What do you currently do as a regular part of your life that improves the world? How does it work? What are you actually contributing?
I suppose it all depends on how you want to look at things. One could say that by doing my job okay, I relieve people of having to do tedious and repetitive work under abysmal working conditions, and I make people happy because their veggies and fruits at the supermarket look bright and sparkly. It might even sound like I do improve the world.
On the other hand, I could also point out that by doing my job okay, I make people (who usually live in already weak economies) unemployed, and I contribute to the growing problem of people rejecting perfectly good and tasty produce just because there's a minor, purely aesthetic defect, making me sound like I'm amongst the most despicable creatures to roam this earth.
I'm not quite sure which side to pick. Maybe I'll just go and pretend that my karma is neutral in this.
Other than that, I do small maintenance on the apartment building I'm living in on a voluntary basis, so that the other people living there have working lights in the hallway, a working heating system and a door that actually keeps out the baddies. But since I have a personal interest in that as well (it's also my lights, and my heating, and my door), and since I'm not doing it out of the goodness of my heart but because noone else will do it, I'll ignore this as well.
So no, unfortunately, I don't do good. I try not to do bad though. It's a start :-/
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Date: 2008-09-08 01:07 pm (UTC)I suppose it all depends on how you want to look at things. One could say that by doing my job okay, I relieve people of having to do tedious and repetitive work under abysmal working conditions, and I make people happy because their veggies and fruits at the supermarket look bright and sparkly. It might even sound like I do improve the world.
On the other hand, I could also point out that by doing my job okay, I make people (who usually live in already weak economies) unemployed, and I contribute to the growing problem of people rejecting perfectly good and tasty produce just because there's a minor, purely aesthetic defect, making me sound like I'm amongst the most despicable creatures to roam this earth.
I'm not quite sure which side to pick. Maybe I'll just go and pretend that my karma is neutral in this.
Other than that, I do small maintenance on the apartment building I'm living in on a voluntary basis, so that the other people living there have working lights in the hallway, a working heating system and a door that actually keeps out the baddies. But since I have a personal interest in that as well (it's also my lights, and my heating, and my door), and since I'm not doing it out of the goodness of my heart but because noone else will do it, I'll ignore this as well.
So no, unfortunately, I don't do good. I try not to do bad though. It's a start :-/