A Quotidian Approach to Serving Others
It’s of great personal importance to me to remember 2020 keenly in this new year. Yes, it was the year that COVID-19 changed things profoundly, and there’s a popular sentiment on social media and in the workplace of wanting to wash our hands of and forget 2020 as soon as possible. I fully acknowledge the seriousness of the pandemic and its devastating effects, though it’s important to note that I have so far had a pretty cushy time of it. The first main idea I invite myself and you to consider here is that COVID-19 could end up doing far less harm by certain key metrics than human beings have inflicted on each other through racist, sexist, ableist, and other discriminatory beliefs and systems. As just one example, for how many centuries is COVID-19 going to be a serious problem for humanity? As many as the destructive aspects of colonialism or failing to solve the problem of poverty? With vaccines coming out a year into the pandemic, that seems very unlikely. The second main idea that I invite us to consider is what personal next actions we can take toward bringing about the best possible outcomes for all people, regardless of features that have historically been justification to treat some groups of people worse than others. This is especially empowering to think about if we’re not personally in a position to help the COVID-19 situation more than just following safety best practices.
I don’t know anyone else’s life well enough to be able to answer this question for anyone but myself. This past year I gave thought to how I’m specially positioned to improve outcomes in other peoples’ lives. I am fortunate to belong to a few different professional communities, and the more I thought about it, the more nuance and richness I found in the options available to me. I also discovered that there was an enormous amount of low-hanging fruit around me when it came to making opportunities more accessible, especially in the aerospace industry.
It’s important to address the reasonable question of how sustainable it is to make career-long or lifelong commitments to engaging with the social problems we’ve inherited from past generations. Burnout is real and dangerous. It would also be net unhelpful, in my opinion, for a person to use so much of their resources to help others that they end up depleting themselves into needing support, in turn. But I’ve found that the risk of this among people with many advantages in life is often (greatly) exaggerated. It really doesn’t take much time anymore to search for and donate to worthy organizations providing professional development to minorities, for example. It doesn’t take much time to connect with people of diverse backgrounds on LinkedIn. It doesn’t take much time to write an email offering ideas or advice to a young professional from a minority group. Heck, it doesn’t take me a long time to write this blog post. I still spend the overwhelming majority of my energy, time, and money progressing my own career and interests.
If you, personally, decide to care enough to act to bring about more just distribution of resources—jobs, compensation, child care, health care, and so on—you will come up against the hard and essential question of what you can do that will actually help improve situations. I take a practical, engineering-type of approach to generating answers to this question. It’s worth noting that this is a very open-ended question, and there are many types of approaches that might be effective.
If you, personally, decide that you are not going to act as above, I suggest that you don’t waste your time feeling guilty and/or making a show of guilt. Guilt doesn’t serve anyone. At best, it can indirectly lead to benefit by motivating a person to act in a way that’s different from the way that brought about the guilt. Own your decision. Dedicating yourself to bringing about your own well being, especially if you face many obstacles, can still be a life worth respect, in my book.
As I promised in the title of this post, I will speak to an approach that emphasizes improving outcomes of situations when trying to help others. Quickly, an example of an attempt to help that does not exemplify this approach: posting on social media about how outraged or sad or appalled you are at the discriminatory actions of others. I’m not claiming that this has no effect. I’m claiming that there are many actions that would go further toward helping—and many of them have about the same or even less cost to one’s energy and time. Why? After you’ve vented on social media, targets of harm have not been concretely helped. Maybe your social status will cause people you know to not be overtly discriminatory, which is probably a step forward, but it’s not along the best route toward positive change.
This approach starts with a calm sense of compassion and accountability, for both the person trying to help and for the intended recipients of that help. Start by considering yourself accountable for all the opportunities to help that exist or could exist in your day-to-day. I don’t identify all of these in my own life by any stretch of the imagination, nor do I follow up on all the ones I do identify. Identifying them is a practice that can become an effortless habit. The goal is not some theoretical 100% success rate, but simply more awareness and action than you had the day before.
To me, holding others accountable means avoiding giving away freebies. By this, I don’t mean that you should engage in quid pro quo generosity. I mean that, to be of greatest use to them in the long-term, the situations you help others into should require some effort or commitment from them. Expose people to opportunities, but don’t eliminate all the work to achieve them. To oversimplify with a platitude, this means teaching people how to fish for themselves instead of giving them fish, whenever feasible. Giving fish is still generous and probably the result of many noble feelings. And if someone is going to die immediately if you don’t give them a fish, probably best to give them a fish. You are certainly not a “bad person” for giving non-starving people fish (e.g. providing ongoing disaster aid or giving money to panhandlers) instead of teaching them to fish. What makes this an ethically inferior approach on balance, to my view, is that the recipient of the help is far better off, in the long-term, for knowing how to fish than for having some fish in the present yet not knowing how to fish. Note that it’s still possible to do a lot of harm even with the “teach-to-fish” approach, so great care is still needed before and while attempting. There are examples of NGOs, for example, that have gotten involved in communities with the goal of creating community self-sufficiency and arguably left a worse mess in their wake.
To summarize this approach to helping: Focus on the opportunities that do or could exist in your small, daily life. At first, just practice looking for them. When you identify one, consider the range of possible outcomes associated with intervening to the best of your ability in that moment. Foremost, aim for the outcome in which you do no harm. If you think there’s a reasonable chance you can do better than that, make clear to yourself what that better outcome is and make a plan for how to bring it about. This is a great time to double-check your thinking for shaky assumptions or missed information. Once you’ve done that, just act. It might not go as well as planned. That’s okay. Reflect, learn, and keep working.
I’ll leave you with a worked example from my own life to demo this process. I’m lucky enough to get to go to aerospace conferences for my job. At each mingling session between the presentations, I aim to find one person who’s looking for a job. Regardless of who that person turns out to be, I ask for their contact info and request to connect on LinkedIn or send a quick email with suggestions for opportunities and the application process (I even save time by customizing a stock message saved to my email and hard drive!). I have consent to make this contact, so presumably it does no harm. If it eventually helps them toward a job, then it helps them to fish. Some people I’ve ended up interacting with more extensively, e.g. if they were specifically interested in the company I work for. Some people I’ve not been in touch with since. The cumulative load of this practice on my life is therefore light with potentially high impact; I was already going to be at the conferences and talk to people, and after that I add maybe an average of 5 extra minutes of email per week. But even in just three years I’ve been pretty directly responsible for multiple people getting work, interviews, or meeting prominent people in the industry.
[Aside: An important detail in the above paragraph is that I don’t specifically select people to mentor based on external characteristics; anyone looking for a job gets my attention. There are a couple driving reasons for this. The first is that, while you can make probabilistically better or worse guesses about someone’s background based on external characteristics, any individual might or might not conform with statistical trends. For example, there definitely are people of a racial minority group who had very advantageous starts in life in terms of education and parental income. There are also white people who come from poverty and resulting difficulties. Another reason is that I think it’s valuable for women to mentor men and to not only focus on the (very important!) work of mentoring other women; it gets both groups of people used to that power dynamic. It makes me so, so happy when a man feels comfortable asking me for math/other technical advice. I’ve noticed in my professional life that some men, though certainly not all, and maybe a minority, appear surprised or uncomfortable or even passive aggressive when they realize that I am better than them at math or other technical skills or make more money than they do. Importantly, I’ve seen them not act this way around more-powerful men.]
As far as my personal donations go, I skew them toward organizations that work to help others help themselves, though I do give smaller ongoing amounts to organizations that serve immediate needs, such as food banks. With more substantial surplus income from my job that I’m also lucky and frugal enough to have, I donate to organizations like SheEO that provide startup investments to women entrepreneurs who have a responsibility to use that money to grow their businesses. And always, I aim for improvement with a willingness to accept outcomes that seem suboptimal; it helps me stay motivated and moving.