I've been thinking about my job a lot lately. I think it's because I'm beginning to feel too comfortable.

This is how I figure it works (bear with me here).

There are a wide array of, for lack of a better term, Bad Jobs in the world. These jobs are Bad in the sense that they not only provide no real benefit to the world, but often, they work against the Common Good.

Some brazen examples of this include Shell Oil, Sony, Microsoft, or Nestle etc. All "Bad" companies in the sense that they hurt society and/or the planet in the pursuit of profit, but in truth, the majority of companies in the world are not so much in the business of Doing Good, as they are in that of making making money.

I've become more at odds with this whole concept because of what I've been doing in my off hours. From 10 - 6 I work for an online advertising company, but lately I've been spending a lot of my energies helping out with the Toronto Public Space Committee, an organisation which, at it's core, stands for the concept that Public Space is for the public, and not for the advertisers. In other words, I work for the enemy by day, and by night, I moonlight as someone who gives a damn.

Now this post is not meant to start an argument about the virtues of advertising. No one is ever going to convince me that a 10-metre high ipod billboard is "good for society" -- it's not, end of story. No, this is about something one of my teachers back at VFS told me: "Now you know everything I can teach you about web development" he said, "Use your powers for Good, not Evil".

What am I doing?

More and more I feel as though my involvement with the TPSC has less to do with the fact that I want to help, and more to do with me trying to somehow offset the work I'm doing during the day.

The world does not need more ads telling us to buy things we don't need. The world needs more faith, fewer guns, patience, and an honest attempt at slowing down. Can I honestly say that I contribute to any of these things in my forty hours each week?

But this all comes back to Good jobs and Bad Jobs. The world has an abundance of vacancies in Bad jobs because the majority of people in the world want to do Right and will often jump at the chance of supporting people doing Good Things. What's worse, the more detrimental to the world a company is, the more money it tends to have and so they can afford to hire more people. All this makes it very hard to find Good Work.

I need to start looking for a Good job. I just got another raise, and here I am, complaining about my job... I guess that means that there's still hope for me.