Social work is a waste of time
Have you come to that point in your life where you have started thinking about people other than you? To think of contributing to the larger good of humanity in whatever way you can?
It must be an excellent thing to do; helping others so that they can have opportunities too. Being there for someone who doesn’t have it as easy as you. But here is a short case for you to keep in mind before actually doing any kind of social work.
Is it actually true that one does social work because one is selfless and altruistic? Or is it just the mind tricking you into doing something that makes evolutionary sense, no matter how hard it is for the short term?
Whenever someone does social work they mostly do it in exchange for nothing but satisfaction to their mind and heart. Whether your work results in any real change or not, the satisfaction is pretty real and you spend all the time trying to convince yourself that you do it for others and that your contribution means something. Isn’t satisfaction a personal gain?
Even if your social work makes no permanent change in how things work, you still feel satisfied personally when you go home.
It is not the result that makes people happy in social work, it is the act.
I believe that social work should not be this. An attempt to have personal satisfaction and to live in the glory of vanity and pride. If your work does little to change the actual conditions of the world where generations after generations go through the same problems, then what did you really achieve?
Until and unless, of course, you only do it for personal satisfaction with no particular wish to change people’s lives.
If one is bent on doing real work to help society become better then one must think long term. Only large-scale, permanent, long-term changes in the law, the system and the organisations or institutions can do real good. All else is just a waste of time to feel good about oneself. Or only a temporary solution that distracts and takes away resources from real permanent solutions.
Social work should be mainly aimed to improve things that ensure those future generations that come after us do not face the same problems as our generation.
And if your work isn’t aiming for that, it isn’t as impactful as it can be.
Sure, it feels good to see the smile on someone’s face when you help them. But the permanence of such acts is far more important than whatever you do on a case-by-case basis.
An example would be to teach or feed people. In most countries, it is a fundamental right of citizens. And if that is the case then instead of feeding or teaching people yourself, maybe it makes far more sense to ensure that the government agency or institute responsible for education and health actually does their job.
Or going even further, I would say that any kind of social work that one does almost always is a problem caused by the absence of a law or because of the weakness of one already existing. I believe that the only reason for a government to exist is to ensure that individuals won’t have to do social work at all.
All these impermanent acts of social work are more harmful than good. After all, teaching is best done by professional teachers and food is not something for which anybody should rely on you to show up.
Social work that truly matters is almost always of the boring kind. One where you can’t post about it on social networks, where most people would think you are doing nothing at all and where recognition would be rare, if not nonexistent.
It is a futile attempt, to say the least; an abomination to one’s true potential if you are no more than an etching when you really can be a monument of great acts.
Thanks to Deepak for reading the draft of this.
