What is a sacrifice?

I know people who've lived in vans, eaten mostly beans and rice or hummus and bread, rented horrifying apartments, agonized over the cost of plane tickets.

That's sacrifice.

Going vegan, not wearing leather, that can be a sacrifice too.

It's complicated, though - once you think it's murder it might be psychologically easier to go vegan than not - is that a sacrifice?

But I think other things can be a sacrifice. They're easier to fool yourself about, they're not conventional, but I think they can be.

I think being a politician, even a successful one, can be a sacrifice - to your privacy, your comfort, your desire to live your life as you'd planned, and some people do it because it's the right thing to do.

[Obama apparently does not like campaigning]

I think resting instead of working and going for it, not because you want to, but because you think that will maximize your long term impact, can be a sacrifice.

I think doing cushy tech or meta work can be a sacrifice, if you had to tear yourself away from the work that was most personally meaningful to you, that ended suffering you could see with your own eyes, because something else was more important.

Maybe it is a magic power granted only to the Comet King. Not the power to hear the screams. But the power not to have to. Maybe that is what being the Comet King means.”

I want working effectively on the most important and pressing problems of the world to be easy. It's often not. It often causes people, stress, and anguish and guilt, fears of a breakdown, uncertainty about how to allocate resources, sometimes guilt at the money that they can spend on grants, or the difficulty of the decisions placed in their hands. I'm personally mostly having a great time, but the stakes are real, and I knew going in that there was a risk to my mental health.

I think that - taking a hit, or a hit in expectation, to your happiness or mental health - is a sacrifice.

For me, at least, it has been very helpful to see things this way. I’m not scrupulous by nature, I don’t tend to suffer from extreme guilt, and I like the ferocity of orienting towards moral obligations and doing the right thing. So when I’m scared or nervous or overwhelmed, it’s been a balm to think that not only are those feelings real, they are my sacrifice, they are what I have, with full endorsement and forethought, decided to experience to do what I think is the right thing. And it gives me strength and confidence to move forward, bolstered by my sense of righteousness and the feeling that I have a community behind and with me.

Now, pain is not the unit of effort, and sacrifice is not the unit of correctness. In addition, skepticism of all those cushy office jobs being some kind of sacrifice is allowed - it’s not as if it’s hard to convince yourself that you’re doing some difficult right thing when the correct move is skipped entirely over in your thinking. It’s just that it’s not always obvious which move is the sacrifice, especially not from the outside.