Sorry I missed all this wisdom, and glad you are better kat. I think Rick's discussion of desperation cuts very deep -- it is more than just the bad people thinking that everything needs to be changed utterly, or everything is doomed, it is also the good people who become desperate, not only when things turn bad on a cosmic scale, but when a friend commits suicide -- you think nothing will ever go right again, or what is the point of anything. Sometimes I think about this as the bad side of "everything being connected to everything else" -- when things go wrong you come to believe that everything is infected with badness, that there is nothing good that cannot be shadowed by the state of things.
I assume that is why the wise people have always suggested doing simple good things until that desperate shadow subsides.
I come at all this from an even darker perspective, which may be ironically why I keep balanced (when I keep balanced). I am constantly surprised at how not bad people are, when they have all the incentive to be horrible bastards. When you see all the propaganda for people to be miserable self-interested neo-Darwinian consumers, looking after No.1, and the desperate lives people lead, I constantly wonder why everyone isn't butchering everyone else. I wonder why my students don't burn down the world in frustration at its stupidity. And when I see, as I do sometimes, people like Big Mick at work, and others here, I think we are truly blessed. Why do they do good things? Why do they do good things? A complete puzzle, if you believed the economists and neo-Darwinians who rule things.
So when someone asks me what the point of doing good is, I occasionally say: "To provide counter-evidence!" -- to prove by example, that human beings are not as bad as everyone thinks. After all, wasn't that what St. Francis of Assisi was about? -- Look, we can be like this, guys. It doesn't have to be the way they say it is. It lifts the soul; just as reading this thread does. If people like those who post here can be in despair, knowing what they know, and having worked so hard and suffered terrible disappointments, and yet they can somehow get up and go back to work -- isn't that amazing, totally miraculous? It makes no sense, and yet....
yours, Peter T.