My Greatest Weakness? I’m Too Idealistic.
This post is a plea for help. After years of priding myself on my cynical circumspection, I’m worried that I might be an idealist.
Perhaps this is partly due to the excessive amount of time I spend on idealist.org. I am more concerned, though, by my inarticulate attempts to explain my desire to go into public service. At best, they prompt mutterings of “naïve.” At worst, someone will empathize with my dream of “changing the world.”
I don’t think I can change the world. I don’t even want to. This WSJ gig might have inflated my self-esteem, but my ego, let’s hope, will never go global.
Yet every time I describe my nonprofit impulses, I lapse into clichés. I can be a bit of a workaholic, so I want work that is worthy of that disease. I want to do something meaningful, something rewarding, something that I can fully believe in.
Sorry, I meant to warn you not to read this over lunch.
None of those clichés quite captures my sickeningly do-good aura, or the reality that hides behind it. Explaining my preference for nonprofit work, I’ve discovered, is kind of like explaining why my favorite color is blue. It’s just my personal taste, and it seems self-explanatory.
I’m aware that many nonprofits—and most politicians—are self-serving. I’d bet that some for-profit companies do more meaningful work than several devoted to the public good. Victorian philanthropists did as much harm as their militaristic contemporaries. Plenty, in their own ways, were more deplorable, and a disturbing number of modern nonprofits seem stuck in that era.
I have no intention to “save” anyone. It’s just that most of my interests contain the word “reform,” and injustice infuriates me … ahh, there I go again with the naïveté. How do I explain my passions without upsetting anyone’s digestive process?
Help me, Wall Street Journal readers. Avoid appeals to the morality of the free market, and we should be able to sort this out in the comments section.
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