#249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world
episodePreviously titled “Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 6, 2026
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How common are psychological challenges for people working on existential risks and what did the survey find?
Often when people are doing things like constantly checking news that's stressing them out, they're engaging in weird coping behaviors that actually don't allow their brain to become more okay with the thing. Imagine you had a magic dial and you could control how much of different emotions you would feel. Take your fear. Would you dial it down to zero? I think I'm prone to throwing more hours at things. That is not the best way to be more productive. It's like thinking that the way that you win a race is by going at maximum speed at every single moment. No, that's actually how you get injured or burn out. Failing to accept your limitations can actually be disastrous towards the goals that you care about.
There's actually a mathematical equation we came up with. It's about like how much value you produce and it splits into three factors.
Today, I'm speaking with Spencer Greenberg. Spencer is the founder and CEO of clearthinking.org and co-author of the book, The 12 Lovers, the complete psychological toolkit for improving your life, which is actually being released today. So congratulations, Spencer. Thanks for coming on.
Thanks so much for having me.
So at 80,000 Hours, we ask people to think deeply about some genuinely very distressing things. So pandemics, AI, human extinction, factory farming. But taking these issues seriously is... very difficult for multiple reasons, including for me personally. So they're hard emotionally. You know, we're talking about suffering and death on an enormous scale. They're also really hard to truly comprehend. I think kind of the human brain struggles to actually fathom the things that we at ADK think might be true. So, you know, everyone on earth might die in the next decade or sooner. Humans and other sentient beings might suffer extraordinarily at some point or already. Even in the best case, the world might transform, maybe for the better, but beyond recognition in the span of a few years, which despite that being a positive thing, I still find very scary.
So I think all of that makes thinking about these issues emotionally fraught and also epistemically fraught. And some of these issues are kind of further exacerbated when you decide to spend your career trying to solve these problems. So, you know, we have to grapple with the fact that we might be able to help and every moment we spend playing board games or on vacation is time that we don't spend trying to reduce existential risk or help animals that are suffering. There's also just so much uncertainty about these risks. So we might kind of simultaneously believe our work has incredibly high stakes, but also maybe we're wrong about the whole AI thing and we're all wasting our careers. Some of us have to decide whether to have kids in the next few years or delay or skip it entirely because, you know, maybe the next few years could be the most important ones in our careers.
And we have to grapple with the fact that we think AI, pandemics, factory farming and other issues are kind of massive world problems when many of our friends and relatives don't understand why we think that or don't care enough to change their behavior. And working on these problems can also be a source of incredible meaning. So there's a big positive too, which we'll talk about. But I think we want to give some kind of airtime to the way that this is costly, both to kind of normalize some of these issues, to talk about some things that can help. And then also, I think, yeah, just to be like, Thank you for working on these problems anyways. We see that you're doing that and it's hard and we would like to help how we can.
So yeah, I guess to start, do any of these things resonate with you? Do you struggle with any of them personally?
Yeah, absolutely. It resonates with me. And I think we should acknowledge these are incredibly difficult topics to work on psychologically. You know, we have constantly changing things in the AI space. I can absolutely relate to the fear that this could go really badly on many different levels from like, you know, very...
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
How common are psychological challenges for people working on existential risks and what did the survey find?
0:00–26:30
2
Why does doomscrolling and hypervigilance worsen anxiety and how can you limit news exposure?
26:30–1:05:29
3
How do people cope with fear of death and existential risk?
1:05:29–1:09:11
4
What strategies help preserve relationships when others think you're alarmist?
1:09:11–1:19:59
5
How should you balance personal values like family and wellbeing with high-impact work?
1:19:59–1:31:05
6
What practical tools and habits did the survey and book recommend to avoid burnout?
1:31:05–2:09:20
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from 80,000 Hours Podcast
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#252 – Owain Evans on accidentally training AI models to be evil
#251 – The UK's former head AI safety scientist on how to solve alignment before superintelligence arrives | Geoffrey Irving
#250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong