Why I changed my mind about volunteering
Hi everyone
I have a piece today I’m glad to finally be able to share with you. It’s been a long project in the works, and more of a personal one. Probably the most personal thing I’ve written since my motherhood dread essay last year. It was also inspired by a note I received from a reader last year! Your comments and questions really can send me down some long, generative rabbit holes :)
The piece is about individual action — and how I, like so many in my generation and younger, came to see activities like volunteering, charity, and modifying our personal behavior as “ineffective” at best when it comes to social change, and a harmful distraction at worst. We put systemic change on a pedestal, and it had greater costs to society and ourselves than I think anyone really anticipated.
This is an essay that has taken me in many different directions over the last ten months, and I definitely ended the project thinking differently about social change than when I started. I think a lot of being in my thirties so far has involved reassessing things I felt so sure of in my 20s, which can be generally disorienting and strange. I’m sure I’ll look back on this essay one day and think about it differently, too.
You can read the piece here! And maybe I’ll follow up later this week with some additional reflections and thoughts on feedback.
I read your piece on Vox the other day, thank you for writing it! It's something I have been putting a lot of thought into, and had decided that whether it was "helpful" or not, I wanted to do more service work. I feel like your essay pushed me over the edge.
I love this take! I saw something recently from a website that helps people find high impact do good jobs that they don’t recommend teaching as a “high impact, do good” job because you only influence a small amount of people and don’t have a huge impact. Even though education is one of the most important things to a young persons life…..
I think the emphasis on systemic and policy change make things seem really hard and impossible. Sometimes it’s just nice to do good things and be in service to others on a personal level. Thanks for the article :)