The Currency of Relationships: Family, Public Service, and Disillusionment

 

Caricature hanging in our kitchen, Uncle Jacob (Iacob) died in Oct. 1964

My mother began writing about our family before I fully understood why. At first, it seemed like a quiet hobby: names copied into notebooks, dates gathered from old documents, occupations traced across generations. She wanted to know who our ancestors had been, where they had lived, what work they had done, and what small marks they had left on the world. In doing so, she gave our family a history that had otherwise existed only in fragments, a photograph here, a story there, a name repeated at the dinner table but rarely explained.

One of the figures who emerged from her research was Uncle Jacob. In our kitchen hung a caricature image of him holding a pretzel in his hand, a curious and almost comic detail that made him feel both familiar and distant. We knew very little about his relationship to us or about the full shape of his accomplishments. His parents had been bakers, and somewhere in the family record was the suggestion that Jacob had served as deputy mayor of our city in Oradea, Romania. I also remember reading that he had graduated from law school.

Learning about him interested me more than I expected. Here was a relative who had moved through public institutions, law, municipal government, civic responsibility, at a time when such paths must have looked different from the ones I knew. I too had spent time in public service, first in healthcare and later in policy work. Like Jacob, I had believed that public life could be a place where skill, education, and good intentions might improve the lives of others. Yet the more I learned about his life, the more I found myself measuring my own against it.

When I was younger, I had large dreams. I wanted to work for the World Health Organization one day. I imagined contributing to global health, helping to shape policies that could protect vulnerable communities, and being part of a system that placed human wellbeing above politics, profit, or prestige. It was an idealistic ambition, but it felt genuine. I did not dream of status for its own sake. I dreamed of meaningful work.

Over time, however, my experiences made me question whether I possessed what that particular world demanded. I had ambition, but I began to suspect that I lacked the drive to play the game public service often required. I could work hard. I could learn quickly. I could care deeply about a problem. What I could not easily do was cultivate influence for its own sake, perform confidence I did not feel, or treat relationships primarily as instruments for advancement.

I was curious about how systems worked. I wanted to understand why institutions made the decisions they made, why resources were distributed unevenly, and why reforms so often failed to change the conditions they were designed to address. I believed that if I climbed the professional ladder, I would eventually gain enough authority to make a difference. But I did not know how to build alliances along the way. I assumed that everyone around me was equally interested in improving society. I assumed that shared values would naturally translate into shared action.

I was too naïve to understand that relationships are often the currency of public service and professional life. Merit matters, but it rarely stands alone. Ideas matter, but they need champions. Expertise matters, but it needs access. A person may have the right qualifications, the strongest evidence, and the clearest moral purpose, yet still remain outside the rooms where decisions are made. In those rooms, who knows you, who trusts you, and who is willing to vouch for you can matter as much as the quality of your work.

I cared too much about the work itself. That sounds like a virtue, and in many ways it was. But it also left me unprepared for a professional culture in which visibility, loyalty, and strategic relationships could outweigh competence. I watched people advance not because they had the best answers, but because they understood how to make themselves indispensable to those in power. I watched others remain invisible despite carrying much of the intellectual and emotional labour of an organization.

Policies can be rewritten. Rules can be bent or broken. Titles can change. But the relationships created along the way often endure. They become the informal architecture of an institution: the private conversations, the old loyalties, the debts and favours, the people who will answer a call and the people who will not. This informal architecture is rarely acknowledged in mission statements, yet it often determines whose concerns are heard and whose are dismissed.

There were always ideals on paper. Organizations spoke of equity, compassion, innovation, evidence, and service. Job descriptions listed the skills and credentials required to qualify for a position. Strategic plans promised transformation. But the realities were often much different. Intentions were not always aligned with the mission and vision of an organization. People could speak the language of change while protecting the arrangements that benefited them.

Skills and expertise did not always matter when administrators set the rules. I saw promising ideas treated as threats rather than opportunities. Costly innovation that could save lives was dismissed because it did not fit within a finite budget. The argument was always practical: there is not enough money, there is not enough time, there is not enough political will. Yet somehow there was always enough money for administration, reputation management, or projects that reinforced existing power.

I also saw how easily the language of empowerment could dissolve when power was challenged. In healthcare, there were many highly accomplished women who spoke passionately about female empowerment. Yet when men entered the room, that conviction sometimes softened. The conversation changed. The confidence contracted. The same women who had been bold in one setting became cautious in another. It was not because they lacked ability or conviction. It was because the structure of the room itself signalled who held authority, whose comfort mattered, and whose voice could be safely ignored.

Each phase of my professional advancement came with what felt like sidetracked intentions. I would enter a role hoping to contribute to something larger than myself, only to discover that the immediate priorities were territorial: protecting budgets, preserving reputations, building personal empires, and/or maintaining the comfort of those already inside. People seemed more worried about building their own cottage than eliminating inequity in health and prosperity.

Even in humanitarian settings, where one might expect the moral purpose to be clearest, status and job roles often seemed to matter more than helping those most marginalized and vulnerable. I saw people speak movingly about poverty, displacement, and suffering while remaining insulated from the consequences of the systems they managed. The language of service could coexist with a deep attachment to hierarchy. Compassion could become a professional identity rather than a practice.

Slowly, I began to see a pattern that I can only describe as white-collar fraud. I do not mean fraud in the narrow legal sense, with a single identifiable criminal and a clear transaction. I mean something more diffuse and more difficult to name: institutions that claim to serve the public while creating bureaucratic structures with gaping holes. These holes allow indifference to flourish behind the language of procedure. No one has to intend harm for harm to occur. The system simply makes it easy for responsibility to disappear.

A policy can be technically compliant and morally empty. A decision can be defended as efficient while producing avoidable suffering. A leader can claim to be following evidence while ignoring the people most affected by the evidence. In such a system, harm is not always the result of malice. It can be the result of design: rules that protect institutions rather than people, incentives that reward self-preservation rather than courage, and cultures that mistake process for justice.

I started asking myself why I should continue sacrificing my compassion and hope for a better future. Why should I keep offering my energy to institutions that seemed incapable of protecting the people they claimed to serve? Corporations, after all, are often granted an artificial human status. They possess rights, legal protections, and enormous power, yet they do not breathe, suffer, love, grieve, or die. They can outlive the people who created them. They can accumulate wealth and influence across generations. And their power is often protected by laws that allow them to externalize harm onto workers, communities, and the natural world.

Why bother collecting degrees and certificates in a profession that aims to save the most lives, only to see those same lives used for war, exploitative commodities, environmental destruction, and family feuds? Why devote oneself to health, care, and prevention when the broader social order so often treats human beings as expendable? The contradiction was exhausting. I had entered public service because I believed in the possibility of collective care. But I kept encountering systems that seemed organized around extraction, control, and denial.

Why bring new humans into a world that is so evidently cruel and, in many ways, manufactured to be so? This was not a question I asked lightly. It came from a place of grief as much as anger. I looked at war, poverty, ecological collapse, and the everyday cruelties embedded in institutions, and I wondered whether bringing children into such a world was an act of hope or an act of denial. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps every birth contains a refusal to surrender to despair, even when despair has evidence on its side.

Maybe it is best to withdraw from such a society. Maybe the sanest response to cruel cultures that fail to protect human vulnerability is to step back. Maybe one should refuse to lend one’s labour, imagination, and care to systems that permit artificial persons, such as corporations, to destroy humans and nature for a good price. Withdrawal can look like failure to those who measure life by advancement. But it can also be an act of moral clarity. It can be a refusal to normalize what should not be normalized.

Still, withdrawal is not simple. To withdraw is also to leave behind the people who remain inside the system, the communities who depend on imperfect services, and the colleagues who have not yet given up. It can feel like abandoning a burning house rather than trying to save it. And yet staying can mean slowly becoming shaped by the very forces one hoped to change. The question is not only whether to participate, but how to participate without losing oneself.

Perhaps this is why my mother’s search for our ancestors matters so much to me. It offers another way of understanding time. Institutions promise progress, but they often repeat themselves. Governments change, organizations rebrand, technologies evolve, yet the same patterns of hierarchy, exclusion, and self-interest return in new forms. Family history interrupts that cycle. It reminds me that people existed before the current systems, and that they survived through relationships, labour, memory, and imagination.

My grandmother used to tell stories of a simpler life. I do not know whether those stories were entirely accurate. Likely they were not. Memory tends to soften hardship and preserve warmth. But perhaps that is not the point. Her stories were not a literal blueprint for the past; they were an image of what life could feel like when it was less dominated by status, competition, and institutional power.

Maybe it is helpful to remember those stories and imagine that such a utopia can happen, even if it never fully did. A simpler life does not mean an easier life. It does not erase illness, loss, poverty, or conflict. But it may mean a life organized around different values: mutual aid rather than advancement, enough rather than more, belonging rather than status, care rather than control.

Uncle Jacob’s pretzel, my mother’s notebooks, my grandmother’s stories, and my own disillusionment belong to the same family archive. They are not simply relics of the past. They are questions addressed to the present.

What does it mean to serve?

What do we owe one another?

When institutions fail, where do we place our hope?

And how do we live with integrity in a world that often rewards the opposite?

I do not know whether I will ever work for the World Health Organization or similar international institutions. I no longer know whether I want to. What I know is that I once believed public service could be a calling. In some moments, I still believe it. But I have learned that a calling cannot survive on ideals alone. It needs protection from cynicism, from hierarchy, and from the quiet corrosion of systems that mistake power for purpose.

My mother began writing about our family so that we would not forget where we came from. In doing so, she gave me more than names and occupations. She gave me a way to see my own life as part of a longer story, one that includes bakers and lawyers, public servants and dreamers, women who told stories and people who tried, imperfectly, to make the world more humane. That inheritance does not solve the problems I have described. But it reminds me that another way of living has always been imaginable. And perhaps imagination, carefully protected, is where change begins.