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The Trouble With Trying to Change the World
A Personal Perspective: How to know when you're doing enough for the world.
Posted January 4, 2022 Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster
Key points
- People who work to make the world a better place often struggle with the question of whether they're doing enough.
- Define what is enough. The more you quantify your aspirations, the more likely you'll know, and feel satisfaction, when you reach them.
- Sometimes the better part of wisdom isn’t in improvement philosophies but acceptance.
I hear this a lot in my line of work: people saying they want to change the world. They want to leave an impact, a legacy, be an influencer. They want to know their work and their life make a difference. And this is tricky stuff. I have a poster in my office that says, “The trouble with trying to change the world is that weeks can go by and nothing happens,” just to tease me about my ambitions.
Anyone who wants to help the world, no less change it, will naturally come up against feeling inadequate to the task, uncertain whether they're doing enough, or certain that they're not. This may motivate you to step up your game, or it may stun you into inertia.
Burnout, as anyone involved in activism or advocacy will tell you, isn’t just the result of hard work or even overwork, but a sense of futility, the fear that all your hard work isn’t making enough of a difference.
But whether we're talking about doing enough for the world in the aggregate or the particular (your career, marriage, family, health), it’s extremely common for people to feel like they’re not doing enough with their time, talent, and resources, and the world’s problems just keep gathering force like storms offshore.
The hard truth is that the difference any of our individual lives is likely to make in terms of human history, evolution, consciousness, or suffering, is roughly equivalent to throwing a stone into a lake.
However, science tells us that because that stone is now lying on the bottom, the water level had to rise. Archimedes taught us that sitting in his bathtub. The rub is that you can’t measure it. The lake's too big. You have to take it entirely on faith that it matters that you’re here and doing your good works and that the water level will necessarily rise. But that's a faith that only begins where measurement leaves off.
Contrarily, it helps to define enough. If your mission is to change the world, how will you know when you’ve attained that goal? I remember a cartoon in the New Yorker showing a man carrying a briefcase emblazoned with the logo of a polling company. He stops suddenly on a crowded city street and says to no one in particular, “I just detected a slight shift in the public opinion.”
If you identify a problem, solve it, and it goes away, then you’ve done enough—whether it's fixing a broken appliance or a broken line of communication with someone. But with global problems, especially at their present scale and urgency—climate change, inequality, poverty—you won’t have that satisfaction. That is unless you find a way to make lasting Buddhistic peace with uncertainty and incompletion, which might involve the ongoing application of any number of salves—meditation, gratitude practice, a support group, or regular celebration of whatever you do manage to accomplish. But if a problem isn’t solved, then you haven’t done enough, and the chances of solving the world’s bottomless problems are spectacularly remote.
A friend of mine, David Lamott, author of Worldchanging 101, suggested that a more productive question than “Am I doing enough?" is “What is mine to do? Am I doing my part?” Or, as the theologian Frederick Buechner said, where does your deep gladness—your passion and gifts, your love—meet the world’s deep hunger?
Still, you have to quantify your aspirations (and thereby your sense of success). What does “change the world” mean to you? Technically, you already change the world just by existing, since your actions impact those around you. Each of us is a piece of “the world,” a single cell in the body politic, and the world isn't out there somewhere. If you change yourself, you change the world.
Saying you want to “change the world” or “make the world a better place” is like saying you want to earn “a ton of money.” How much? The more you quantify your goals, the more likely you'll know—and feel satisfaction—when you reach them.
Will you donate $1000 a year to your favorite charity, write a monthly letter to your Congress-person, bi-monthly blog posts about a social issue, weekly volunteering at the dog pound, a daily meditation practice to help you manage your attachment to outcome, or a regular contemplation of the impact your work makes in individual people’s lives—all of which are examples of “changing the world,” but far more quantifiable.
And try to avoid comparison. Everyone's threshold of what is “enough” of a contribution to the world is different. One person might take on multi-national corporations or federal laws, another might sponsor or adopt a child from a developing nation, and yet another might simply sweep the street in front of the shop every morning.
For some people, all the activism they can handle in this life is in trying to heal their own souls, though, by most accounts, this is the work of the world. Either way, you have to measure success by how far you've come from where you started, not compared to anyone else.
And don't underestimate your contributions, even if they don't register on any Richter scale of accomplishments. It all matters—the recycling, LED lightbulbs, electric cars, and random acts of kindness. They may be drops in the bucket, but that's how buckets get filled, drop by drop. Just because public opinion doesn't noticeably shift and no one alerts the President doesn't mean your efforts are wasted. Besides, service is as much a mindset as anything you actually do. It’s a way you live your life, ideally a continual responsiveness to all the small daily calls to care for the world and those in it.
Working on behalf of the environment or race relations is certainly service, but so is listening to a friend, doing self-care when you're exhausted after a day of storming the Bastille, and personally escorting insects out of your house in old yogurt containers rather than dispatching them with a rolled-up magazine. And so is working to understand your relationship to feeling like you’re enough, or not enough, or never enough—not in what you do, but in who you are.
But understand, too, that whatever wounds you've sustained in this regard, from family of origin or the culture at large, they may also be part of why you care about the world to begin with, that an affinity of wounds connects you to others, and where the world touches you in a personal way, you can find yourself responding, turning from sympathizer to activist.
But maybe it's human nature to feel perpetually unsatisfied. In an episode of the TV show Mad Men, a character asked, “What's happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness.” In other words, there's never enough, and it's hard to step off the hamster wheel. Harder still when you continually overlook or undervalue your contributions because you're busy looking for the next rung or impatient with the pace of progress, yours or anyone else's.
Granted, the world is full of complex problems that need solutions, that need activists and advocates with their hands on deck and their shoulders to the wheel, and the world never stops calling, never stops shouting to us from the sickroom and the cold calculus of the daily news. But having your shoulder to the wheel, your nose to the grindstone, your ear to the ground, and your hands on the plow is not, for long periods, the most comfortable position. Sometimes lying in the bathtub is. But how do you make peace with lying in the bathtub while Rome burns?
The fact is, there's really no other choice. Rome is always burning, and the world's problems are inexhaustible, whereas you are not. Sometimes the better part of wisdom isn’t in the philosophies of improvement but acceptance. If you’re constantly absorbed in trying to improve life, you might forget to live it as it is, and as you are, here and now, for better and for worse. And if you end up bitter and burned-out, you won't be doing anyone any good.
That is, much wisdom can be found in a bathtub, or any form of self-care and time-out: going inward can be going forward; you can experience progress even while standing still; and just as the ear needs "rests" when listening to music, and the eye and mind need the respite of paragraphs when reading a book, you need a place to linger and reflect in the onrushing of life with all its pressing problems, eddies into which you can occasionally turn your canoe from the current.
But when you're up to the top of your hip-waders in trying to change the world, a bubble bath might take more courage than you imagine, not just in getting yourself to stop, but because in those moments of respite you may well feel whatever grief is attached to your sense of insufficiency—the sheer enormity of the world’s problems and the achingly limited resources you bring to bear on them.
Maybe you have to surrender the infiniteness of your aspirations, and maybe that feels like defeat, but it’s really a kind of liberation. You know better where you stand with life, and it can help bring you back into the right relationship with yourself and the world.
