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realizing i can’t change the world.
- Authors
- Name
- Amanda Southworth
return realizing i can’t change the world.
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked it in the face, but my teenage dream of “changing” the world with accessible human services technology refuses to let me rest — despite all it’s already cost me.
I catalogued all of my work that I’ve done since my “flop era” started, when I stopped releasing mobile apps in late 2020 and fell officially out of the public eye on purpose.
Since 2021, I’ve written 70+ personal and work essays, 20+ video essays, developed another non-profit web app [Everine], open source SDK [Aureus], cofounded and became CTO of a company that determines if buildings will survive natural disasters that’s raised $4 million and reached millions of homeowners [Faura], designed a platform for those with missing loved ones [Olympia], co-created a street medicine app for providers [Oenone], and started to rebuild my next non-profit project [first person to donate a milli knows the name first].
It feels like I’ve been frozen in time since I was assaulted in 2021. But, the numbers dispute that. I very publicly tried to build what I called the “world’s most impactful non-profit” starting at 16 and ending at 23, but failed and abandoned hundreds of thousands of users. The shame of that has not left me, but the desire to try again hasn’t either.
I’m not even 25 yet, and I don’t know why experience, which is the very thing that will make me succeed, is scarier to me. Somehow, I feel I’m running out of fuck-ups as an adult and that people are less interested in the alive version of me at 24 compared to the suicidal 14 year old app developer I was.
I see what I want to build every day.
That’s why it scares the fuck out of me.
I don’t think I can face this head on. I don’t think I have a choice. I hope I can be as brave as I was. As open as I was. As vulnerable as I was. I hope I can make it. I hope I can turn the tide. Just a small bit. In my own way.
I used to think making change was the thing. I used to believe that changing the world, dominating it and reshaping it in my hands was the goal. Now, I not only see how naive that is, but how many terrible things have been done in the name of changing the world. How many civilizations, companies, people, and products have tried. And what they left in their wake.
Change is always in some ways, a stabilized thing. Good requires bad, and vice versa. There is no “safe” way entirely to do anything. There is just a strong commitment to pay off the forces we know as safety, ethics, responsibility, and kindness. Those are not one and done things, but practices we have to invest in repeatedly, and hope that we don’t come up short when it truly matters.
To invent the plane is to invent the plane crash. To invent the iPhone, in some ways, was to invent stalking via the AirTags.
Maybe a more brave, and honest thing to do would be accept the world as it is and provide the love it needs anyways. Be the ideal of what you want to see, knowing it may never survive in the real world. To know Utopia is not achievable, and to push forward anyways.
To know this thing we have may never change the world, and it doesn’t matter. It just needs to exist. It just needs to be apart of the world. It can be enough just to be here.
I heard again and again the advice that I need to preserve myself before the mission. That I need to have some sense of self, that I cannot make my purpose fixing something that is an immovable object.
It only took the grief of losing my non-profit and realizing I was totally unfit to lead it, as well as watching my cofounder descend some stairs into madness to realize how true it was. How utterly I was setting myself up to fail with my own standards.
To realize the world was not mine to change — just to care for as much as I can.
Change is always and somehow never neutral. It will be overturned and stepped on. Debated and dissected. But existing in the world is irreversible. Depends on no one but me. Beautiful, incredible products and technologies exist all of the time. Existence is a smaller, more steadfast thing than change. Maybe, the formative step.
I read this book recently that I’ve been thinking about almost every day. It was called “
DWB/MSF have one of the most philanthropic and stressful missions you can possibly imagine: going into parts of the world devastated by state failure or collapse, disease, poverty, corruption, genocide, and more and providing life saving medical care. As much as they can do, wherever they can do it.
Reading that book for the first time gave me the clearest picture of what it means to exist: that existing is change enough. That going to your absolute limit all of the time is the fastest way to dissipate existence.
MSF would know, they’ve paid in blood for the work they’ve done. The blood of their patients, the blood of their employees / volunteers / people providing them support on the ground. So many people have died at MSF. Babies on operating tables because they didn’t have the proper medical equipment. Family members at homes who never came back for a followup appointment. Workers who were pulled over and murdered to send a message.
So much pressure, so little people stepping in to fill their shoes. Yet, the utmost acceptance that there is limits, and lack of limits leads to the lack of self. They step out of crisis zones. They know how important their existence is, and they protect it at all costs.
What makes MSF so powerful is their ability to accept their powerlessness. That they have a limited role to play in which they are good, and that they play it to the maximum extent they can. They are just a player in the world, and if the other players do not do their part to ensure change, they cannot do it alone.
I think often, in the midst of crisis and turmoil and fear, about the constant need for goodness [which itself is so varied, contextual, and controversial] about the Doctors Without Borders Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, one that I’ve come back to read many times over.
You must accept your limitations in the world to have a chance to last in it at all.
This is a strongly condensed version, so I would recommend you read it in its’ whole form
“Our action is to help people in situations of crisis. And ours is not a contented action. Bringing medical aid to people in distress is an attempt to defend them against what is aggressive to them as human beings. Humanitarian action is more than simple generosity, simple charity. It aims to build spaces of normalcy in the midst of what is profoundly abnormal. More than offering material assistance, we aim to enable individuals to regain their rights and dignity as human beings. As an independent volunteer association, we are committed to bringing direct medical aid to people in need. But we act not in a vacuum, and we speak not into the wind, but with a clear intent to assist, to provoke change, or to reveal injustice. Our action and our voice are acts of indignation, a refusal to accept an active or passive assault on the other…..
As civil society we exist relative to the state, to its institutions and its power. We also exist relative to other non-state actors such as the private sector. Ours is not to displace the responsibility of the state. The final responsibility of the state is to include, not exclude, to balance public interests over private interests and to ensure that a just social order exists. Ours is not to allow a humanitarian alibi to mask the state responsibility to ensure justice and security. And ours is not to be co-managers of misery with the state. If civil society identifies a problem, it is not theirs to provide a solution, but it is theirs to expect that states will translate this into concrete and just solutions. Only the state has the legitimacy and power to do this…..
Humanitarian action comes with limitations. It cannot be a substitute for definitive political action. In Rwanda, early in the genocide, MSF spoke out to demand that genocide be stopped by the use of force. And so did the Red Cross. It was, however, a cry that met with institutional paralysis, with acquiescence to self-interest, and with a denial of political responsibility to stop a crime that was “never again” to go unchallenged. The genocide was over before the UN Operation Turquoise was launched.
I would like for a moment to acknowledge among our invited guests Chantal Ndagijimana. She lost 40 members of her family in Rwanda’s genocide. Today she is a part of our team in Brussels. She survived the genocide, but like a million others, her mother and father, brothers and sisters did not. And nor did many hundreds of our national staff. I was MSF’s Head of Mission in Kigali during that time. No words can describe the sheer courage with which our Rwandan staff worked. No words can describe the horror that they died in. And no words can describe the deepest sorrow that I and all in MSF will carry always.
I remember what one of my patients said to me in Kigali: “Ummera, Ummera-sha.” It is a Rwandan saying that loosely translated means “courage, courage, my friend — find and let live your courage.” It was said to me in Kigali at our hospital, by a woman who was not just attacked with a machete, but her entire body rationally and systematically mutilated. Her ears had been cut off. And her face had been so carefully disfigured, that a pattern was obvious in the slashes. There were hundreds of women, children and men brought to the hospital that day, so many that we had to lay them out on the street. And in many cases, we operated on them then and there, as the gutters around the hospital literally ran red with blood. She was one among many — living an inhuman and simply indescribable suffering. We could do little more for her at that moment than stop the bleeding with a few necessary sutures. We were completely overwhelmed, and she knew that there were so many others. She knew and I knew that there were so many others. She said to me in the clearest voice I have ever heard “allez, allez… ummera, ummera-sha” — “go, go… my friend; find and let live your courage.”
There are limits to humanitarianism. No doctor can stop a genocide. No humanitarian can stop ethnic cleansing, just as no humanitarian can make war. And no humanitarian can make peace. These are political responsibilities, not humanitarian imperatives. Let me say this very clearly: the humanitarian act is the most apolitical of all acts, but if its actions and its morality are taken seriously, it has the most profound of political implications. And the fight against impunity is one of these implications….
Yes, humanitarian action has limits. It also has responsibility. It is not only about rules of right conduct and technical performance. It is at first an ethic framed in a morality. The moral intention of the humanitarian act must be confronted with its actual result. And it is here where any form of moral neutrality about what is good must be rejected. A negative result that must be rejected is the use of the humanitarian in 1985 to support forced migration in Ethiopia, or the use in 1996 of the humanitarian to support a genocidal regime in the refugee camps of Goma. Abstention is sometimes necessary so that the humanitarian is not used against a population in crisis….
More recently, in North Korea, we were the first independent humanitarian organization to gain access in 1995. However, we chose to leave in the fall of 1998. Why? Because we came to the conclusion that our assistance could not be given freely and independent of political influence from the state authorities. We found that the most vulnerable were likely to remain so, as food aid is used to support a system that in the first instance creates vulnerability and starvation among millions. Our humanitarian action must be given independently, with a freedom to assess, to deliver and to monitor assistance so that the most vulnerable are assisted first. Aid must not mask the causes of suffering. And it cannot be simply an internal or foreign policy tool that creates rather than counters human suffering. If this is the case, we must confront the dilemma and consider abstention as the least of bad options. As MSF, we constantly call into question the limits and ambiguities of humanitarian action — particularly when it submits in silence to the interests of states and armed forces….
Our volunteers and staff live and work among people whose dignity is violated every day. These volunteers choose freely to use their liberty to make the world a more bearable place. Despite grand debates on world order, the act of humanitarianism comes down to one thing: individual human beings reaching out to those others who find themselves in the most difficult circumstances. And they reach out one bandage at a time, one suture at a time, one vaccination at a time. And for Médecins Sans Frontières, working in more than 80 countries, over 20 of which are in conflict, this also means telling the world of the injustice that they have seen.
All this, in the hope that the cycles of violence and destruction will not continue endlessly.”