How is your work making the world a better place?

How will my work make you feel better?

I think what you're really asking is how can your work make the world a better place? And you're looking for ideas?

How many people do you need to "improve" to make you feel self-worth? 1? 10? A billion?

What do your customers think? Do they think their world is improved by spending their money with you? Do you think they're spending money with you because it makes them worse off?

In truth 99% of people make the world better, even at a small scale, even if they don't know it. That person directing traffic, flipping buyers, working on a production line, is contributing to society.

Even traditionally despised occupations (tax collector, adware programmer) perform vital functions that society needs to function well.

In our journey through life its common to reach a point where one seeks to find "significance". Naturally the first place you look for this is work. If you are functionally easily replaced (think payroll clerk) then it's easy to become despondent. But easy replacement doesn't make you less significant to the people who rely on you every month.

Equally you dismiss "paying the bills". As if your loved ones are not sufficient for "making the world better". Or as if the people receiving those bills are not sufficient. That waiter you tip, that grocery you buy, the mechanic who fixes your car - you lean on them for your life, and they benefit from your custom.

I'll close by suggesting that significance seldom comes from work. It comes from how you treat people. "Seeing" people, saying hello, treating them with humanity, that's how you make the world better. Thank people sincerely for the way they improve your life. Acknowledge the hidden people who make your life easy. (Go thank your payroll clerk.) Tell others how they are significant in your life, regardless of how menial their task for you is.

When you find the significance in others, you'll also find it in yourself.

I wish you well.

Work may enable altruism outside of your actual job. For example, I got fulfillment from sharing my journey publishing some open source software over the course of a few months. Having savings helped make that possible.

SMART criteria[1] can help to get out of a rut. "Making the world a better place" is very difficult to satisfy. How many people? What is better? How much better? I don't advocate for quantising abstract ideas in general but sometimes the thought process of coming up with a number and hitting it helps to get going.

My current dayjob involves me wrangling a clunky Java system written like FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition[2]. Keeping this abomination running and getting paid for it feels soulless. Yet I genuinely believe I'm able to stick to my values.

For example, there are 3 components tightly coupled to proprietary AWS systems (AWS Lambda and Simple Queue Service). I feel this has made the world a (very slightly!) worse place; Amazon to me represents the bad side of humanity (greed, scrupulousness). Furthermore, people new to the software dev industry may never know that it's possible to implement these kinds of systems using significantly simpler, portable designs without making a deal with the devil! My goal is to refactor the system to instead use the language's built-in concurrency primitives to perform the same work.

The next person who sees the refactored work can more easily take it and run with it without needing to know anything about AWS. That person doesn't need to care either; I can always share this story with others who I don't work with. Maybe AWS does something so egregious that it's distasteful even to company executives; I can confidently say that we're not as tied to AWS as we think.

I'm not changing the entire world for all eternity. But in a way I am changing my little tiny insignificant slice of this world today in ways that I hope to inspire even just 1 other person in their own tiny insignificant slice :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria [2]: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

I think usually this is difficult unless you "choose your own adventure". My attempt to do this is through various side projects, one of which is going relatively well (I at least shipped it!): https://techposts.eu

It's a tech news and jobs website focusing on Europe. I see it as an attempt to showcase and highlight all the good stuff going on in Europe that otherwise flies under the radar.

We need more optimism here, that's the idea anyway!

Tell me the company you work for and I can give you a few reasons why your work makes the world a better place. It is not a binary thing. Almost all work we do has some meaning no matter how boring or useless it may seem.

For example, lets take whatsapp. We can talk about how it erodes user privacy and has access to so much data and is more dangerous especially after being owned by FB. However, why do you think it became so big ? It helped connect you with anyone across the world in a second with incredible speed and accuracy. Before whatsapp, there was nothing remotely close (I know because I have family across the world and before whatsapp, it was always a battle to connect with them over a quick call).

So is whatsapp an evil company/product or did it make the world a better place ? You can say both depending on how you look at it. This argument can be made for almost all work in my opinion.