Decreasing Worldsuck: Peg Kerr

November 5th, 2009 by Nate

Today’s guest post was written by Peg Kerr, an active member of our A-Team. She’s on a very cool mission to “decrease worldsuck,” and has a lot of interesting and easy ideas on how we can all do our part.

I always knew I wanted to Do Something Important when I grew up. Life, however, sometimes doesn’t turn out quite as one expects. I had the misfortune to graduate from college in the middle of the 1982 recession, and as a result I got slotted into a succession of dead-end jobs that didn’t match my temperament or talents very well. I went back to graduate school, hoping to get a doctorate so that I could teach English, but had to leave after finishing just the Masters degree due to financial constraints. I took a job as a legal secretary while I wrote fiction at night. It took a long time, but I enjoyed some modest success, eventually seeing the professional publication of a dozen short stories and two novels. I started blogging online in 2002. It bothered me that I made my living as a secretary (something I had never dreamed about when I was a kid, believe me) but consoled myself with the reflection that I was “really” a writer.

But once the kids arrived and life got busier, the fiction writing began to dry up. Writer’s block led to a reoccurrence of my depression, something I’ve struggled with on and off throughout my life. Now I was facing a real crisis of confidence. What was I really on earth here to do, if it wasn’t to write deathless literature? What fulfillment could I find in being “just a secretary?” I was extremely good at my job, but I didn’t respect it very much.

I blogged periodically about the issue as I struggled to come up with an answer. I was positively haunted by the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:12-28), worried about being judged if I didn’t find a way to tap into whatever-my-gift was and offer it to the world (by myself? By God? I wasn’t even sure). But what was my gift? I couldn’t write fast enough to make a living at it. Was being a secretary really what I was meant to be?

Last December, I wrote in my online journal:

Longtime readers of this journal know that I sometimes ruminate here about what I should be when I grow up. Which is both rather funny and sad, since I’m going to be 49 on my next birthday. I thought for many years that what I wanted to be was a writer, which (I assumed) meant a writer of original, professionally published fiction. Well, I’ve done that, and done it well, if I do say so myself, but the creative part of my brain hasn’t been cooperating enough to allow me to do that for a while. This caused me great pain for a long time, as you’ll know if you go back and look at all my entries tagged ‘writers block.’ I started to realize that the larger question is, what is my vocation, my life’s work, if you will? (And yes, I realize that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what I do to earn my living).

A lot of thoughts have come together in my mind about this the last few days. I started applying some of the reading I’ve been doing about vocation at work. I read about a woman who scrubbed floors at hospitals, and when asked what she did for a living, she said she helped heal the sick. I read about a creative man who was the manager at an art framing store who was happy with his work, because he said his job was to help people display their own creative endeavors. I read about a man who worked for a moving company who said that his vocation was to decrease the stress for families when they moved. How do I serve a vocation by working as a legal secretary? If you look at it that way, it’s not so much that I type insurance paperwork, it’s that I assist six attorneys by decreasing their stress, helping them accomplish their projects. At the time I was thinking about all this, one of the people I worked for suddenly underwent some serious upheaval in his life, and he really needed me to decrease his stress in a way that he’s seldom needed before. I suddenly saw that I was assisting him that way, and once I realized that . . . well, it felt pretty good.

And then there’s the thinking I’ve been doing in the last year watching several projects: Obama’s election. Getting involved as a microlender with Kiva.org. Taking a look at Google’s Project 10^100 contest (see an explanation here). Project 4 Awesome, by the Vlogbrothers (the Brotherhood 2.0 guys, John and Hank Green, the originators of the Nerdfighters).

It’s all interconnected, I’ve suddenly been thinking in the past three days. John and Hank Green, the ones who pointed me to Kiva.org, have put it into words as: “We want to Decrease World Suck.” (”We’re Nerdfighters We fight against suck….we fight awesome…We fight using our brains, our hearts, our calculators and our trombones.”) The genius of this as a vocation is that it’s so flexible. That’s why John and Hank have turned the idea over to the Nerdfighters, and said, okay, run with it! What can you do to decrease worldsuck? It’s exactly the same thing that Andrew Slack is doing over at The Harry Potter Alliance. It’s why Obama set his organization up as a grassroots movement, modeled on, well, community organizing, trusting people to see the work and carry it forward, from the ground up. It’s why people have been responding to the election by saying, what can I do now, to help get our country back on its feet? It’s what [Minnesota Senator] Paul Wellstone was trying to do, and it’s what the Wellstone Action is trying to carry forward. It’s what the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater is trying to do, and Playing for Change. It’s Teach for America, and the Peace Corps, and Bread for the World, and the Search Institute, and Hippo Water Rollers and the Life Straw, and so much else. It’s St. Martins Table and projects to create and distribute solar cookers in Africa. It’s the guy who wrote Three Cups of Tea, who’s building schools for girls in Afghanistan. It’s paying it forward. It’s keeping a heart of flesh in a world that tries to put in its place a heart of stone. It’s raising kids and cleaning up the environment and making the world a better place.

A few days after the turn of the new year, I was standing in line at the grocery store. All this thinking collided together in my mind when I saw a poster informing customers that they could take a coupon, for $1, $3, or $5 and give it to the cashier, and then the cashier would add that amount to their bill, and then the grocery store would donate that amount to a local foodshelf. This is something I can do right now to reduce worldsuck, I thought, and as I took a coupon and gave it to the cashier, I suddenly thought, well, why not make this an ongoing project?

What if I tried to find a specific way, each day, to reduce worldsuck? Suppose I started keeping track of it, the way I keep track of workout minutes, or calorie intake, or the balance in my checkbook? I could set up a goal called “Decrease worldsuck” and check it off every day in my online journal when I do something like, buy a $1 coupon to donate groceries to my local foodshelf, or shovel a neighbor’s walk, or . . . or what?

What could I do? Could I find something to do every day? Even just a small thing? Besides the basics of being a good employee, a good parent, a good citizen, there are little ongoing things I was doing already: packing my lunch in a laptop lunchbox that I took home to wash each night instead of buying frozen lunches in plastic trays that were discarded. Biking to work in the summer. Microlending at Kiva.org, to help entrepreneurs build better lives for themselves. Recycling. I decided to keep doing that ongoing stuff, but could I find other, tangible, specific things to do, each day?

I had to think about how, exactly, I envisioned improving the world. Protecting the environment, I decided. Helping people who are struggling. Helping support children and families. Helping support the disenfranchised. Helping literacy and education causes. Helping people fight chemical dependency. Helping raise people’s spirits. Helping people become involved. Helping people get healthy. Helping foster new businesses.

I asked people reading my blog for ideas. I decided to do some research online and started searching non-profit websites. From there, it was a short step to getting onto Twitter, which I found to be tremendously helpful in giving me ideas for little specific things I could do each day. Sites like Cool People Care and Care2.com had a constant stream of suggestions for things that might take only five or ten minutes a day, but would allow me to do something–a little something–to make the world a better place.

Sometimes I donated money, often using Paypal, just a few dollars to a worthy cause I found online. But money was tight in our household since my husband’s been out of work for quite awhile, so I couldn’t do that every day. Part of the fun became discovering the wide variety of things I could do. Sometimes my contribution was as simple as a giving someone a compliment, or dropping off an old cell phone for recycling, or listening to someone who was troubled, or networking someone with someone else, like the time I took a young entrepreneur out to lunch, listened to him tell me about his fledgling business, and then gave him the list of every one I thought could help him.

More than that, I discovered what I came to think of as ‘the ripple effect.’ As I talked about the things I did or discovered, my readers picked upon some of them and started doing them, too. I led others to become Kiva lenders. They shared stories about how they had taken a moment to encourage someone, or volunteer, or pick up trash on the beach. My example was leading others to help make the world a better place, too.

I’ve been doing the Decrease Worldsuck project for ten months now, and it’s completely changed my feelings about my job, my life, and especially my relation to other people. I know what I’m here to do: it’s to make the world a better place. I don’t manage to log a specific task each and every day, but that’s all right. I know I’m here for a reason.

[Nate's note: You can find Peg on Twitter at @PegKerr. If you want to follow other people who are decreasing worldsuck, check out her Twitter list on the subject.]

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