Notes from searching for meaning in work

I'm trying to find out what to do with my life. Writing code and managing doesn't seem to be it anymore.

Therefore, enjoy my notes from a couple hours of good old-fashioned internet reading. its not even slightly finished, so be warned.

• recently found the site lesswrong. it has this post which i really like
  • pick a direction, not a goal
  • exploit your natural motivations
  • i think i want to work with people, in some capacity. interpersonal stuff matters a lot to me
• that led me to read more on lesswrong, and discovered the section of "inspirational intro posts" which included this
  • your feelings aren't representative of severity, they can lie to you, its hard to comprehend scale and large numbers, and thus your feelings don't scale
  • basically talks about how to change your mind about caring, that it's not important to feel that you care, but to take some positive action anyway
• that led to reading more about effective altruism
  • i had heard of it, but only loosely
• related: charitable giving effectively
  • It's important to give to the right causes because your dollar can be significantly more impactful if you give to a charity or organization that is well-run and efficiently managed
  • charity navigator is a place to evaluate charity effectiveness & overhead
  • give to the right causes
• found 80000 hours blog, and ordered their free book about how to find a meaningful career.
  • i bet the book is just the same as the career guide online, but we'll see
• career guide: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/introduction
• 80k hours career guide part 1 - job satisfaction:

If this were a normal career guide, we’d start by getting you to write out a list of what you most want from a job, like “working outdoors” and “working with ambitious people.” The bestselling career advice book of all time, What Color is Your Parachute, recommends exactly this. The hope is that, deep down, people know what they really want.

However, research shows that although self-reflection is useful, it only goes so far.

You can probably think of times in your own life when you were excited about a holiday or party — but when it actually happened, it was just OK. In the last few decades, research has shown that this is common: we’re not always great at predicting what will make us most happy, and we don’t realise how bad we are.

• tl;dr the whole "follow your passion" idea is flawed
• 80k hours part 2 - impact
  • if you want to do high-impact work, you probably need to do something unconventional. like being a doctor in a less-developed country is a much bigger impact than doing it in the US or UK, because there are fewer doctors and the need is higher