As a child, I always saw myself as born to serve bigger interests. Part of the pursuit of the point of life was to work with the rest of humanity in a desirably useful way. Much of my ethics and decision style comes from looking at usefulness rather than good or evil, etc.
Bigger interests, I had assumed, were responsible for sticking me in this life and they were also responsible, so it seemed to me then, for using who I was and my skills wisely. Of course, wisdom dictated by me would have made this using enjoyable to me as well as useful to others. Convenient, no?
I eventually felt left out of the bigger picture since I was being left out of the flow of life. Regret and disappointment turned into loneliness, into anger, into surprise, into slacking, and eventually into a pursuit of entirely different goals. I ditched much of hte life that I had created with this old understanding of the way things were not. Several changes in my circumstances led me around to thinking that most people still held that belief that I had had though.
It became time for me to realize that while several people were able to make themselves fit into the bigger picture, there were many that I felt a lot of respect for who did not manage this.
Several years ago, I put aside the last vestiges of my old integrity - the integrity of an artist or an engineer. Instead of requiring a hothouse environment within which to thrive and be useful, I would create one for all these other folks. Voila. My energies turned to FSC, and while I had to work production areas some of the time given my expertise, my policy was explicitely that each of these self-absorbing and energizing tasks would be sliced off for another person to carry on with. I would only retain hot house building tasks in the long run.
This has worked astoundingly well. So many of the people who would not have suffered the initiation rites of most hot houses entered though this more protected space I worked out into the places where flowers can more generally grow without a problem.
Building hot houses has never felt as good as being a flower. It has a load of responsibility attached to it. There are issues that the flowers sneer at without understanding. The hot house I have built is made up of entrepreneurs and managers, a building and an incredible business plan. So many things must occur for the hot house to grow and thrive, and so many of htem seem contrary to the flowers' more direct happiness.
I am not surpirsed finally that I was not found useful back then. I had not truly valued the hot houses that had existed around me. Anarchists hardly ever do.