"Don’t go because you’ve fallen in love with solvability. Go because you’ve fallen in love with complexity."

A very good look at how "save the world" rhetoric often plays out into exotification and power fantasies for the young (and usually wealthy and white) students who go for them, even as there remain pressing issues in the United States that aren't as "sexy" to solve. Best quotes below:

There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.”

A bit of credit for all of the people who seek complexity over prestige, intentionality over "impact":

For some, there’s less learning to do. For ten million American kids whose parents have been incarcerated at some point while they were growing up, choosing to work on this issue is more about linking policy and programmatic learning with personal experience — a hard-earned, shorter road to enlightened action.
The activists, entrepreneurs, advocates, designers, and organizers that I admire most these days are up for that kind of investment. They seem to lean in to systemic complexity with a kind of idealistic sobriety.
They seem to hold a precious paradox at the center of their work — on the one hand, newbies have to acknowledge how much they don’t know and cultivate a tremendous amount of patience and curiosity. On the other, they have to hold on to their beginner’s mind that leads them to ask the best kinds of questions and all that fresh energy for change, which veterans so desperately need. They are people working on the least “sexy” issues imaginable: ending homelessness, giving more people access to credit, making governments work better.