“Am I working for the bad guys?”

How to make sense of your job in the capitalist system

Let’s be honest here: the world really sucks right now. It’s not just the war in Gaza, the climate emergency and the rise of fascism. There’s hundreds of everyday miseries that we human beings are dragged through — the racism, the sexism, the poverty, the general unfairness and injustice we face whenever we step outside. Anyone with a job (and a beating heart/functioning sense of humanity) has at some point asked themselves what their role is in it all — if they’re somehow making the world a better place, or if they’re part of the problem.

You come across it all the time in sustainability spaces, which are filled with smart, principled people who are very aware of the fact that they’re working inside a broken system, often for some of the world’s biggest and most powerful companies. On the surface, everyone’s all about progress and change and a green utopian future, but in private, many feel conflicted about their role in, let’s say, running the sustainability team at a huge fashion brand, or working for a non-profit that’s funded by some of the world’s biggest polluters. People care, they want to make a difference, but they don’t always know how to make sense of it all.

Am I changing things from the inside, or am I part of the problem? 

Am I working for the bad guys? 

It’s complicated, because when we talk about our work there’s a lot more involved than just ethics. People have bills to pay and kids to feed. There’s only so many opportunities in life, and the further down the road you walk, the harder it is to imagine a different path. But we only have one life, and we should be using that one life to do good things, whether it’s making cool stuff or being awesome to other people or making the world 0.000001% better.

There are many toxic systems in the world. There’s fossil fuels boiling the planet, workers being ripped off and exploited, bombs being dropped on children, soaring inequality, lies and misinformation that mask the truth and tax havens where the world’s richest people hide their money. 

There’s plenty more of these awful systems, and the entire world is tangled up in them. Any company you could work for will have some sort of relationship with some of them. By making and selling their products, fashion brands can’t help but create carbon emissions and plastic waste. You can say the same for a bakery, a software company, a bookshop or a nightclub. Likewise for freelancers, who need to get their hands dirty just to pay the bills. Everyone’s got skeletons in the closet.