Will Your Work Matter? Does it Now? How Do You Know?
This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot over the last few weeks. Does the work, content and material I produce provide some kind of lasting impact for those to come or who are here today. Things like this drive me to do more volunteer work like I currently do with a local high school or to push support towards local businesses I see that give back to the place that they reside in (versus them fostering a new community and isolating the per-existing community). It’s hard.
I’m not even talking about things that lead to payment. Money, and by extension, any form of debt, isn’t humane. There’s a book about this that I got randomly when I was at AFROPUNK Brooklyn from a small bookstore. This book confirmed a lot of the things that I assumed about money and I’m still working through it. I want you to analyze: if you didn’t get paid financially to do something to help someone to help someone, would you do it?
The easy answer is fuck yeah. But if it interferes with the ability for you to “maintain an optimal financial standing”, does it still count? This is the question I pose to myself whenever I get the random itch to go back into larger corporate environments. That sense of (more) security tho! That matched 401K tho! That free free food! All of that shit is nice. But the cost of what it takes to bring that to just you so you can make some investors’ dividends line up is gross.
I’m not trying to pitch my work-life balance as the “one true form”. On the contrary, I want you to first convince more of your colleagues that giving back is the way to go. A definition of giving back is needed but that’s a whole ass blog post.
How Do You Know?
How sure are you about the value and/or impact that you’re allegedly providing to people? I found this hard to measure at larger companies because the way business intelligence is set up, it was done solely in favor of the company. I understand deeply that this is the purpose of companies and what not. I also understand that companies are made up of people, though not with equal representation or say. That’s my way of saying that with the size and demand of profit that companies have, it’s not only difficult to determine if they help people but if they even give a fuck at all. I mean, take Facebook for example. They’ve positioned themselves as the world’s ultimate connector for people. The word ‘for’ is important here because if it was done for the people, it’d be between them. Instead here, it’s a way for advertisers and other groups to get more information about you and how to push garbage to your face. </rant>.
My entries are getting a bit ranty and I only partly apologize for that. I’m afraid that a lot of us are just accepting the state of affairs through performative activism and representation and not truly eager to disrupt the status quo (and not in the way that Silicon Valley describes it). I want us to be great. I want there to be more generations that see us as the spark that pushed forward.
I want you to be awesome to others.