winning can be boring
once you work through all the new ideas, you might just feel at peace with your life... that's not bad!!
A while ago, I saw a reddit post about Financial Independence/Retire Early (FIRE) enthusiasts dealing with the “Boring Middle”. People learn about FIRE and they get out of debt! They get excited! They max out their retirement accounts! They celebrate! And then they max out their retirement accounts the next year! And the next year! And…
At some point it gets kind of boring?
People learned so many interesting things about finance. They got REALLY INTO financial freedom. They became part of a community! And after a while, there aren’t really any more tricks to share, no more low-hanging fruit to pick, no decisions to make. FIRE gets boring.
I wondered if this happens to people in effective altruism too. You decide where to donate, and where to work, and what you think about ai timelines and the repugnant conclusion and person-affecting views and chickens and then… then what? At some point the conversation at the beginner social gets a bit stale.
Maybe you are bored?
That would be… great!
In a TV show or novel, excitement is caused by conflict. Getting bored suggests that you’ve resolved most of the conflict between your pre-existing principles and the principles you’ve heard about in effective altruism circles. When you got into EA, you felt all kinds of tension as part of you thought arguments for veganism are pretty good and other parts of you thought about how much you love cheese. But now you’ve decided to keep eating cheese, or to stop eating cheese, and that’s great! You’ve considered something new, you’ve made a decision, you’ve integrated that into yourself so seamlessly that you don’t feel tension about the topic anymore. To get your kicks you have to learn a new language or take up bouldering or something. You’re bored of EA! And that’s great!
And if you ever want some extra conflict, to make EA interesting again, there’s always the “Community” section of the EA forum.