As someone who is currently still in education for their degree looking at the current (and likely future) economic and societal outlook, it seems like employment in fields that cause/perpetuate negative issues in the world (Big Tech/Military-Industrial Complex, industries contributing to climate change, predatory sales/financial firms) continue to maintain strong employment availability and salaries as time goes on.
However, fields that have a neutral or beneficial impact on society and the world (Medical care, Food service, public infrastructure, humanitarian aid work, environmental research), either don’t have enough available positions that people are able to transition into, have worsening working conditions due to poor management or limited resources, or just don’t pay a living wage to most who work there.
I’ve read about the broken window fallacy, and I understand how focusing on personal gain without considering the impacts on the wider picture doesn’t make for a better world. But can someone feel justified contributing to the “broken windows” of the world knowing that they weren’t presented functional alternative pathways, and try to contribute towards the solution in other ways?
“I’m just following orders”.
Except nothing bad would happen if you didn’t.No.
I can’t. I’m almost 50, and back then I deliberately picked a major that would lead to a career with a neutral or good impact. I make half the money I could have made, I enjoy my job, and I’m not part of the problem (well, or only as much as we have to, living under capitalism.)
I have a friend who worked relatively high in big tobacco. He rationalized that his job is going to exist no matter what, and that if he takes it, he will be able to benefit and do something about it. I don’t know what he meant by doing something, but it didn’t seem to eat at him. But either way he only worked there for about 2 years before getting recruited somewhere else
I work in IT. Some days are better than others. Framing seems to be key to keeping my psyche intact.
I constantly wrestle with the environmental impact of this field. More so now than ever. Everything that goes into consumer and professional electronics generates a lot of waste, and as a professional, I’ve had my hands on more systems than the average home user.
I also do not work at any FANG company, nor for anyone in surveillance like Palantir or Flock. Besides, I don’t get invited to those parties.
Everyone in IT has contributed to both negative social and environmental impacts in some way. Some, much more than others. AI has thrown gasoline on the fire, but we still have the same problems as before: pointless commutes, e-waste, planned obsolescence, power-hungry software, enriching the rich, and so on.
Meanwhile, (without doxxing myself) I work at a company that helps their customers do good things.
I think that’s where I keep my conscience clear for the most part: I’ve made decisions that place me in a relatively better place, with some sense of karmic balance that tips towards better than it is bad. Telling oneself “it could be worse” certainly seems fragile - and it is - but it is what it is.
I’ll add that, in a capitalist system, even the concept of employment is coercive and not 100% voluntary. Also, the way companies proceed in this environment exploits the built-in demand for employment, while exploiting and extracting all kinds of things, both real and virtual. IMO, this puts the most (if not all) of economy on trial for ethical concerns, so we’re only left “how (non)ethical is your workplace?”
People will literally do anything for money.
Ain’t that the truth.
Great question the answer is pretty much no.
Either you live with the guilt or you change your moral framework to make it not bad.
Is “I couldn’t find another job because nobody wants to employ a 64-year old and I have bills to pay” changing your moral framework?
Or how about “it’s the only job offer I got out of 458 applications and I have 3 kids and a mortgage”?
Being able to make an actual choice is a huge privilege.
Then you live with the guilt, which is still better than lying to yourself, but still pretty hard. That is were most of us are.
Nobody forced you to have kids or a mortgage
yep. you could always downsize your lifestyle to take a lower paying job.
but people don’t want to do that. they see that as horrible and tragic and generally feel entitled to maintain or increase their lifestyle costs.
it’s interesting, my dad was unemployed for 3 years and I faced the very real possibility of not going to college, and helping pay for my family costs starting at the age of 15. to me this was just life, but i tell this story and people act like the idea of a 15 year old kid having to help his parents pay for stuff is ‘tragic and traumatic’. for a lot of people… it’s just life. we do what we had to do to pay bills and we made as many cutbacks as we could.
my brother has been unemployed for 5 years… because he refuses to take a ‘job less than he deserves’. he’s made himself essentially unemployable. the irony being… his last job he quit because he felt the pay wasn’t good enough for his ‘level of education and achievement’. his wife has been the sole provider for 5 years because of his arrogance and pride. it’s fucking weird to me.
yep. you could always downsize your lifestyle to take a lower paying job.
This is extremely hard if your lifestyle is already downgraded.
In the USA, many are only a few paychecks away from being homeless (going 3 or 5 years unemployed would be a pipe dream to them). A downgrade could be moving your kids into a tent or having the state take them away from you.
Rock and a hard place, in these circumstances.
and how is it they are in that circumstance other than through their own choices?
why is it that, they have no decided ‘this is not how i want to live my life and I need to do things to not be in this situation.’
because people do, make that choice. they make the choice to not be paycheck to paycheck, and some folks, spend their entire lives, no matter how much they make, living paycheck to paycheck.
some people just make really really bad choices, their entire lives. and yeah, they are in shitty situations, but it’s entirely of their own making. they are not helpless unfortunate victims of circumstance… they just never really thought about the future and lived life form moment to moment and now they are middle aged and broke and wondering how they will survive…
some of us… didn’t want to end up like that so we make different life choices than they did. i grew up in a poor community, and watched friends make shitty choice after shitty choice, and just stopped interacting with them because they were ruining their own lives of their own free will and volition. Why should I feel any pity for these people? especially when they became bitter towards my good choices, and my success that came from those good choices?
especially when at the time 30 years ago, they insulted and harassed me for saving my money and investing in myself and called me a douchebag for not loaning them money to buy drugs, concert tickets, traveling and other necessarily things they could not afford?
I get that you want to feel bad for people who are bad financial situations but my own experience has proven to me again and again, people mostly do this to themselves, often out of a sense of entitlement that other people OWE them financial stability, rather they them seeking to build it for themselves. I’ve also seen people who come from well-off families piss away their opportunities too, and their excuse is always that their parents didn’t ‘give them enough’, even though their parents gave them way more than I ever dreamed of getting from my family… WEIRD how that works.
Please take this as kindly as I’m offering it. From this comment, to me it sounds like you make a lot of assumptions about everyone’s intentions but only listen to your own.
Decenter yourself when thinking about others, I think you’re comparing everyone to your own circumstances rather than truly empathizing.
Not saying you’re necessarily conservative, but this “I did it right and they’re doing it wrong” attitude always dissolves when it suddenly affects them and they “didn’t realize it was that bad”
Intentions don’t matter. Results do.
My work doesn’t care if I intense to do a good job. They care if I actually do it. Nor do you.
No, I do empathize. I went through a miserable and painful experience losing friends over their shitty choices, who refused my help and advice, who turn and blamed me for not ‘helping’ them by me giving they my money to enable their shitty choices. And yes, they told me off about what a MONSTER i was for doing this. For saying ‘no, friend/girlfriend/family member, i’m not goign to loan you $500 to buy booze and drugs’
God, why is it that so many folks on here seem to think they are saints and that anyone who doesn’t share their aspirational sainthood is some monster of a human being who lacks empathy? Have you had friends/family beg you for drug money? Did you just give it to them? Have you had people steal form you, and vandalize your property because you refused to give them what they felt you owed them? And what, you think that in that situation I was the asshole?
No, they do know what they are doing is bad. That is your false assumption. People PRETEND they don’t. Cheaters, lairs, thieves, criminals, will all ARGUE with you that when they do it it’s not bad! But if you do it to them, you’re a monster.
The difference between us, is I acknowledge objectively shitty and awful people exist. You don’t. You seem to to think shitty people are like innocent. Which makes me seriously question what kind of privileged life you have lead where you seem to think nobody is ever at fault for their own choices… except me, right. I’m at fault for my lack of empathy for not giving my drug-chasing friends in my 20s money… and it’s MY FAULT they got busted by the cops, ended up in prison, and so on, right? If only I had loaned them that $500 in 2002 their life would be on the straight and narrow!
Give me a break with this nonsense. You are not empathic, you’re just naive to the point of delusion and you want use the term ‘empathy’ as a weapon to shame and beat others into agreement with you. I don’t agree with you, and if you think that makes me a shitty person… perhaps that’s because you’re not such a great person.
why is it that, they have no decided ‘this is not how i want to live my life and I need to do things to not be in this situation.’
because people do, make that choice. they make the choice to not be paycheck to paycheck, and some folks, spend their entire lives, no matter how much they make, living paycheck to paycheck.
If people try their best to make it work and it works: they made the choice to do better
If people try their best to make it work and fail: I don’t think they’ve made the choice to fail.
Our disagreement seems to be somewhere in these details.
but hey, it’s 2026, where being a hard-working person who builds up your own life through hard work and good choices makes you a selfish bad person? warped timeline we live in.
You believe this? Why?
It’s all about dumb luck. No, it’s not because they worked hard. It’s because they’re lucky.
If people try their best to make it work and fail: I don’t think they’ve made the choice to fail.
yes, but they make the choice to stop trying, and then then are guaranteed to fail.
everyone fails at shit. the difference is some of us try again, and again, and we learn and improve. others just give up and never try again, and then blame other people for their failure and use it as an excuse to never ever try to make things better for themselves.
I am actively going through this with one of my nephews. me and his parents both have to constantly lecture and fight him to get him to try, because he often decides trying is not worth the effort and he’d rather just fail. and the irony is… when he does try he does really well, but he seems to think it’s not good enough, so why even bother. He’d rather get an F, than a C/B, and it’s scary AF we can’t break him out of this mentality, because none of us want him to be a failure of a person, but he seems stubbornly insistent making choices that guarantee he does fail. he also lies to his parents, gets caught in the lie, and gets angry at them for his own lies…
and his teachers all do the same thing. they are more than happy to encourage him and help him and improve his grades when he does do this, but often he systematically just refuses their help and then gets angry and blames them. then his mom goes to the teachers and they talk through it all, and it’s clear that the fault is not with the teachers, it’s him who ignores the teachers and sometimes straight up lies about the help he is offered.
he really just can’t seem to connect the fact that if he tries and puts in the effort he will do well, but it won’t be perfect or as good as other kids. and that’s totally OK. and we are all hoping he gets through this, and doesn’t become bitter and nasty and give up on his life because he seems to think life should be effortless for him and he should get As for never putting in any effort at school. it’s scary to think that he could easily take that track in life.
and to make things worse, he has a brother who studies and works his balls off, and is really really good and got into very prestigious college… and instead of being happy for his brother he’s just kind of bitter about it… despite his brother always always always trying to help him with his school work. he seems to be like just bitter that his brother has made much better choices, and reaps the rewards of those choices, and uses it to justify his own shitty view of himself that he will ‘never live up’ so why even bother.
and it sucks even more because I had friends just like him, smart people who just pissed away their lives into low-effort bitterness, who used me and other more successful people as excuses to fuck up their lives actively and willingly, and i am 1000% with his parents on making sure he doesn’t end up like that. he doesn’t have to be a fucking rocket scientist, just self-sufficient.
yep. you could always downsize your lifestyle to take a lower paying job.
how would you downsize kids and a mortgage?
this is not how it works. all of these probably started being a thing when the outlook was not nearly as bleak as now.
smaller house. cheaper town.
but people absolutely refuse to do this. they refuse to downgrade.
Downsize your lifestyle? Like, shooting your kids? Not eat?
No. cheaper car, cheaper home, no luxuries.
That’s what I’ve come to realize when transitioning from high school to college. I fear that accepting the guilt may lead to rationalizing the behavior - having apathy towards those your work is harming tends to prevent motivation towards changing the status quo.
I think there’s a famous phrase as well about “being paid very well to not consider the issue rationally”.
At least in my understanding: accepting the guilt doesn’t make it go away. changing your view of morality is where it rationalizes and erases it.
(which ofcourse is a fine line)
I left my industry because it made me question my morals daily. It’s not worth the money
Not me at least. After looking for a job for 9 months I saw one at Palantir that fit me exactly. Just considering applying made me feel dirty af.
Thr unsavory businesses are paying a premium for being unsavory. There are SOME people who will not work there, which reduces the size of the labor pool and drives prices up. There are others who can be bought, for a price, and that also drives prices up.
Industries with neutral or beneficial impacts on society do have this pressure, so the wages are lower. Simple supply and demand.
I can’t. One of my job requirements is that I need to work someplace I think is at least neutral, or is good. So far it’s only been neutral and I am ok with that.
I do think some people can be a force for good in a bad place but I am not strong enough to do that.
Edit to add an example - I heard a story about a guy working in corrections - a prison warden - who was working to change the system from punitive to remedial, and had reduced recidivism by a huge amount, like it’s 5%, compared to 50% in most of the nation. I think he is a good person in an evil industry (the American prison industry). Randy Liberty. Not kidding, that is his real name.
“There is no ethical consumption under Capitalism” is a useful parallel concept. One can consume at least more ethically by buying in solidarity with, eg, Fairtrade sellers, local sellers, co-ops, or maybe living a vegan lifestyle.
Not to be confused with finding an ethical form of capitalism. It doesn’t exist. Any system designed to maximize profit will put any other goals (like human rights) secondary.
I think working in this society is similar. I can choose the more ethical option from the limited options available to me and work to make my life and the lives of people around me better. But I can’t find or create a system that is ethical. Even that co-op referenced above probably has suppliers who are less ethical, or they may have to rent from a profit-driven landlord.
I try to focus on small improvements over my baseline rather than thinking anything short of immediate perfection is a failure.
That’s a healthy point of view. I think I’ve been trying to align with that philosophy, but I feel frustrated by the fact that there will be “inevitable” consequences of my future work that I will likely never be in a position to change course.
your problem is you think you can, or should have control over those things.
you don’t. you don’t have control over a lot of things in your life.
you can only be morally accountable for what you can control.
You should read up on how the nazi’s operated the most succesful industrial size operation for genocide while most of the people tried hard not to notice.
I find it noble to go against your own best interest for the greater good, but I don’t expect it and don’t blame anyone for not doing it when it would seriously impact their ability to live life if they did.
I still expect morality though. There’s balance and proportion for everything.
they don’t have one to begin with.
i taught business ethics for two years as a grad student. 60% of the class would write papers how ethics are stupid because the only thing that matters is maximizing company and personal profit for themselves.
ethics is a nice thing people gesture and worry about, but when push come to shove, they will shove you in front of the bus to save themselves.
Many people will literally die for their beliefs, for the sake of righteousness. But I agree, sometimes people will be immorally self-centered (very often in some cultures, especially the morally relativistic ones).
they don’t have one to begin with.
I joined a morally grey child company for a parent company that is, in my eyes, immoral. I did it to see if I could make positive change from the inside.
I don’t do anything in my job that directly contributes to the stuff that I think is bad in my company, but I doubt I’ll make a change at this rate. I’m too small.
I’m glad I tried but I think I’m just really stupid about how to change the world for the better.
Yes, it’s hard for me to continue on. If the job market wasn’t horrible and I didn’t have a family to support, I’d likely be elsewhere by now.
it’s not that you are stupid, it’s that you’re that arrogant.
you’re not that morally significant. you’re not a hero. you’re an average person.
but every average person is under the delusion they are living heroic epic moral adventure that is their own life…
That implies the existence of special people whose moral choices matter, and a larger population whose choices are irrelevant. Not sure that makes a lot of sense either.
it’s that you’re that arrogant.
you’re not that morally significant. you’re not a hero. you’re an average person.
I don’t think I was thinking of myself as anything but an average person, in this regard. I figured I could do my part to improve a system, then realized that there would need to be way more of people with that mindset at my level before a change would manifest.
Sorry if I gave the impression that I thought I was going to be a one man army, hahaha. Wouldn’t that have been awesome?
