Take, Take, Take

I'm using the title of my favorite song on The White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan album to illuminate a sudden, shocking realization I recently had:

I've gone from being an incredibly giving kid to an incredibly selfish adult.

Okay, so I'm being a little bit hard on myself.  After all, most acts of charity are, at the core, selfish; the person doing them gets SOMETHING out of it, and that something can be exptremely important to them.  But in grade school, I used to do a lot of things related to community service: class office, conflict mediation, peer counseling, newspaper, etc etc.  I wasn't paid to do any of those things.  Now as an adult, I lack those outlets I once had. 

About the only thing I freely give are my feelings and thoughts on this page.  It's not that I don't think OP contributions are important.  But no matter how passionately I write here or how important I think this is, I can't honestly say that I write here more for other people than I write for myself. 

So what happened? Well, in college I rebelled against being the always-busy Big Man On Campus.  Michigan is huge, and I was happy just to fit in.  It was comforting to be part of the crowd...but I never quite was.  I met a ton of people; I constantly encountered people who knew me on sight even when I had no idea who they were; and I was in a band that played a few times at parties, bars and on the steps of the Grad Library. 

Then I got out of undergrad.  All of a sudden, I didn't have school to conveniently hook me up with activities that helped me serve my community while already bonded by that same community through attending school.  I didn't have a publication to volunteer for.  I didn't have any of that stuff - and I was either too lazy or too clueless to think about how much more effort it would take to keep doing those things once I finished school.  Actually, that's not true either -- I had intended on working in social services, but obviously that didn't end up happening.  Grad school was a wash - everyone was a commuter, and nobody in my program seemed to care very much about the CUNY community.  My current vocation definitely helps people...but it helps my company's bottom line just as much.  I'm involved in a profession that does both equally: I help thousands of average working people get matched to jobs they need/want, and I help my company by turning away a bunch of them who are poor fits.  Is that enough?  Is that even a sacrifice? 

Then again, was what I was doing before really a sacrifice, either?  In high school, I made some of my closest friends from being a class officer, doing conflict mediation and the like.  Half my closest friends did track and field with me.  I had some awesome experiences.  I got the popularity and glory of being a leader in my community; believe it or not, people actually looked up to me then.  Even in college, my best friend was the editor-in-chief of the only publication I worked on.  One of my roommates was the associate editor.  Sure, the bands were volunteer.  We never got paid.  But there's no way I could call the band a community service.  It was way too fun just to be in a performing band for me to make that claim. 

Which brings me back to the question: am I doing enough? 

I don't think that should even be the question.  The bottom line is this: I could be doing more than writing on OP and acting as an amateur therapist to the people I know.  My capacity to make an impact is far greater than I'm achieving now.

So now I need to figure out what more I want to do -- what additional activity I feel strongly enough about to fit into my life.  And I might need some input from you to do it.  What should I do?  It's something to think about. 

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