There's Always a Future in Plastics

Around this time last year, my friends and I spent a lo of time talking about what it meant to "sell out." Was selling out entering the private sector or was it about settling for a job you weren't passionate about? At the time, we were still in the bright eyed stage of sending out resumes and we didn't realize just how long we would have to wait to hear so little. I liked this column by my classmates, but my friends and I typically took a less forgiving stance. To me, "selling out" was also taking a job that was "safe" rather than one that pushed me in some way.

That conversation seems very far away now, and it's hard for me to recapture why it felt so important to discuss at the time. What remains relevant is a conversation I had a few months prior to that conversation while in Tanzania about the choice between direct service, policy making and advocacy.

My friend Rachel always speaks about "activist division of labor." In its original incarnation, this meant that it was ok I'm not interested in spending my life working on saving the enviroment and it's fine she doesn't want to spend hers shaping policy towards the developing world. I think the division of labor argument can also apply to all the different roles people can play in developing and enacting the same policy. Academics and journalists get to shape and extend the conversation about the problems the world faces and the scope of the solutions. Legislators, lobbyists and advocacy groups develop a policy, and a third group of people carry out the policy.

I'm really unclear what group I'd like to be in. I think I've felt the most fulfilled when directly helping someone, and there's a slightly immature part of me that feels like I'll always be selling out a little bit unless I wind up handing out food in an IDP camp in the northern DRC. On the other hand, the "problematic" bells started sounding in my head as soon as I typed that. I think part of what is appealing about that is the level of deprivation invovled which makes it feel like a more heroic act even though my comfort level doesn't impact my efficacy. Then I remember everything I've read about the aid machine being self-perpetuated, etc. Farewell, Constant Gardener style fantasy. Stop raining on my daydream, Swarthmore College.

I also think I tend to get very frustrated with imperfect systems (this works just great in college but is a potentially unattractive and arrogant trait in a 22 year old, so I bit my tongue).They are neither as bad nor as avoidable as nama gomi. After volunteering for a campaign, my friend Jon and I would spend thirty minutes privately debriefing on their poor volunteer stewardship or inefficient allocation of flashlights. He'll make a good marine officer. Our friends got sick of our endless treatise on loopholes in the RA selection process. It was painful.

I credit some of this to my mother. I think my mother ran my third birthday party better than most government agencies are run. Therefore, I'm always left asking whether a thing would go better if my mother was running it. The answer is almost always yes.

Personal neuroses aside, I think people who spend their lives in direct service have to be very good emotional boundary setters. They have to be able to accept that they only have resources for a limited number of people, and can only do a limited amount for those people. I think I'd really struggle as, say, an English teacher in Tanzania. You can't teach everyone, and you can't give everyone shoes, and you can't feed everyone, and yet every day the barefoot and hungry would come into your classroom. Clearly, there are limits on resources no matter what, but I don't think I have the type of emotional strength required to set those limits every day without going insane and reinventing the facts.

My current job is a great opportunity and I'm glad to be able to learn so much! I think learning is the most valuable thing right now. In the long run, though, I want a job more interactive and direct than the one I have now. I think in general, I'm most effective and happiest one-one-one or with small groups.

I've been thinking about law school for a while. I enjoyed the tort and contract law parts of my law and econ class, which I'd been told was the "bad part" of law school. I happily ate, slept and breathed con law for the second semester of my senior year, so I think I'd enjoy law school. I also have this hope that law could be a good fit for me because a good lawyer can directly help their clients but they can also create precedents that shape legal policy in other cases. At best, it could be a way to help individuals while simaltaneously reshaping the framework that societies operate within, bridging the direct/indirect gap.

On the other hand, I don't know much about what international case law looks like, and professors give me the "it doesn't really exist" vibe. Maybe I'm just being naive, but I do believe we're going to see the development of a stronger international legal infastructure in the next decades and I'd like to do some of the building.

Sometimes I get the feeling all this ambition and life angst is sort of silly, a post college version of my seventeen year old self carefully examing my body in a mirror. I think maturity comes less from knowing who you are and what you want, and more about not feeling like those are the important questions. On the other hand, I do have to make big decisions about my future and graduate school in the next year, so it's impossible to entirely avoid.