| This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked. |
Commenting and feedback guidelines: This draft lacks the polish of a full post (I wrote this in ~30 minutes), but the content is almost there. The kind of constructive feedback you would normally put on a Forum post is very welcome. And this is a Forum post that I wouldn't have posted without the nudge of Draft Amnesty Week. Fire away! (But be nice, as usual) |
Lately I’ve been thinking about what I call the “EA–Asian–woman trifecta.” It’s the combination that makes me want to use every hour effectively, and that also leaves me feeling guilty when I can’t.
Upon a quick search on the Forum, I don’t seem to find others who have written about experiences similar to mine[1], so I thought I'd share my thoughts and experiences.
What this feels like
- I want to do more (I have multiple side project ideas), but have low energy after my day job (which is already in the impactful space).
- There's this constant tug of war between self-care and sustainability, and wanting to do more. (Also I can’t fully let go of comparing myself to my peers, and people in this space are so capable and seem to do so much.)
The trifecta
I’m making broad generalizations here, but here's how I think each of my identities plays a role:
- EA
- Wanting to maximize impact; potentially feeling uneasy when time and effort aren't optimized
- Asian
- Strong conditioning to go on the default/stable path; strong sense of filial piety; hard to be unconventional and adventurous
- General belief in hard work and diligence; diligence held as a virtue
- In EA, where optimizing for impact is already emphasized, this Asian aspect can amplify guilt when “not doing enough”
- Woman
- Socialized to care for others and may be prone to deprioritize the self; feeling guilty about rest or personal growth
Where I'm at
I don't really have a good solution for navigating this myself, but my hope for this post:
- Please know that you're not alone if you feel something similar. If you'd love to chat, feel free to reach out here via DM or on the Hive Slack.
- If you have any suggestions on how to find a balance between doing more good and being well, I'd love to hear them.
- ^
I was later pointed to @Julia_Wise🔸's post "You have more than one goal, and that's fine", which explores similar ideas.
Thanks for voicing this!
Some places to connect:
- Magnify Mentoring aims to support people from underrepresented groups in pursuing altruistic work. I suggest checking them out if you haven't already!
- I'm not sure how active it is, but some EAs started a Facebook group EAs from immigrant backgrounds. I know family expectations about what you do with your career and money is a very common theme among people I've talked to among EAs whose families moved from lower-income to higher-income countries.
Thanks Julia! I joined Magnify Mentoring (twice) but haven't heard of that Facebook group.
I can speak to two of those three identities (EA and Asian). I think one possibility that took me an unusually long time to consider was that maybe my identities didn't matter and I'd still feel the same problems if I was the "default person" in society. And I was working through a lot of identities.
It's a weird way of framing things since we can't have our identities counterfactually removed. Even if we did, we wouldn't be the same person. But I think it's a framework that usually doesn't get mentioned much in mental health circles , especially on the internet. Partly because it feels invalidating, partly because most people really want contextual advice, and partly because it feels "emotionally dumb and ignorant" to downplay sociological factors.
To do some fake math on this, if we could decompose mental health problems into the triple Venn diagram of Asian-women-EA (which is 6 different things if you count up the intersectionalities!) and include stuff outside that, it's possible for the Asian-women-EA sources of stress to be maybe only 10-25%.
Basically, part of the challenge of identity is not just figuring out if it matters but also how much. And maybe that amount is ultimately a small thing. Or maybe it's not as tractable as working on the identity-less portions
As someone who fits into the trifecta I think it's less about identities and more about upbringing / messaging associated with identities. I grew up in a family context with strong filial piety, respect for authority, lots of comparisons with other people which leads to feeling not good enough, EA is dismissed as something that's stupid to do by "authority figures".
I do think that I need to unlearn a lot from my family's messaging. For me personally, I'd say it's much more than 10-25% as a source of stress given how much I need to re-program my brain from all the messaging I received. I'd maybe say like 80%?
Agree it's more about upbringing and messaging. And also relate a lot to this.
But also I think it's really hard to tell the "cause" of any given problem at an individual level. As recently as a few years ago, I would have put 80% weight on upbringing / messaging (which I agree aren't the identities themselves but something associated with them). Nowadays I'm more agnostic about it.
I think it's fine to seek out affinity groups and culturally-relevant advice to some degree. But also, there's a tradeoff between exploring identities versus applying generic mental health advice. Especially when you get to intersectionality-type stuff like trifectas where the number of things to explore is gets incredibly vast very quickly.
thank you both for sharing your perspectives! :)
I am not Asian but fit the other criteria and I really relate. It's half the battle to recognise it in yourself and then another one to do something (like more self-care, boundaries) to actually address is which is not easy! Thanks for posting about this Angel!
Thanks for your comment Sofia! Yes I'm glad at least I recognize this. :)
interestingly i've talked to a couple of other asian women in EA who have sort of an opposite experience—we (including myself here) feel like EA ideas and communities fundamentally don't capture things that are important to us as asian women, and so that actually forces us to be more balanced and draw our values from multiple places, rather than holding ourselves to a standard of being a more-optimized EA. one very literal example someone mentioned to me is that western cultures and traditions of thought emphasize breaking down systems into discrete parts and optimizing on single goals, and eastern cultures/traditions value more holistic thinking and balance.
i can also 100% see where you're coming from, as someone who grew up in a very competitive asian/immigrant community myself—i'm sharing another experience not to discount yours, but more to highlight alternate ways of thinking about your own relating to EA that might help you find that balance!
as a former optimizer: #1 thing that helped was therapy
Thanks for your comment ethai! I think I've read somewhere about that example of eastern cultures/traditions being generally more holistic but forgot from whom. Appreciate you bringing this alternative perspective! :)
Great post, this one helped me get over some guilt feelings in EA, it might help others - https://replacingguilt.com/
Thanks Cam!