Spencer Greenberg

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1,056 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Spencer Greenberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah, we surveyed people who work on these high-impact cause areas like existential risk and, as you mentioned, animal welfare and AI.

And we ended up getting about 60 to 110 respondents, depending on the question, because some were optional and some people dropped out during the survey.

And the basic questions we were asking about are, do you experience psychological challenges in this work?

How big are those challenges?

What are the nature of those challenges?

And what kind of things have you done that you think might be helpful to yourself or that you think might help others?

And yeah, I think we have a lot of really interesting results from that.

Yeah.

So first note, these tend to be younger people that responded, typically aged about 25 to 45, and typically working for less than 10 years in the field.

What we found is that very few people were suffering from what you might call like a clinical disorder or like generalized anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder.

But the majority of people do seem to find this work psychologically challenging.

So it doesn't get to the point, usually it doesn't get to the point of full-blown depression or anxiety, but it doesn't mean it's easy.

And in fact, not only did most people say that they experienced at least somewhat anxiety

difficult psychological challenges around it.

But many people have even considered leaving or reducing their work in it because of these challenges.

Well, generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder reflect certain patterns in the mind that can be really painful and difficult, but they don't reflect all that can be really difficult psychologically.

So I think what we're seeing here is that people are struggling psychologically.

They're just not getting to the point of having those particular disorders.

So when we ran the survey, we asked people which of a variety of different psychological challenges they face.

from a list.

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