I suck at being altruistic…can I still be a civic hacker?

In short, yes.

So I’ll share my story briefly.

I’ve always been asked why I do what I do. Since I was younger, my ability to empathize and to understand what someone else was feeling has been strong.

I was always the neutral party in friend groups and was grateful to have never been bullied to the extent that I some of my dear friends experienced. My role was always to connect but also defend those who needed a shield. I wanted to build space for them to be themselves without external pressures. Just seemed so unfair.

I’m sure that little Sarah will agree that my current role as a civic hacker and social entrepreneur aligns with who I’ve been. I’m still connecting and building protective spaces for our communities to take charge of the good we want to see.

I watched this last year and I loved what Abigail Marsh shared:

“As societies become wealthier and better off, people seem to turn their focus of attention outward, and as a result, all kinds of altruism towards strangers increases, from volunteering to charitable donations and even altruistic kidney donations.

But all of these changes also yield a strange and paradoxical result, which is that even as the world is becoming a better and more humane place, which it is, there’s a very common perception that it’s becoming worse and more cruel, which it’s not.

And I don’t know exactly why this is, but I think it may be that we now just know so much more about the suffering of strangers in distant places, and so we now care a lot more about the suffering of those distant strangers.

But what’s clear is the kinds of changes we’re seeing show that the roots of altruism and compassion are just as much a part of human nature as cruelty and violence, maybe even more so, and while some people do seem to be inherently more sensitive to the suffering of distant others, I really believe that the ability to remove oneself from the center of the circle and expand the circle of compassion outward to include even strangers is within reach for almost everyone.”

No one I spoke to grew tired of my questions and I learned more in the first few hours than I have in my whole life. By the 5th hour into the hackathon, we had everything down and I was feeling comfortable.

We are all humans. I can assure that while disabilities exist in various forms, we all feel the same emotions and it’s time to step over our insecurities. So regardless of what you might think of yourself, I invite you in to see what you are actually capable of.