EA - Some feelings, and what’s keeping me going by Michelle Hutchinson

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some feelings, and what’s keeping me going, published by Michelle Hutchinson on November 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.It seems weird to start a public blog post with how I’m feeling, because that seems so irrelevant to what’s happening right now, and to anyone who doesn’t know me. But a couple of people suggested it might be good to write a post like this. Also, over some of the past week I couldn’t be around others (covid), and found that pretty isolating and alienating while the FTX crisis was intensifying. For people who feel less surrounded by like-minded people in daily life, I thought it might be helpful to have some more voices on the forum expressing how we’re feeling. Sharing our coping strategies also seems particularly useful right now, given that many of us are currently dealing both with difficult emotions, more life uncertainty and greatly increased stress.In what follows, I’m not going to touch much on what specifically happened around FTX. I’ve haven’t been following the reporting as closely as others and don’t have a background in finance. I’m also not going to say that much about what I’ve learned from the debacle. I want to come back to what I should learn going forward when the situation is clearer, the most urgent response work has settled down and I can think more clearly. As usual for my posts on the forum, I’m writing in a personal capacity.[Written 19/11/2022]How I’m feelingI was hesitant to write about my feelings not just because they seem irrelevant, but also because it feels hard even to know how I’m feeling, let alone describe it. I also honestly really don’t want to inhabit a bunch of my emotions right now. But I’ll have a go at describing them here.Please don’t take any of these as in any way a prescription on how people should feel. Some of my friends feel angry and betrayed right now, some feel confused about their place in the world, some feel totally fine and largely unaffected by last week’s events. All of those sound totally reasonable to me.Here are a few of the kinds of things I’ve been feeling over the last week, to give a flavour of how much it feels like I’ve bounced around: Panic and urgency over figuring out how the things I’m responsible for need to be handled and done differently in light of this. Frustration and anger at how powerless I feel to really help. Anguish that whatever I tried to work on I somehow seemed to upset someone or let someone down. Gratitude for being able to go home to my son and how excited toddlers are to see you even if you can’t do anything more in the world than provide food and cuddles.I’ve been trying not to inhabit my feelings of sadness too much. There’s a lot to do, now of all times, so being too upset to contribute seems worth avoiding if I can. I’ve found two things particularly salient, and their sadness impossible to avoid. One is interpersonal conflict. It’s an extremely high stress time in which people are even busier than usual, so it’s easier than ever to cause friction, whether with friends/colleagues/online acquaintances. I’m also finding that harder to deal with than usual, I think because my refuge is usually caring relationships. The other sadness I’m finding impossible to avoid inhabiting is that some of my dearest friends are feeling deeply sad in a way I can do almost nothing to alleviate.Those are the things that I can’t get away from. But I know that in some light they don’t even seem that significant. There are so many sadnesses now that I really want to avoid looking at. One is sadness for the people who lost their money, despite thinking it was safely deposited rather than even being invested. Like a lot of us, I know people who lost money to this, including most of their life savings. Another is sadness for people who had been planning important e...