Apr 28 2026

Doing the most good

#blog-challenge-2026

Carter’s prompt this week is as follows:

You have been given one month away from your obligations to use your talents to enact societal good. What do you go do?

This is the first prompt in the challenge where I genuinely feel like I have nothing really novel to say. If you know me, this is quite unusual.

I have two immediate questions:

First: What are my obligations I’d be free from? My 9-5 job, sure. But my family? Taking care of my kids? Feeding myself? What am I obligated to do? Beyond providing an income for them, I don’t particularly feel like I have many obligations. Generally speaking, if I don’t want to do something, I don’t do it. There are some things I’m involved with at my church that maybe aren’t my first choice but really it’s quite minimal.

Second: What are my talents? Hard for me to really even say. Most of the talents I feel like I might have seem to have little to no direct way to impact “societal good”. What does that even mean anyway? Who’s to say what’s “good” or “bad” for society?

The other issue is a month hardly feels like enough time to really move any kind of needle. But say I had a year? A decade? What would I do then? My answer doesn’t change much because I still have no real answer.

The first thought I had was I could help the elderly load groceries in their car, but approaching strangers in a parking lot is a skill I lack and have no desire to develop.

Then my thoughts drifted towards more selfish endeavors. Truly I think the greatest skill I have with a potential to impact some kind of arbitrary “societal good” is raising my kids to be productive members of society. So I’d spend more time with them, not less. I could try to work hard and get some home improvement projects finished that would make our home a more nurturing environment. I’ve wanted to remodel my sons’ bedroom for a few years, I’d like to build them a cool loft bed with their own desk space underneath to try to better utilize our seemingly ever shrinking floor space as they get older and seek more privacy. However, I tentatively pitched my wife on the idea a while ago and her response was less than enthusiastic. Increasing marital friction seems like it would not do society any good.

Desperate, I turned to Wikipedia to see if there is an article on “societal good”. The closest I could find was the page for “public good”. There’s a list of example “public goods”, the first of which is “public fireworks”. So I guess I’d go out and buy fireworks and light them off for my community. I’m sure my neighbors would be thrilled. Still no luck.

Maybe it’s a complete cop-out but I really do feel like the best method I have to do “societal good” is exactly what I’m already doing. I earn an honest wage. I try my best at work to be thoughtful and deliberate to do the best work I can. I make myself available to my kids and give them real attention. We spend quality time together. I don’t use harmful or addictive substances. I pay my taxes. I literally donate 10% of my paycheck to charity. I try to be generous with my time and money. My kids have a friend from the neighborhood eat dinner at our house nearly every weeknight. My wife spends a lot of time each week volunteering with our local youth organization and I know for sure her only motivation is to try to make people’s lives better. I help my mom take care of her aging father, directly. This week I’ve gone over to help her move every day after work to make things more comfortable for my grandpa. I spent all weekend doing that. My feet hurt right now because of it. I judged an elementary school science fair. I taught the children’s class at church today in addition to teaching the adult class once a month. I volunteer to play in the community concert band, which I do enjoy, but I also probably wouldn’t do if they didn’t really need a drummer. I know for a lot of the elderly members of the band it’s one of the only things they do each week.

I’m not perfect. In all of those things I mentioned, there’s more I could do, and I could do what I do even better. I could try harder. But if someone said I had a month off to go and do some other thing for “societal good”, I’d probably say “no thank you”. I don’t need some fantasy scenario where I travel halfway around the world to feel like I’m a contributing member of society. I already try to be. I’m not good at building schools. I’m good at being me. Ultimately, I want to be societal good, continually.

My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April, 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts.

For week 4, Carter chose the prompt:
"You have been given one month away from your obligations to use your talents to enact societal good. What do you go do?"

My friends' posts this week:

My other posts in this series: