London GWWC group co-lead: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/london
Organiser of the EY Effective Altruism workplace group and EA London Quarterly Review coworking sessions.
Original EA Taskmaster https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9qcnrRD3ZHSwibtBC/ea-taskmaster-game
In my day job, I'm an accountant turned product person in tax technology.
+1 Thank you for writing this!
I'd add that this is why I liked working for a big corporate right out of university.
Opportunity to make lots of sideways moves between different career paths without needing to apply for jobs externally. I just needed to network internally (easier on a global shared MS Teams) and ask if I could try stuff out.
Over 5 years and 1 uni internship at EY, I did:
Lots of variety and lots of support which is good because I'm personally quite risk averse.
I'm very lucky to love what I do and I credit being able to try out lots of things out in a low stakes way.
I read this more like the guy was lonely and wanted community so was looking for some kind of secular religion to provide grounding to his life.
I personally think people overrate people's stated reasons for extreme behaviour and underrate the material circumstances of their life. In particular, loneliness https://time.com/6223229/loneliness-vulnerable-extremist-views/
(would genuinely be interested to hear counter arguments to this! I'm not a researcher so honestly no idea how to go about testing that hypothesis)
I enjoyed this, thanks for writing. I definitely think the wrong people read Ayn Rand and Nietzsche.
For those (like me) that had the opposite inclination towards domination and shame (rather than sacrifice and guilt), I'd recommend the Tao Te Jing.
It's a lot about accepting your fundamental lack of control over the world while balancing it with your individual agency.
(The Stephen Mitchell version is my favourite out of the translations I've read but apparently is not the most accurate translation: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html)
Sorry to hear that you're having a rough time!
When I'm feeling like this, I find that the only thing that helps is actually finishing a project end-to-end so I feel momentum.
Something I intrinsically think is valuable but wasn't going to get done otherwise. (Like improving wikis or cleaning up a mess in a park).
Going as small as possible while still being satisfying helps remind me that there are things within my control and people around me that I can help.
I also liked this post from FarmKind
I personally think of it similarly to wearing my pledge pin irl. I don't use emojis to signal anything else.
Imo I'd only really push you to add it on LinkedIn:
Great work making this happen!