Summary
As of 2021, I'm trying to reduce my information overload and the number of projects and conversations that I'm involved with. It's difficult to know how to decline interactions with other people politely, but I thought writing this page could be one way to make it clear that if I fail to engage with someone, it's due to generally wanting to feel less stressed rather than something specific to that person.
The rest of this article is purely optional reading about my own thoughts on the issue of having too much going on in one's life. Unfortunately, my preference for slowness and tranquility is in opposition to having lots of utilitarian impact, and if you can tolerate a faster-paced lifestyle, you should do that because you're much more likely to have outsized impact that way. (I worry a bit about tempting anyone toward my lower-impact approach to life.)
Contents
My history
I grew up in relatively quiet rural environments. As a kid, I spent a lot of time outdoors (which, in hindsight, was bad for all the critters that I crushed under my footsteps while doing so). Until age ~10, I wasn't allowed to watch non-public TV, which meant that I didn't have as much exposure to flashy entertainment as most other kids, although there were some exceptions like Bill Nye the Science Guy, which is a fast-paced show. I was fond of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which moves at a relaxed pace. Sometimes Fred Rogers even asked viewers to just sit and think quietly for a moment.
School forces students to learn to sometimes work at a fast pace. That's particularly true for tests like the SAT where time is extremely scarce. It's also true in terms of the homework load. During high school, I spent most of my waking hours on school work, and yet I sometimes still had to stay up late to finish assigments at the level of thoroughness I preferred. Eventually, by 12th grade, I learned to be less perfectionist in order to get homework done without any all-nighters. I continued to be less perfectionist during college and for a few years after, out of habit.
I dislike the feeling of being stressed, though I was frequently stressed by school and then later having a full-time job. I think I felt I didn't have any other choice than to be a high performer, so the stress was inevitable. Utilitarian ethics is also demanding and can make one feel guilty about too much relaxation.
I still like to work hard and feel guilty about being lazy, but as I've gotten older, I may be a bit more averse to stress than in the past and very much prefer a relaxed pace of life where I set my own timelines for doing things and don't feel overwhelmed by how much there is to do. Unfortunately, in our fast-paced modern world, it can be hard not to feel overwhelmed.
Message overload
I first uploaded some of my writings to a website in summer 2006. A few months later, I received my first email from a reader of the site. I was excited and flattered that someone was interested in what little old me had written. Over the years, as the number of articles on my site and my readership grew, it became more frequent for people to write to me. I still greatly appreciated people's interest and kind words, but replying to all the messages became a bit more of a chore due to their volume.
By 2021, due to a combination of my slowness and the frequency of messages I received, I decided to take the unfortunate step of making the "Contact me" page on my website harder to find in order to reduce the number of messages I receive. Another option could be to just not reply to most people, but whenever I receive a non-spam message that I fail to reply to, I feel bad about it.
I also feel bad when I fail to reply to messages on Facebook, comments on my YouTube videos, mentions of me on Slack, and so on. I often feel like I'm drowning in messages, as well as millions of other little tasks, with no hope of unburying myself. Often I try to calm this feeling of being overwhelmed by thinking: "I'll get to whichever tasks I get to, and if I don't get to others, then oh well." But it's hard for my completionist brain to accept that, and I worry about people who write to me feeling rejected if I fail to reply.
I think the volume of messages I receive might be easily manageable for a "normal person". However, I'm extremely introverted, and when I have too many conversations without getting other work done, it can feel like I've eaten too much candy. I also like to absorb people's messages slowly and reply thoughtfully. When I read things quickly, I feel like I'm doing a chore; reading slowly allows me to feel like I'm savoring a dessert bite by bite. However, this "quality over quantity" approach to communication makes me a laggard.
Highly sensitive person
In 2021 I learned about the concept of a highly sensitive person (HSP). On Aron (1996)'s HSP test, I answer "yes" to about 18 questions, and the page says: "If you answered more than fourteen of the questions as true of yourself, you are probably highly sensitive." Aron ("FAQ: You talk ...") summarizes high sensitivity with the "DOES" acronym: "Depth of processing, overstimulation, emotional responsivity/empathy, and sensitive to subtleties." I identify pretty well with the first three of those.
When I have the choice, I prefer to process information deeply—to suck out all the juices that the information contains. For example, when watching a movie, I dislike missing any parts and will go back if I didn't catch something. (Not being able to do this is a reason I dislike watching live broadcasts.) That said, how much I'm bothered by rushing through things depends a lot on how important they are. If I'm reading something for entertainment, it can be fine if I just skim it and miss details. In contrast, if I'm changing an account password or filling out paperwork, I insist on carefully reading the instructions to make sure I'm not making a mistake.
I'm extremely distracted by noise in my surroundings when I'm trying to concentrate, and given that I'm thinking about something or other during most of the day, I usually am trying to concentrate to some degree. For this reason I almost never listen to music in the background. While it might be pleasant, it would disrupt my concentration to some degree. Gorvett (2019): "Perham found that it didn't matter whether people liked or disliked the music they were listening to, it still made them perform worse on a 'serial recall task' – where they were asked to remember a list in order – than they did in total silence."
Some people say they leave the TV on in the background while working at their computer or reading. That idea horrifies me. I'm made extremely miserable by verbal distractions when I'm doing anything other than routine physical tasks.
In my senior year of college, I interviewed at two companies for a post-college job: Microsoft and Google. While I ended up not getting an offer from Google, it seemed like I might get an offer from both companies, and I was debating which one I'd pick. A main reason I was leaning toward Microsoft was that employees have their own offices, including doors that can help block sound, while Google had an open office environment.
According to one prominent theory, extroverts are inherently 'understimulated', so they tend to seek out situations which increase their level of arousal – like noisy environments. Meanwhile, introverts have the opposite problem[...].
With this in mind, it makes sense that more introverted workers would be more affected by the background noise, since anything that increases their level of arousal, like music or the chatter of colleagues, could be overwhelming. For example, a study of medical students showed that those who were more introverted tended to have more difficulty concentrating, and feel more fatigued while performing a maths task to a soundtrack of 88-decibel traffic noise (for perspective, that’s about as loud as a lawn mower).
There have been a few times in my life when I've felt understimulated regularly, and I became more extroverted at those times because the presence of other people helped to make me feel less "empty". But during most of my life, I've been sharply on the other side of the spectrum, feeling that I have more than enough stimulation from other people already. My problem is usually not having enough alone, quiet time.
Time poverty
Many Americans live on the brink of financial disaster. Konish (2021): "Just 39% of Americans can afford a $1,000 unexpected expense, according to a new survey from Bankrate.com." In my case, my bigger problem is lack of time. I often feel like I'm living on the brink of disaster with respect getting my tasks done. In fact, I usually feel like I'm already in debt regarding the things I should be getting done, and I'm only barely able to pay the interest on those loans.
In addition to my general slowness, part of the problem may be that I like to work on lots of different projects at once, following my interests at any given time. When I get absorbed by one project, I can fall behind on my other ongoing activities. I enjoy being able to spend a few days getting obsessed with some task without having to break my focus too much. This is a reason I don't like supervising other people: being a supervisor requires lots of ongoing communication, and you can't just disappear for a few days. Still, even when I'm not a supervisor, I sometimes have to interrupt my flow due to externally imposed deadlines or random little emergencies that may come up.
Over time, the complexity of my life tends to increase faster than it decreases. I accumulate more website articles to maintain, more online accounts to manage, more friends who ask me for feedback, more topics that I'm interested in, more best practices that I try to follow, and more unfinished projects and tasks (many of which I'll probably never finish). As of 2021, I have three different minor health problems that require a fair amount of time to deal with on an ongoing basis. As I get older, I expect to keep accumulating health problems, and my ageing parents will as well.
There can sometimes be a "poverty trap" in terms of time: not having enough time makes it harder to simplify one's life in ways that would in the long run help to save time.
As one possible way to reduce time poverty, I've considered looking for a personal assistant (PA) to help with some of these tasks. I think a PA could help to some degree, though most of my tasks aren't very outsourceable or would require a great deal of trust to hand off to someone else. Also, I worry a bit that if I did outsource some of my paperwork kinds of tasks, I might get fatigued by only doing the more high-level, effective-altruism-related tasks without as many breaks. Some of the reason I'm slow is just that I'm fussy and have high quality standards. If I found someone who could meet my high expectations, that person would probably be smart enough and reliable enough to make useful contributions in his or her own right, or to be a good PA for someone who is objectively more busy than I am.
When I have occasionally tried outsourcing small tasks in the past, I often felt that doing so was at least as much work as just doing the task myself. Maybe if I eventually found a solid, long-term PA, the dividends of outsourcing could eventually more than pay for the setup costs. In any case, for now I think the more feasible approach is just to reduce the number of things I try to do. For example, in 2020 I deleted my LinkedIn account in order to avoid having to deal with connection requests and messages. In 2021 I'm thinking about possible ways to reduce my volume of notifications on Facebook as well. This is kind of unfortunate because I sometimes make useful connections on these platforms.
Too much literature to keep up with
In the modern world, scientists have to specialize into smaller and smaller sub-fields because there are so many papers being published all the time that it's impossible to keep up with any more than a tiny slice of them. I feel the same way about various causes in effective altruism. I used to follow work on AI safety to a moderate degree of depth until 2015, when the field seemed to grow faster and faster, and I felt unable to contribute anything useful without reading much more material than I had time for. Toward the end of the 2010s, the fields of wild-animal suffering, invertebrate welfare, and s-risks also began to explode (at a smaller scale than AI safety), and I likewise had trouble keeping up with the work being done in those areas.
I've heard some people say that it's important to have a critical mass of researchers working in some area in order to sustain people's motivation. That's an interesting viewpoint, though I happen to work in roughly the opposite way. If I'm one of the few people exploring some topic, the work feels useful and manageable. Once too many other people join in, I find it harder to contribute anything unique, and most of my time is spent reading the work of others rather than saying anything of my own.
Of course, it's a good "problem" to have when there's too much exciting work being done in an area to keep up with, but it does exacerbate the feeling of being overwhelmed.
The fast lane has more impact
In order to be one of the most "successful" people in the world—whether financially or otherwise—you generally have to be able to work a lot and work quickly. You have to be able to avoid getting hung up on little details. And you have to be able to tolerate a great deal of stress.
There may be increasing returns here: being twice as productive can often increase your wealth or other types of impact by much more than two times. As one example, maybe it's fair to say that elite software developers in hedge funds work twice as hard as average software developers, but they can earn 5, 10, or in some cases even 100 times as much as an average software developer. (Of course, differences in intelligence, interests, and other traits are also very relevant in explaining this contrast.)
So if your personality is suited to speed and performance, you have a gift, and you may be able to make a significantly bigger impact than most other people. For the rest of us mere mortals, one of the most useful things we can do is to find more of these exceptional performers and inspire them to support important altruistic causes.