Thoughtless and Meaningless… or not.

During my eight weeks of service at Ireuse, I often thought how lucky I was with the work I was doing. Not that it was the best thing ever, and not that I wouldn't have preferred to be paid for doing basically the same thing my salaried co-workers were doing, but I had a variety of work to do, something different each week, and what I was doing mattered. Ireuse is a new and growing company, and with just half a dozen employees there they had plenty for me to do, and I wasn't just a cog in some vast (rat) wheel. The projects they assigned me were things that they really needed to get done, and my work was immediately used in the business.

Reflecting on this during my last day there, my coworkers talked about their own internships in years past, with varying degrees of nostalgia. One woman had worked for a small PR firm and had enjoyed it since she got to work on everything. In contrast to her happy experience, a male employee remembered his internship as long hours sitting bored behind an information desk in San Francisco City Hall, doing nothing of any use.

With this fresh in my memory, I noticed a section in Whistleblowers that correlated. On page 117, Alford talks about thoughtlessness, and quotes one non-whistleblower defending an illegal activity in typical fashion. "...we might as well do it, because if we don't the company will find someone else who will." While it's probably true, this "logic" can be used to defend almost anything, up to and including the inevitable, Godwin's Law-triggering, Nazi concentration camp guard. The imaginary excuse goes something like, "If I hadn't shot the prisoner, my commander would have shot me and the prisoner. Why should I die when my death won't change anything?"

This same reasoning applies to whistleblowers too, and the fact that it's logically sound is the tricky part. That's why they call it "ethics," I suppose.

Nothing in my service work approached this level, of course, but the principle was similar. Alford stresses that thoughtlessness comes from a feeling that one's self or one's work is entirely replaceable, which leads to disassociation, commonly expressed in the popular, "Whatever." sentiment. Working at Ireuse, I knew I wasn't doing anything life-saving, but I wasn't just keeping a seat warm, either, and the feeling of being part of a team, and the intellectual stimulation of my tasks, made my time there pass far more quickly and enjoyably.