something that will bank on 7% average annual over a 20-30 year timespan and guarantee 5% real return each and every year.
Pretty sure a guaranteed 5% real return in perpetuity doesn’t exist. My understanding is that annuities are generally very vulnerable to inflation?
Acceptance. My survival strategy for mid-life has been to replace the ambition and balls that got me through my 20's and 30's with age appropriate acceptance of the MANY things I cannot control & don't have time to do, with a wisdom to focus on the FEW things that are likely to matter to me when I hit my 70's and beyond. For example, I can't control the divorce that consumed a ton of time and money in my 40's, but I…
Acceptance is basically the one and only key to happiness - it's simple to say and hard to practice. But by practicing it even the most miserably ill and destitute people can be happy. It's also not a particularly new idea, going back at least as far as Buddhism. It's also why I'm not inclined to agree with things like perceived inequality as being the root of all misery.
I've done this for over a decade, and "Effective Altruism" does NOT prevent midlife crises. There's more nuance to it. (In my case, my day job that paid VERY well involved things that are very much against my ethics. Even giving away 20% of the money to good causes didn't stop the guilt. So now I'm "retired" but mostly just wallowing in guilt of enabling horrific things while lying to myself about "making the world b…
I wonder some of the time what role self deception can play in finding meaning. If we only have so much agency to make a difference in the world, how much should we beat ourselves up over the inability to change it?
I don't think that's a question of deception at all. Just measure yourself up against the amount of change that you can and want to have on the world. It's pretty simple.
If you want to save or improve 10 lives, do that. It doesn't matter if there are millions of people still starving. You still made the incremental change that you wanted to
Yeah I'm 34 in SF, turning 35 this autumn, and feeling like I'm literally in my prime. Old enough to have matured, experienced enough to have some good battle scars, young and energetic enough that there's decades of quality life ahead of me. The mindset stability that came in the past few years has been nice. Hustling for the shiniest immediate goal in sight no longer appeals, but there's plenty of energy to go afte…
A friend died at 51 not long ago. If you die at is age, you are already 68% of the way there. It's not barely getting started, it's behind you. More realistically, a man who is 35 years old has a life expectancy of another 43 years, so not quite there yet.
Sure but the effectiveness of upcoming years seems much higher. Where I used to toil for 10 hours to do something, I can do the same thing now in 1 hour.
Resources are higher too. For lots of things that used to take time, I can just pay someone.
And lets not forget I spent the first 10 to 15 years being basically useless.
These kinds of discussions remind of this passage from Mere Christianity by CS Lewis: Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in lov…
Thanks for the quote, now I want to go read that book! I really like the way he voices parts 1 and 2, as it echoes similar thoughts I've had but haven't articulated so elegantly.
I think my personal answer to (3) is slightly different but to each their own!
One thing I've found in philosophy that's informed my thinking about happiness is the paradox of hedonism, which suggests that I'm better off not striving for happiness at all, at least not directly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism
That, and also Freud's sobering words, written to one of his patients: "Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness."
I'm looking at journal articles about how age correlates with happiness and this sentence doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in the state of research: This paper is the mirror image of Blanchflower (2020b) that examined unhappiness data and finds comparable evidence using twenty different measures for an unhappiness curve that maximized with controls at age 49 compared with a zenith of happiness estimated in t…
Back in the day, people would get married and have a few kids early in life. 48 is when the kids would be leaving the home. So you are probably making a decent salary, no longer have kids at home, and are young enough to still be healthy. Now you can have sex without worrying about the kids hearing. Can travel whenever you want. Have money to buy whatever toys you want. Have time to pick up new hobbies. Etc. Bottom l…
Empty nest syndrome seems to typically set in once the kids are actually gone. I'm also not sure anyone's quality of life drastically improves due to that one factor, anyway. It's mostly young kids that really disrupt your life, not any kids at all. You can travel and leave a 16 year-old home alone, and that should be old enough to not worry if they can hear you having sex. The next big quality of life jump is when they no longer depend on you financially, but that is likely to happen well after they move out, not immediately.
One thing I love about Tolstoy's War and Peace is how it describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects across the arc of their lives. They feel adrift, then find some great cause to push them forward, exhaust the possibilities of that cause, and find themselves disillusioned when they discovered that they have not "solved" the problem of life. This happens over an…
it describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects across the arc of their lives
That is pretty much the theme of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, written many a moon before War and Peace. You have a king who cycles through everything he thinks he could possibly desire, attaining all of it, and realizes at the end the answer to the problem of life was... well, I'll let you figure out the rest: