Why Are We Applauding?
Why are we celebrating unpaid labor to compensate for a government that won’t adequately feed its people?
I recently started thinking about something while attending a hot meal program.
I receive food assistance from the state, but the monthly allocation isn’t always enough to cover my nutritional needs. So, occasionally, I visit organizations that provide free meals. They’re staffed, in part, by volunteers who donate their time preparing, serving, and distributing food.
I’m grateful the meals exist. But something about this arrangement bothers me.
The state provides insufficient assistance, and volunteers step in to compensate for the shortfall. Their unpaid labor helps keep people fed while the underlying inadequacy of public assistance remains largely unaddressed.
And then we applaud them.
Literally.
At these organizations, there are occasions when everyone is instructed to clap for the volunteers. There are recognition ceremonies, awards, branded tote bags, and other tokens of appreciation.
I’ve collected a few tote bags myself over the years. 😂
There’s nothing inherently wrong with recognizing someone’s generosity. But I’ve begun questioning the larger social arrangement that makes this recognition necessary in the first place.
Why are we applauding people for voluntarily performing labor that a properly organized society might not require them to perform?
The Concentration of Sacrifice
Let’s consider what’s actually happening.
When the state fails to provide sufficient food assistance, someone has to compensate for that failure.
In this case, the burden falls disproportionately on volunteers.
They donate their time, energy, and sometimes their own money to help people who cannot afford adequate food.
This is not distributed effort. It’s concentrated sacrifice.
Meanwhile, the government can continue operating with an inadequate safety net, charitable organizations can continue filling the gaps, and the people experiencing food insecurity can continue depending on the generosity of strangers.
Everybody has found a way to accommodate the problem without necessarily addressing it.
There’s something fundamentally backwards about this arrangement.
Why should the burden of feeding economically disadvantaged people fall so heavily on the goodwill of individuals rather than on properly funded public institutions?
And why have we become so comfortable with this arrangement?
The Moral Status of the Volunteer
I don’t doubt that many volunteers genuinely enjoy helping others. Some are motivated by solidarity, compassion, friendship, or a desire to participate in their communities.
I’ve been a volunteer myself.
Years ago, after being laid off from the Los Angeles Times, I found myself unemployed and struggling to find work. I eventually started volunteering at an AIDS services organization in Orange County.
I genuinely cared about people affected by AIDS. It affected my community, the gay community, and I wanted to contribute.
But looking back, I recognize that there were other motivations at play.
Volunteering also gave me something I wasn’t getting from employment: validation.
I could demonstrate that I was still contributing to society. I could feel productive. I could present myself as someone doing something worthwhile rather than someone unemployed and struggling to find work.
And, of course, I enjoyed the recognition.
At volunteer appreciation events, I’d walk away with tote bags displaying the organization’s logo. Apparently, I was building quite a collection of moral credentials. 😂
It took me years to recognize these additional motivations.
There’s nothing particularly sinister about them. Human motivations are complicated. We can genuinely care about others while simultaneously enjoying the social approval that comes with helping them.
But I think we should be willing to examine the relationship between volunteering and validation.
In a society that constantly measures people’s worth through productivity, volunteering offers another opportunity to demonstrate one’s usefulness.
Even unpaid labor can become a source of social status.
The Recipient’s Position
Now consider the person receiving the meal.
They arrive because they don’t have enough money to purchase food.
The volunteer serves them. The organization recognizes the volunteer. Everyone applauds👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽.
The volunteer receives public acknowledgment. The recipient receives a meal.
I’m not suggesting that volunteers are deliberately trying to humiliate anyone. Most probably aren’t thinking about the social implications of this arrangement at all.
But there’s an interesting imbalance.
The giver is celebrated. The recipient is expected to be grateful.
And sometimes, beneath that gratitude, there’s an unspoken expectation that recipients should eventually give something back.
Perhaps they should volunteer, help clean up, participate in activities, or otherwise demonstrate that they’re contributing rather than simply receiving.
Why?
Why must receiving something essential to human survival create an expectation of reciprocal labor?
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If I visit a public library, I’m not expected to volunteer as a librarian.
If I receive treatment at a publicly funded hospital, nobody expects me to volunteer in the emergency department afterward.
If I use a public park, I’m not expected to spend Saturday cleaning it to demonstrate my appreciation.
We understand that certain things belong to the social infrastructure that allows people to live.
Why should food be treated differently?
The Myth of the Indebted Recipient
There’s an underlying assumption in our culture that receiving something without immediately giving something back creates a moral debt.
You receive assistance? You should demonstrate gratitude.
You receive housing assistance? You should demonstrate that you’re trying hard enough.
You receive food? Perhaps you should volunteer.
You receive public benefits? You should prove that you’re not taking advantage of the system.
Apparently, simply being alive isn’t sufficient justification for receiving the material necessities of life.
You must continually demonstrate your worthiness.
This is particularly insulting when you’re already living on an inadequate safety net.
The person struggling to afford food is not necessarily looking for another activity to fill their day. They might simply want enough money to purchase groceries without having to depend on charitable organizations.
They might prefer independence over gratitude ceremonies.
They might prefer choosing their own food over accepting whatever happens to be served.
And they might prefer not having to organize their lives around the availability of charitable assistance.
These aren’t unreasonable expectations.
They’re ordinary desires for autonomy.
What Would Distributed Effort Look Like?
Imagine a different arrangement.
The state provides sufficient food assistance for everyone to obtain adequate nutrition.
Public institutions are properly funded.
Organizations can still offer community meals, but their existence doesn’t determine whether economically disadvantaged people eat.
People can volunteer because they genuinely enjoy cooking, organizing, distributing food, or spending time with others.
Some people might volunteer occasionally. Others might never volunteer at all.
Nobody needs to feel morally superior for donating their time, and nobody needs to feel inferior for receiving assistance.
Volunteering becomes an actual gift rather than an informal substitute for public responsibility.
More importantly, the burden is distributed differently.
Instead of concentrating the consequences of inadequate public assistance in the hands of volunteers, society collectively finances the infrastructure necessary to meet basic human needs.
This doesn’t eliminate generosity or mutual aid.
It eliminates the expectation that generosity must compensate for institutional inadequacy.
There’s an important distinction.
Stop Worshipping Sacrifice
David Graeber spent considerable time examining the strange moral relationship our society has with work, productivity, and economic value.
His criticism of bullshit jobs, meaningless labor, and the cultural glorification of work offers a useful perspective here.
We have constructed a society in which employment is frequently treated as a measure of personal worth. Even when people aren’t being paid, we find ways to celebrate their labor as evidence of their moral worth.
Volunteering can become another expression of the same productivity religion🙏🏽.
Instead of asking whether everyone has enough food, adequate housing, and sufficient time to enjoy being alive, we celebrate the people who sacrifice their personal time to compensate for the absence of those guarantees.
We applaud the sacrifice rather than questioning why the sacrifice is necessary.
And we sometimes expect the people receiving assistance to join the applause.
I’m not interested in discouraging anyone from helping their neighbors. Generosity is wonderful when it’s freely given.
But I am interested in questioning why we have normalized a social arrangement in which the survival of economically disadvantaged people depends so heavily on unpaid labor and individual goodwill.
A society should be organized to minimize unnecessary sacrifice, not manufacture endless opportunities for people to demonstrate their willingness to make it.
I’d rather live in a society where nobody needs to volunteer at a hot meal program because everyone can afford to eat.
And if someone still wants to volunteer, wonderful. Let them.
But perhaps we should stop confusing their generosity with a functioning social safety net.
Feed people because they have a right to eat, not because someone else has volunteered to make sure they do.
And maybe, just maybe, we can put the applause on hold until we’ve figured out why people are hungry in the first place.
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