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> You don’t need to fix everything, just make the world better by being in it. I wish more people would follow this advice. I've made it a habit to try to mak

> You don’t need to fix everything, just make the world better by being in it. I wish more people would follow this advice. I've made it a habit to try to make the world an infinitesimally better place every day. It doesn't always work out, but the effort is a huge boon to my mental health and maybe I succeed and the world is a better place.

ThinkBeat 5y ago
This is a demanding thing to achieve. The road to hel is paved with good intentions. Philospy spends a lot of literature on how to tell if what you are doing is making the world any better? History, current history is filled with examples of "making it better" and doing enormous damage. Is your intent when you do the action what is important? Or is it how your action is received in the moment? Or what a spectator might conclude. Or is it the eventual consequences of your action that is important? Or none of the above. Your intent is selfish. I want to be a person who makes the world a better place. Do you do so in a vacuum? You do the act, and then never ever speak about it to anyone. Or is the real goal the adoration of those you "tell"? (Innocently and self deprecating of course) If you were (or are) an evangelical Chrisitan, sharing the word of God, and saving souls would be the greatest good you could ever accomplish. "Today I shared the Word with 5 people. " Those 5 people may have found a person rambling about God to be unwelcome. Annoying. Rude. Or maybe one was in a deep crisis, and he was moved and accepted Christ and his life took meaning from it. His life got better and afterwards he kept a good job, got married, had wonderful kids. Or a person who was rambled at has terrible trauma from childhood from being sexually abused by a Catholic priest and this forceable reminder brings him over the edge, and he kills himself 20 minutes later in a public toilet. Maybe one is a woman who was viciously demonized by protesters for having an abortion two weeks ago. This most unwelcome vocal assault by another right-wing misogynist is what finally drives her to take a stand and gets involved in politics, changes her major to political science and many years Later she is a senator who casts a deciding vote in something she think is wonderful Did this evangelical guy make the world better?
- a_t48 5y ago
  Perfect is the enemy of good here I think :)
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  I generally work on a smaller scale and usually in regards to the people around me. Did I help? Inspire creativity? Say something kind? Say something that needed to be said? Learn something? It doesn’t take much. Did you make someone else’s existence better? You can still do big things, but don’t forgot the small ones. They matter too.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    This is a more radical practice than most being presented here I think. Optimizing things is a cultural norm and value for most people likely reading this. I see a lot of my peers focus on optimizing their "good output" on some scale or metric, but ignore or even devalue this one. This one that, in my experience, also has a lot more daily challenges of difficult virtues like forgiveness and humility.
    - randomswede 5y ago
      My xmas gift to one of the other teams in the company was improving one of their alerts, so that it fires when there is an observable problem with the monitored thing, instead of firing pretty much constantly. Makes the alert more useful and saves them from alert fatigue.
- ctdonath 5y ago
  The intent of "make the world a bit better every day" is colloquially understood to refer to things like picking up more than just your garbage, making choices that add less tragedy to the commons, and generally being nice to people even if they're not nice to you. Deliberately taking "make the world a bit better every day" off to some demeaning tangent tearing down others by wild scenarios designed to discourage does not "make the world a bit better every day". "...2000 years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..." Yeah, Douglas Adams got that bit right.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

This is a demanding thing to achieve. The road to hel is paved with good intentions. Philospy spends a lot of literature on how to tell if what you are doing is making the world any better? History, current history is filled with examples of "making it better" and doing enormous damage. Is your intent when you do the action what is important? Or is it how your action is received in the moment? Or what a spectator might conclude. Or is it the eventual consequences of your action that is important? Or none of the above. Your intent is selfish. I want to be a person who makes the world a better place. Do you do so in a vacuum? You do the act, and then never ever speak about it to anyone. Or is the real goal the adoration of those you "tell"? (Innocently and self deprecating of course) If you were (or are) an evangelical Chrisitan, sharing the word of God, and saving souls would be the greatest good you could ever accomplish. "Today I shared the Word with 5 people. " Those 5 people may have found a person rambling about God to be unwelcome. Annoying. Rude. Or maybe one was in a deep crisis, and he was moved and accepted Christ and his life took meaning from it. His life got better and afterwards he kept a good job, got married, had wonderful kids. Or a person who was rambled at has terrible trauma from childhood from being sexually abused by a Catholic priest and this forceable reminder brings him over the edge, and he kills himself 20 minutes later in a public toilet. Maybe one is a woman who was viciously demonized by protesters for having an abortion two weeks ago. This most unwelcome vocal assault by another right-wing misogynist is what finally drives her to take a stand and gets involved in politics, changes her major to political science and many years Later she is a senator who casts a deciding vote in something she think is wonderful Did this evangelical guy make the world better?

a_t48 5y ago
Perfect is the enemy of good here I think :)
kayodelycaon 5y ago
I generally work on a smaller scale and usually in regards to the people around me. Did I help? Inspire creativity? Say something kind? Say something that needed to be said? Learn something? It doesn’t take much. Did you make someone else’s existence better? You can still do big things, but don’t forgot the small ones. They matter too.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  This is a more radical practice than most being presented here I think. Optimizing things is a cultural norm and value for most people likely reading this. I see a lot of my peers focus on optimizing their "good output" on some scale or metric, but ignore or even devalue this one. This one that, in my experience, also has a lot more daily challenges of difficult virtues like forgiveness and humility.
  - randomswede 5y ago
    My xmas gift to one of the other teams in the company was improving one of their alerts, so that it fires when there is an observable problem with the monitored thing, instead of firing pretty much constantly. Makes the alert more useful and saves them from alert fatigue.
ctdonath 5y ago
The intent of "make the world a bit better every day" is colloquially understood to refer to things like picking up more than just your garbage, making choices that add less tragedy to the commons, and generally being nice to people even if they're not nice to you. Deliberately taking "make the world a bit better every day" off to some demeaning tangent tearing down others by wild scenarios designed to discourage does not "make the world a bit better every day". "...2000 years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..." Yeah, Douglas Adams got that bit right.