When you realize that denying people life’s necessities for being poor is a form of killing… Then pretty much every job starts to feel like working in a death camp “just following orders.”

(since every job that’s actually necessary involves requiring money in exchange for necessities. even if the job is for a nonprofit or tax-funded, you have to make decisions about who the money goes to help, and if there is any limit on your resources, your decisions will deny necessities to someone).

So unless you can make a living off totally unnecessary work, the only way to cope with that is to use your position as ethically as you can.

Find ways to let someone get what they need, whenever possible. Even if sometimes it means not doing things the way you’re officially supposed to.

And depending on how far you take that, it might mean your good deeds have to be kept completely secret, forever.

Which may mean that, depending on how history is written, you may be remembered as…. one of the monsters who were “just following orders.”

And that’s probably even the best way for history to be written.

Because it’ll mean that “monsters just following orders” are considered a bad thing– bad enough to be worth teaching about in history.

Which will mean the monsters giving the orders didn’t win.

But it doesn’t mean anyone will ever recognize you for being good.

I think a lot about this lately. About this theme of the conflict between “being good in my own eyes” and “being seen as good by others.”

Sometimes in a work context, like above. But also pretty often in the context of strangers on the Internet judging me as a whole person based on one thing they saw me say…. and how to not feel like total crap about that.

Being good in your own eyes is not always what matters most in terms of real goodness. But it usually matters more than the judgment of strangers who know almost nothing about what you’ve actually done.

But at the same time, it also pretty much never determines any of the real-world rewards for being good. All of that is determined by how other people perceive what you’ve done.

So actually doing the most good you can… will often come with no recognition, and maybe outright punishment, from a world that makes its own conclusions about how good you are.

Which is a hard thing to live with. But I’m trying.