Thou seek to create impact, but why?
Have you bothered yourselves to ask what it means to impact a human being? Why does one want to impact anyone at all?
What makes you believe that impacting a human being in a way that you think or feel or have heard is the way needed or helpful? What gives someone moral, intellectual or academic superiority over the human that is intended to be impacted?
How is your notion or ideas of impact the same or different than the videos or case studies you read about impact? What good is any such video or case study in nothing other than an advertisement with narrative-colored fiction conditioning you by selling you something, some way, some trick to make yourself feel good?
Do you ask yourself what is value, what is valuable to you, and why? What is development? Is the summation of the movement of money across different players, GDP, and development?
In all the impact and development themes of concerts, carnivals and social self-congratulatory events, with ever-growing content on online and offline media on impact and development, where do such acts and dynamics leave a human being?
It is detestable to see so-called social entrepreneurs, professors, impact makers and what not, interacting with under-privileged individuals and communities as if they own them for their whimsical self-aggrandizing experiments tainted with their noble intention backed by some ideology or hypothesis, as it they are the free laboratories to test out their hypothesis on need and test out their solution as if they are lab rats with no humanity, ambitious and needs of their own.
One is so ready to picture and video these individuals, test on them all kinds of innovative, promising, cutting edge, most-sellable solutions and frameworks be it design thinking, human-centered design, or even business model canvas, bend and stretch and blend narratives and judgments on their existence and life.
Why does one feel to have been granted any right to help or impact anyone, and then feel entitled about it? Why does one do it? Where does such an appeal come from? Just to advance themselves in their own career, win some competition, get a paper out or just make a YouTube video, creating influencers and role models who are then branded and cashed out, incentives and actions that keep repeating across universities, and social networks.
One must ask, where do such actions, of all are well-intentioned, leave these people, does it solve any problem? Has any solution come out of it? Does the solution or do the traces of your well-intentioned and well-published efforts still exist? Is this the new form of exploitation borne out of our ignorance, lack of understanding, hunger for self-validation, and self-absorbedness?
Do not believe me or be tempted by this rhetoric, just look at yourself and if possible, which is unfortunately so for only a few, to open the window and look and assess for yourself by going beyond your own self-importance and entitlement. Do people, including you, feel empowered? Do you even know what it means to be empowered? I am not talking about the short-lived inspiration and motivation that comes from musical videos that you consume and share on social media.
Getting a banana as part of a nutrition program, that claims to have impacted you quoting alignment with UN SDG 4, is okay with you? What does it mean to truly impact someone? Is it as shallow to be priced or advertised? Is using a business model canvas or design thinking the way to achieve it? Why have we stopped asking these questions?
Why have we settled with the answers, which are literally non-answers, that were given to us, by society, by taglines posted on social media, by any political leader, by any philosopher or by any religious text? Why have we disconnected ourselves to the extent of becoming numb, dumb, and slaves to fashionable ideals, virtues, and ideas? Why have we fallen for the surface-level classification and have accepted the notions that divide us? Humans, whether Indian, American, African, Chinese, Christian, Jew any of such classes, which only keep on growing, are still human, they feel the same grief as you, the same joy and pleasure as you, feel lonely sometimes as you, have the same fears and anxieties as you, suffers existentially as you.
Are we able to see problems like poverty, poor healthcare, lack of education, or climate without any assumption about its importance and more importantly without a solution at hand, a solution you heard somewhere, read somewhere, saw somewhere or thought yourself? Are we able to see these problems not at the macro global or national level, but at an individual level?
Asking instead of what can solve the world’s poverty to asking how to solve your own poverty or the poverty of any person that you may come across. Are you able to ask, what does it mean to solve poverty for an individual?
If one is too sincere to follow the guidelines of well-intentioned institutions, then one just needs to give US$1 per day to any individual to solve poverty. But is this all? Have you stopped to ask yourself, see without any condition or motive to give a solution, to understand the nature of one's own or others' poverty? What does it mean and how does it manifest? Why does it still prevail? Is it a choice of an individual or an outcome of circumstance? Can one ever help anyone who does not want to help and is happy staying with how things are but is happy to receive kindness and entertainment from you as you struggle to project your preferences, desires or expectations?
But why would you want to solve anything for anyone? Would you still do it knowing that there is nothing in it for you? Would you still do it knowing that you do not have any solution or deal to sell them or knowing that you do not need the support of the person in any way? Would you still do it when you know no one is seeing it or no one will ever get to know about it? Are you capable or human enough to do it without any act of doing or thinking about it? Can you do it without seeing the other as the one that is less privileged in any way, as the one that needs to be helped or rescued by you, as anyone who is as human as you with as much potential, possibilities and capabilities as you are given the opportunity? Can you do it without needing to do it? Can you do it without any feed good?
Can you? Will you?
Next: Ingredients for a thriving marketplace for social outcomes