Service and Servitude
This is a “reprint” of an article I published on Medium in June, 2025.
I came across this quote today, in a moment when I was in absolutely no fit state to do anything for anyone, and it reminded me how often Dr. King’s wisdom is harvested for sound bites and misused for the benefit of the very people he spent his whole life warning us about.
Either I have never read or do not recall the text from which this quote was extracted (and “extract” is a very intentional word choice here), and I’m choosing not to go look it up today. But if I had to guess, my guess is that there’s a lot more to this than a simplistic demand for your service.
In this current oligarchical, extractive, colonized dystopia where efficiency, growth and profit seem to be the only things that matter, “what are you doing for others” has become not an invitation to compassion or generosity or community, but rather a demand to wring yourself out of every resource you have for the benefit of someone who is not you. And the backlash against that, the one that says “you deserve to put your own mask on first,” is equally problematic when it is perverted into a self-centered, self-absorbed, sad beige mom campaign to buy bath bombs and eye masks and say no to making cookies for the school bake sale because you’re so burned out from your crappy day job that you can barely manage to get a pizza delivered for dinner.
The version of the world where you say yes to everything destroys you. the version where you say no to everything destroys you differently, and takes your community down with you. The problem isn’t with what you are or aren’t doing for others. The problem isn’t even with what you’re doing or not doing for yourself. The problem is that DOING isn’t the point, but we’ve been duped into thinking it is.
Your behaviors — the things you do — make up the you that other people see. Other people will judge you based on your behaviors. And for that reason, you may fall into the trap of thinking that your behaviors define who you are. But that is simply, and obviously, false. Before any behavior occurs, you are presented with an opportunity. In simplest terms, all behavior is a response to a stimulus. In the case of any voluntary behavior (meaning anything that your brain, rather than your spinal cord, is causing you to do), you have to make a choice to act. You choose to respond to the stimulus in whatever way seems most appropriate to you in that moment. The choices, not the actions, are what define where your attention goes, and in turn, where you put your attention becomes the content of your life. Your choices, then, are what define who you actually are.
When you choose to do something for someone else because it feels right to you, because you value that person or see a benefit to the community or believe that the choice to serve them is making the world a better place somehow, that is true service. You do the thing. It feels good to choose to do it, it feels good to do it, it feels good to have done it.
On the other hand, when you choose to do something for someone else because you feel obligated, whether because it’s part of your job, because you feel pressure to be seen to be doing it, or because you think you’re going to get something out of it, that’s not service. That’s servitude. Whether you do it voluntarily or not, your choice was not motivated by a desire to share your bounty with your community. You do the thing because you sense that you must. It doesn’t feel good to choose to do it, it doesn’t feel good to do it, and it doesn’t feel good to have done it. You haven’t really made a choice; you have abdicated your agency to someone else. You have become a participant in your own exploitation.
Capitalism and American Christianity rely heavily on narratives of scarcity, guilt, and shame. We are told that the hardest workers are the most righteous. That success is earned through relentless effort. That the best people are the ones who “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” and achieved something from nothing — when that is almost never actually the case. That poor people are poor because they are lazy — which is also almost never actually the case. That competition, even the kind that gets mean, violent, or illegal, is good because it promotes innovation or brings prices down.
We learn that everything is a resource to be exploited, including (especially!) human labor. That the earth is a ball of buried treasure that we must dig up and burn faster and faster in order to continue on a ‘growth trend.’ We learn that there’s not enough to go around, so we need to fight for what is rightfully ours even if it means other people have to go without. We are convinced by the greedy and the powerful that our best life course is to work as hard as we possibly can to claw our way up a “corporate ladder” — getting bigger salaries and fancier titles, but still beholden to the people who employ us. Broken systems like private health insurance tied to employment status (and unaffordable to anyone not working full time for a big company) and creditworthiness being based on having the precisely correct amount of debt (not too much, but also not too little) are explicitly designed and maintained to ensure that a small handful of billionaires have everything they could ever imagine wanting and more, while everyone else fights over their table scraps.
We believe that our very identity is bound up in what we DO — what we produce, who and how we serve other people — when some of the people we work hardest to serve are acting in bad faith. True service is not transactional. We aren’t supposed to drain our own tank into someone else’s as an act of contrition or of performance. We aren’t supposed to have to choose between self-absorption and self-harm. Our choice to serve others should be a choice we make because we have transcended the illusion of separation. You and I are not separate. We are all part of one community. What helps you also helps me. What hurts you also hurts me.
When we choose to do what truly feels right, it moves us closer to the fullest expression of our authentic selves. Our service is not an act of sacrificing some possession we have to some disparate other, but an act of connecting to the community of the world for the mutual benefit of all.
Life’s most persistent and urgent question shouldn’t be, “what are you doing for others?” It should be, “who are you BEING, and how does that serve the world?”