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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
by 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 agoPerfect is the enemy of good here I think :)
- kayodelycaon 5y agoI 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 agoThis 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 agoMy 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 agoThe 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.
- LarrySellers 5y agoI pick up trash in my neighborhood. It makes the neighborhood cleaner and more enjoyable for all. You might be overthinking this.