Your Work Will Change You Whether You Like It Or Not

Be careful who you strive to become

I try to design these posts so that if I only earn 30 seconds of your attention, you’ll still have gotten the message. In this case, here it is:

A post from the golden age of both twitter and roon, circa ~2022.

I’ve previously written career advice from an altruistic perspective, arguing that people should be more ambitious about building skills to solve important problems. I think your career can be your biggest opportunity to help others.

But even from a selfish perspective– my god, I think you should be careful who you strive to become. Like it or not, you will spend the best hours of your best years on activities that change you. Honing a craft often requires (or is even synonymous with) developing a new way of seeing the world and your relationship to it. Skills are not passive objects in the minds that carry them.

And beyond the work itself, every professional community is full of people whose respect you will warp yourself to earn (even if unconsciously). You are a primate with a social brain that is deeply attuned to status. The culture you surround yourself with will shape you, so it’s important to choose one that encourages you to grow in the directions that matter to you. I respect people who work hard to develop their own views and sit at a distance from status games– we should all try– but it’s incredibly hard to do, especially without deceiving yourself.

So when thinking about your profession’s habits and status games, I’d ask:

• Does your work encourage you to increase your empathy for others, or to tactically narrow it to achieve some end?

• To achieve your goals do you get to practice truth-seeking, learning new things, or asking better questions?

• Is it socially reinforced that being a decent person will help you advance in your profession, at least somewhat?

No workplace is going to be perfect in these dimensions, but I think you should make sure that your vocation is worthy of what you give it. Especially because your ability to judge what you should be aiming at can itself be eroded over time in the wrong environment, so it’s important to catch this early.

I know this all sounds dramatic, but I get frustrated by how many people stumble into a job and get stuck there in its path dependency. In my career advising calls I often speak with people who are dissatisfied with their work and are struggling to articulate why. Sometimes there are clear answers like a lack of meaning or personal fit, but occasionally people communicate that they’ve spent a decade twisting themselves into a shape that they don’t like. You won’t get your hours back.

Of course, selection effects explain some of this. Restless people are more likely to schedule an advising call, and any field will tend to select for the traits that it later appears to have instilled. I think selection explains some but not most of the story here, since the habits we form through repeated practice and the people we surround ourselves with undeniably shape us. I also don’t mean to imply everyone can just change jobs tomorrow. It’s hard! There are sometimes more important family or life constraints keeping people where they are, which is also fair.

Still, I hope you consider whether the ~80,000 hours¹ you’ll spend in your career will reinforce what’s best in you.

1. We are what we repeatedly do

Please do not spend 75 hours a week physically tensing yourself into a higher ‘Partner at Deloitte’ probability shape. Do anything else first– start an altruistic career, take a sabbatical, run off into the woods to forage for mushrooms, whatever.

To be clear, I’m not anti hard work. I’ve written that if the ends you pursue are worth it, you should work harder and aim higher than most people. That post mostly focused on external consequences, but it applies to personal growth as well. It probably also makes sense to spend long hours chasing a career that helps you think clearly, become more compassionate, etc.

I think biographies can be helpful reference points for thinking about careers. Charles Darwin said that five years of practicing the careful observation of nature with a skeptical eye caused his religious faith to subside. But later in life, he also lamented that his scientific obsessions let his creative mind atrophy: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.” Simone Weil was transformed by her time working in factories, where she said “the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul,” and George Orwell’s years in the Indian Imperial Police informed his views on imperialism: “in the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.”

I recently met someone who runs events professionally who thought his work had changed him a lot. He’s become attuned to peoples’ needs at the micro and macro level: when they’re quietly uncomfortable in a conversation; when the music is too loud or not loud enough to facilitate discussions; who should speak to whom and why; what people miss in the rest of their social lives; etc. By becoming a person who is good at this particular job, he noticed a spillover into the rest of his life, where he thinks he became more empathetic and socially attuned. Similarly, a lobbyist and former political staffer I spoke to said he’s become much more agreeable after years of working to find consensus and build coalitions. He said he’s trying to be less agreeable in his personal life after years of seeing the world as just a series of stakeholders.

When I’ve spoken with great researchers or journalists, I’ve enjoyed how incisive their questions can be, even in casual conversation. I notice these people often pause to reflect before speaking (a rare skill in itself), then ask about some aspect of my thinking that I hadn’t even considered. I know a policy researcher with a curiosity about the world that his friends describe as almost “childlike.” He’s fun to speak with at parties for this reason– he’ll pivot from small talk about a trip to New Mexico to questions about why its ancestral pueblo people traded marine shells from over 600 miles away. He probably chose a research career because he already wanted to understand the world, but I get the sense his work reinforces those habits.

I think I’ve also changed from the hours I’ve spent doing career advising. In some ways, I’m lucky– I think it’s made me a better listener, quick to notice which questions people aren’t letting themselves ask. In other ways though, I think it’s made me a bit nosy. I spoke to a smart staffer at an event recently who complained a lot about a gap in the think tank ecosystem, so I told him he should apply for funding to start it himself and interrogated his reasons why he couldn’t. He said he actually hadn’t considered starting it himself before, but it seemed like an obvious question to me. Even “off the clock,” it’s hard not to slip into the habits we reinforce.

I think this is sometimes invisible to us because we develop more unconscious habits than strict personality changes, or because it’s hard to admit the opportunity cost of who we could’ve become. I also think there are sometimes other factors that people need to prioritize, like a career that supports them and their families or particular constraints, so it’s understandable that personal growth is less urgent. I hope people consider it as one factor among many when making their career decisions.

And again, I understand selection effects are to blame for some of this. Empathetic people will sort into jobs working with people, incisive readers will sort into research jobs, etc. Still, humans are continual learners– not just of information, but also ways of seeing the world or default approaches to problems. Why else would we value past experience so heavily in hiring? Also, even if most of these qualities are caused by selection, you should think about whether you have sorted based on your personal fit correctly. As you ponder whether you’re growing in your role, you can also ask whether you’ve ended up in an environment that supports your natural strengths.

2. Choose your status games carefully

In “People’s deeply held beliefs are surprisingly surface-level,” Andy Masley argues that while many people think they’ve adopted a view through careful investigation, they often believe something because “a person with a cool jacket said it.” He writes that “a lot of people (myself included) have a lot of internal illusions about how deep our deeply held beliefs go. [...] We have very strong incentives to construct narratives of ourselves that make us feel important, give us access to the people we perceive as cool and with it, and shield us from the indignities of everyday life.”

I think this can be especially true in professional contexts, where status is accrued not only through cool jackets, but titles, salaries, and implicit social rewards. Workplaces can have vastly different cultures that teach us to prioritize different ways of being. Who gets ahead here? How do we seek the truth? Who do we serve, and which enemies are we overcoming? These ideas will almost never be stated outright, but they will be felt to some degree. This isn’t inherently a bad thing– status games channeled productively are an important part of how we work together in society, and a good professional community will do so in a supportive way. But you might become a different person over time, so pick carefully.

Concretely, accidental status hacking can look like: the law school grad who takes a BigLaw job for “a couple years” to pay off debts before doing public benefit work, only to become convinced by peers that this was naive; the civil servant who joined government to try to improve the world, but got came to believe in its culture of passivity; the influencer who succumbs to “audience capture,” producing extreme versions of the arguments they’ve been rewarded for, even if they wouldn’t have endorsed the person they’ve become; etc.

People sometimes say “you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” I think a better version is “you’re the average of the fifteen people whose respect you most crave, consciously or unconsciously.” When you notice yourself changing course to seek your boss’ approval, or even thinking “what would that cool podcaster I have a parasocial relationship with think I should do,” you might want to check if you’re on the right course. Obviously it’s healthy to have respected role models to try to emulate and learn from, but you should choose them based on the values and skills that you want to reinforce, not who has a cool jacket.

Status games can also be totally opaque to us but still shape our lives unconsciously. Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal argues that natural selection actually favors self-deception. By hiding our underlying status-seeking motives from our conscious awareness, we become more convincing when we signal to others. Our ancestors’ survival and reproductive success depended on their standing within a tribe, so we may have been shaped to become hyper aware of how people see us. While I’m skeptical of evolutionary psychology’s just-so arguments sometimes, this one seems right to me. We’re primed to believe and behave in a way that will make us feel respected as part of the right team. We think and learn socially.

In college I secured a paid fellowship at a classical liberal think tank. This happened partly because I already found the concepts interesting, but I did notice classical liberalism suddenly seemed much more compelling when it was wrapped in dollar bills and friendly conversations with cool peers or mentors. I was willing to push back on some ideas and learn more about where I disagreed, but it was weird to viscerally feel this status sorcery at work. I think this happens a lot in Washington DC.

Some people might think they’re above petty status games, deriving their beliefs purely from enlightened reason and empiricism. I’ll grant that we should all try to read widely, practice good epistemics, and think for ourselves. In some ways “make rigorous truth-seeking and tolerance high status” is the project of liberalism, and it has taken us far. We should strive to participate in communities that reward us for careful thinking. But we should be humble about how hard this can be, especially when we tell ourselves we’ve transcended the irrational groupish parts of our minds. I think it’s much more important to choose communities that hold the qualities you want to practice in high esteem and practice them, rather than try to overcome the social aspects of our minds.

3. How to find work and peers that shape you into the person you want to become

To find a career that shapes you in accordance with your values, I think you first need to know what those values are. Most people don’t have a personal written constitution, but you probably have books that influenced your worldview, previous mentors with traits you’ve wanted to emulate, lessons you learned from experiences in your life, etc. It can be worth taking an hour to write some thoughts down about this, particularly if you think your current career is lacking in some areas.

For me, reading “Famine Affluence and Morality” and “The Moral Imperative Towards Cost-Effectiveness” heavily shaped the way I think about suffering in the world and our obligations to help others. Millions of people will die of totally preventable diseases in developing countries this year. I was also horrified to learn about the billions of animals that are tortured in factory farms each year. Later, reading The Precipice also made me horrified at how fragile our civilization might be at this moment in history, with technologies like nuclear weapons, bioengineered pandemics, and powerful AI potentially threatening our entire future. I decided I wanted to find a career that let me work on some of these problems directly, but also to continue to reinforce empathy for others and understanding the world as core practices. This is my answer though, what’s yours?

To find a profession that reinforces the habits and builds the skills that you admire, I think you should be willing to consider a broader range of options. If you feel like your current role is not helping you grow in the way that you want to, you should try applying to a bunch of jobs, grabbing coffee with people working in other professions to ask about what they do (warm friend-of-a-friend intros or even cold outreach is underrated), attend conferences, and practice skills through side projects that might help you switch tracks. I’ve found people tend to systematically underrate the transferability of their skills, but don’t do enough empirical testing for different areas. A lot of the advice about “testing your fit” in this article can be applied to personal motivations for career switches, not just altruistic ones.

None of this means it’ll be easy to get a new job tomorrow, but you could treat “find out where my skills will be in demand and allow me to flourish” as a 5-20+ hour empirical research project with real answers. Approaching networking with genuine curiosity about other peoples’ work can also make it easier and more enjoyable for everyone.

This advice also applies to finding a professional community with status games that socially reinforce your values. Jobs will never perfectly represent your ideal of the good life, but there’s probably more variance than you realize. It’s hard to know from the outside which fields will have healthy, supportive cultures that reward the things that are most important to you, so you might not realize how different other workplaces can be.

Unfortunately, this means that workplace culture often needs to be experienced first-hand. Job descriptions might not provide much insight. So again I’d really encourage you to have more informational conversations with people in adjacent fields to learn about what options you might have. Ask friends, friends-of-friends, cold email people at organizations you think are doing cool work, try to attend conferences/talks/happy hours, take a trip to a top city, be curious about the world, etc. A lot of my job as a career advisor is just telling specific people they should go talk to each other. And once you have a job offer, you can “interview” the hiring manager about their culture, or even ask to chat with a few members of their team to learn more.

Personally, I’m grateful to have found a community that allocates status in a much better way than most others. I’m part of a social movement that thinks it’s really cool when people donate 10% of their income to the least fortunate, advocate for better treatment of animals on factory farms, donate their kidney to a stranger, use their careers to protect us from the next pandemic, or hold AI companies accountable for the risks they might cause. I’ve been genuinely amazed by the earnestness of EAs about trying to do good in the world. It’s not uncommon to hear “You raised $100,000 to fight the worst abuses on factory farms? Based.”

Why do people in Effective Altruism donate to help the world’s poorest people, or use their careers to protect future generations, all of whom they’ll never meet? I think the main reason is that they really have considered a bunch of moral philosophy arguments and decided it’s the way that they can do the most good in the world. We should reason about our obligations to others, letting the better angels of our natures guide our decisions, and I suspect most of these people would keep doing what they’re doing even if nobody else knew about it.

However, from an evolutionary perspective, it seems unlikely that such a strong altruistic motivation to share resources with people we never meet would be selected for. Humans should be hard-wired to care for our offspring and our local community. I think that, since we are all mortals, EAs are also motivated by the social status that being a good person can accrue in a local community that heavily rewards this. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this, and frankly I wish the rest of the world chose their status games more intentionally. I love that (at its best) Effective Altruism is a status race to the top, not to the bottom.

Anyway, you might find a totally different answer for which communities you want to opt into. This is just one answer, and I know there are many other professional fields working to improve the world, to try to think clearly, and to reinforce better ways of channeling our best impulses together. I think it’s more important to prioritize thinking about this at all, and to explore various options over time, than to find the perfect answer right away. I also didn’t include it because it’s not career related, but many people find values-driven engagement through a religious or a social non-professional community. Your work doesn’t have to be the primary way that you give your life meaning. But, it will probably shape who you become in some ways.

1. I work at 80,000 Hours, but am writing in a personal capacity on this blog.