Everyone’s a saint until the rent’s due…

I’m currently working on making a graceful exit from a position I’m no longer comfortable with, so it’s hard to say what I’d do if offered a massive salary to put myself back into a similar situation.

I suspect that there are few ethically pure jobs out there, and very few alternatives that don’t feed into the orphan crushing machine somehow. So in my mind it comes down to striking a balance between what impact your position has, what level of control you exercise over what the company does, and what you can do outside of work to try and improve the system.

Are you willing to campaign and vote against the interests of your employer even if it means the possibility of being laid off or fired? Does supporting yourself financially provide a benefit to marginalized people by making the scarce aid they can find more available to them? Are you designing products or processes to increase other’s misery or just mopping the floor? If you quit, what impact would it have on the org as a whole?

I don’t think there’s a simple answer to this, and I’ve long felt that we allow our occupations define our identites to an unhealthy degree, so I’d rather judge and be judged based on one’s beliefs and actions outside of work than for participating in a system designed to force our participation.