Description du poste
This is a written version of a workshop I gave at EAG NYC in October 2026, edited to make sense in article form. Other materials: Slides with narrated audio, slides without audio, handout.
Introduction"In war, what in ordinary times would be thought weirdly zealous becomes expected...For do-gooders, it is always wartime." - Strangers Drowning
I'm opening with this quote because I want to hold in mind that many people reading this are working under a mentality of high urgency.
The EA atmosphere has felt different to me since Hugging Face and the sea change in existential risk discourse. I know that for lots of us the times do not feel normal.
So this piece is about how to be more okay in abnormal times. It’s for anyone working under chronic urgency or moral demandingness - especially people working on x-risk, or anything else tethered to rapid advancements in AI. But in my experience the same themes apply to other cause areas too.
This isn’t about specific mental health problems, and I don’t assume readers have any. Instead I hope to persuade you that sanity and sustainability are nonnegotiables for all of us; to share some perspective from working as an EA therapist; and help you start planning for ongoing stability.
Where are you starting from?Let's check where you're starting from. On the one hand, someone in a constant sprint at the edge of burnout who's doing nothing to care for themself should pause and sleep and probably make a plan for handoff.
But at the other end, sustainability isn't our only priority. At a certain point, adding more exercise (or fun, or rest) starts trading off against stuff we care about more.
So where we want to be is in the green, where we're putting our capacity to good use while also getting the full benefits of sustainability.
And my fear is that many of us enter the yellow too often - where we're working at a level that can't be sustained longterm, performing suboptimally, and constantly running a background risk of burnout.
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