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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

Some people don't have a choice. It sounds lovely to have anything else in your life worth taking seriously, but that's not an opportunity that is available to everybody.

What if you have no community, no chosen family, no friendly acquaintances, and you know that will never change? If your choices are essentially between dedication to work and dying of despair in an empty room, what's wrong with choosing the path that tries to help those who will follow?

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Is this a thought experiment? How can you know you will never have a community, chosen family, nor friendly acquaintances? You can work on gaining those just like you can work on a career.

yeah but the people who are on hackernew either don't care or don't know how to begin working on those things.

What if you spent 80000 hours on your mental health instead of this? You do have a choice

If someone spent 80000 hours on their mental health 8 hours a day, they would be 30 years older having contributed nothing to the world.

I would assume that for most people, "spending time on your mental health" is not something you do in solitary as a 9-to-5 job. It is more likely to mean building friendships at work or elsewhere, working towards meaningful goals, and leaving time to rest your mind and body. If this precludes a 100% dedication to some startup idea, then that's just something to accept about onself. Everything else will just lead to nothing but burnout, which kills all capacity to contribute anyway. Stuff like having a positive influence on the people you meet can also be a contribution, and there can be personal value and gratification even outside of "contributions", such as simply learning something new (maybe even something without economic value). Personally, I feel like it's highly arguable whether yet another SV-style startup is likely to result in a net positive contribution to the world anyway. Often, the drive to optimize everything for productivity seems to stem more from a need to prove ones worth to oneself and a lottery player's fantasy of riches. I commend everyone that takes their inspiration from more than those things, in business or outside.

That sounds great to me. We need more mentally healthy people.

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