A Solution For Loneliness: Get Out and Volunteer, Research Suggests (scientificamerican.com) 161
"Loneliness is rampant, and it's killing us," writes Kasley Killam for Scientific American. "Anywhere from one quarter to one half of Americans feel lonely a lot of the time, which puts them at risk for developing a range of physical and mental illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and depression." Killam surfaces several studies that found volunteering to be an effective strategy to help combat this widespread health problem. From the report: In a recent survey of over 10,000 people in the UK, two-thirds reported that volunteering helped them feel less isolated. Similarly, a 2018 study of nearly 6,000 people across the US examined widows who, unsurprisingly, felt lonelier than married adults. After starting to volunteer for two or more hours per week, their average level of loneliness subsided to match that of married adults, even after controlling for demographics, baseline health, personality traits, and other social involvement. These benefits may be especially strong the older you are and the more often you volunteer.
Participating in volunteer opportunities may help alleviate loneliness and its related health impact for several reasons. The first and most obvious is that it's a meaningful way to connect with others and make new friends. Second, volunteering can make up for the loss of meaning that commonly occurs with loneliness. Research using the UCLA Loneliness Scale and Meaning in Life Questionnaire has shown that more loneliness is associated with less meaning. This makes sense, given our deeply rooted need for belonging. By volunteering for social causes that are important to us, we can gain a sense of purpose, which in turn may shield us from negative health outcomes. For example, purpose in life has been linked to a reduced likelihood of stroke and greater psychological well-being. Third, loneliness and isolation can lead to cognitive decline, such as memory loss. But according to the neuroscientist Lisa Genova, people who regularly engage in mentally stimulating activities build up more neural connections and are subsequently more resilient to symptoms of Alzheimer's. So, volunteering is one way to stay engaged and stimulated, rather than isolated and lonely, and thereby protect against cognitive decline.
Participating in volunteer opportunities may help alleviate loneliness and its related health impact for several reasons. The first and most obvious is that it's a meaningful way to connect with others and make new friends. Second, volunteering can make up for the loss of meaning that commonly occurs with loneliness. Research using the UCLA Loneliness Scale and Meaning in Life Questionnaire has shown that more loneliness is associated with less meaning. This makes sense, given our deeply rooted need for belonging. By volunteering for social causes that are important to us, we can gain a sense of purpose, which in turn may shield us from negative health outcomes. For example, purpose in life has been linked to a reduced likelihood of stroke and greater psychological well-being. Third, loneliness and isolation can lead to cognitive decline, such as memory loss. But according to the neuroscientist Lisa Genova, people who regularly engage in mentally stimulating activities build up more neural connections and are subsequently more resilient to symptoms of Alzheimer's. So, volunteering is one way to stay engaged and stimulated, rather than isolated and lonely, and thereby protect against cognitive decline.
Re: Also power monger money grubbers (Score:2, Insightful)
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She could have used that idle time to do the other stuff that is essential in maintaining a household. She is a partner, not just a house guest.
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lol (Score:1)
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Don't worry. With that attitude, you'll never get any. And that is just as Uncle Chuck intended, because we wouldn't want children being influenced by the likes of you.
Feeling down, citizen? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about some uncompensated labor? It's just the thing to take your mind off how empty your life is as a result of spending a third of your life performing poorly compensated labor!
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How about some uncompensated labor? It's just the thing to take your mind off how empty your life is as a result of spending a third of your life performing poorly compensated labor!
I suggest someone mod that up (but I never see a mod point to give).
My analysis is along similar lines. I was going to word it in terms of "time" being the right starting point, but the rest of it is basically propaganda in defense of a broken status quo. The problem is how our time is used, abused, or wasted.
I'm tempted to go on with my solution approaches, but instead I'm going to pick on a random social problem: Aging. Actually a rather hairy area with a lot of aspects, but many of the volunteer opportun
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Whoops, forgot to note that the story is only at 2/15 o'clock. I wish Slashdot had such an annotation in the comment header...
Re:Feeling down, citizen? (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of volunteers are retired or have a partner earning the family income.
Drop the kids at school, go help at the local charity shop, leave in time to collect the kids. Other half gets home, dinner is ready, kids are being brought up well, they get to relax from their stressful well paid job.
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Eh? How does that "reply" relate to anything I wrote? Is there some missing context here?
Or if it's just posted in the wrong place, how does it relate to anything the OP wrote? Or perhaps it is related to something else an is even more incorrectly placed?
Or maybe it's some kind of projection from your [Cederic's] real or fantasy life?
Perhaps a new Subject: would have helped?
Better than a video game (Score:2, Offtopic)
Not saying it's a panacea, it's not gonna fix all your problems, but feeling accomplishment (plus helping others) can be a healing thing. We're hard-wired to enjoy accomplis
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Volunteering has been a popular prescription for a life without meaning for centuries. Of course there's "something to it." The problem is it doesn't work anymore. People don't have meaningful connections to their community to begin with, and trying to forge them through volunteering mostly involves helping people who are even more checked out. Aside from that, there's good reason to believe that just about any cause one can support has been co-opted by fraudsters and political shitrats. A rapidly growing n
Re:Better than a video game (Score:4, Funny)
Volunteering has been a popular prescription for a life without meaning for centuries.
When I was young we could either become a monk, or join a crusade.
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It is my belief that once you go out and engage yourself in something, and it can be pretty much anything rather than sitting on your butt complaining about how some people are idiots you will start to improve not only your own well being, but society as a whole.
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Hey now... my tried and true method of arguing with anonymous people on the Internet to cure my loneliness has served me well for the past 20 years.
Why would I stop now?
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"How about some uncompensated labor? It's just the thing to take your mind off how empty your life is as a result of spending a third of your life performing poorly compensated labor!"
So 50% of the population with an IQ under 100 deserve what they got because they didn't become an astronaut-cowboy-surgeon like you?
Maslow (Score:1)
Once basic needs are satisfied, relationships and social standing rule the individual's priority.
And thank goodness. In this day and age, if you can't arrange water, food, and shelter, your genetic line needs to cease.
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Generally, a person's base view of the world and everyone else tends to be a reflection of that own person's character.
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yeah, raze Flint, MI to the ground and salt the earth, fuck 'em, it's your fault if you can't live without the system you were born into
Is there an app for that? (Score:2)
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shut up banksy
Double Edged Sword (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me tell you from personal experiencing that getting out and helping others is not some utopian ideal and neither is it always the warm and fuzzies. You really need to be built for it!
Charity is a dangerous past time and often counter productive. I have seen people, first hand with my own eyes living under the same roof, become complacent on charity. I have seen people also do well and pick themselves up out of the gutter from charity, and when that happens it is an experience and satisfaction that cannot be replicated. I have also seen people no matter how much help they get, they sabotage everything you do for them including themselves. You give them food, they now expect that to be a permanent income for them. You stupidly loan them money, now they think you are always loaded with cash and will nickel and dime you dry, if you let them. You help them do things and they treat you like a secretary.
This does not even account for the other ways that indiscriminate charity destroys Eco-systems. If you move in and setup shop helping an entire community say... building houses. Guess what... you now drive out what little economic incentive that existed for someone that was there that could build houses but wanted to make a living off of it. They move away... you are not going to stay there for ever and once you leave nothing has really improved. The people with nice new houses are not able to maintain them for various reasons and with the economy still reeling from all the charity work and the imbalance that a bunch of foreigners and their own personal wealth brings to the area and you have an economic bubble that collapses shortly after everyone leaves.
And the coup de grasse... well that is the resentment you have the potential to buildup in yourself repeatedly watching people not only just failing despite the help you are giving but also rejecting you and even becoming hostile towards you if your help does not take the form they "demand" it to be.
Charity can be very rewarding, it can also be very destructive. And like someone once famous said... it is pointless to participate in philanthropy when you do not confront the problem causing the need for that philanthropy in the first place!
MOST philanthropy is bad for the economy and community because it funnels resources into a void that consumes everyone & everything inside of it. It is stupid to assume that you are going to gain and enriching experience by getting out and volunteering!
Ayn Rand is that you? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like an Ayn Rand rant about everyone being freeloaders, it looks like you wanted to say that and then found an article to attach it to.
Let me tell you my personal experience about loneliness.... you model matter as two sizeless massless particles, with one force that propagates at infinity and no measure of time, and before you know it, you've built hydrogen and can explain why the speed of light isn't constant, and an electron isn't fundamental, and why those two things mean we're in a black hole...
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And you sound just like someone with no meaningful experience helping others.
Going places, doing stuff? Forcing yourself? Not only is your Ayn Rand "rant" pointless and baseless it smacks of naivete. You still be alone in a room full of people!
You are the person that feeds a man a fish for a day and then walks away, leaving them to die one day later with your head held high in hubris and false pride.
Ha ha, struck a nerve! (Score:1)
I thought so. It looked like you wanted to do the Ayr Rand thing: "Charity creates freeloaders" thing.
"You are the person that feeds a man a fish for a day and then walks away, leaving them to die one day later with your head held high in hubris and false pride."
Damn freeloading starving man should die today instead!
Ayr Rand of course, famously used public health services to stay alive. It seems some giving isn't 'charity' if you give it to a someone who really needs it, i.e. her.
Likewise, some people are f
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Well, if you are going to lie, can you at least make an effort to do a better job at it?
Charity does not create freeloaders, they were freeloaders before charity showed up. Charity just gets wasted on the freeloaders. I am all for charity towards people just needing a hand up from time to time.
"Damn freeloading starving man should die today instead!"
yea, I figured you didn't learn how to reach properly. You just give fish away. I try to teach them how to fish so they can go and get it for themselves. I
Free fishing lessons! (Score:1)
"I try to teach them how to fish so they can go and get it for themselves."
No you don't. Nobody does. That saying never really worked. The person would have to *instantly* learn to fish, then be successful at it that day, in order not to die of starvation. You also give them the damn fish so they don't starve.
That's the problem with that saying as used to support the "charity just creates freeloaders" idea that you pushed. It's to say "I deny you X, so that you are forced to make X yourself"....
I deny you e
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I don't think Ayn Rand was against charity. She was a Libertarian. She was just against forced charity. Also she was a novelist. If you don't like her novels well no one is forcing you to read them. So I am not sure what you are on about. "Because Ayn Rand" is not the reason for anything especially these days.
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In "Atlas Shrugged" there is a part where there is a huge train accident and Ayn Rand explains how most of the people in the train deserved to die because they were socialist. I would be very surprised if a person with such levels of hatred would be pro charity, unless she can 100% guarantee that the charity only goes to people she likes.
Btw, I did like her books.
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MOST philanthropy is bad for the economy and community because it funnels resources into a void that consumes everyone & everything inside of it.
Completely unlike adtech, or unlike most companies that develop "apps".
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The two AC's that have commented so far are right (Score:5, Interesting)
Bay area volunteering is weird...
Second Harvest food bank for example, you have a CEO making almost $300k@year in salary and benefits. A lot of the local charities are like that. Someone who's buddies with a benefactor or someone on a board gets the job. Qualifications? How about none most of the time.
Underneath them is an army of sycophants trying to climb the ladder. You have politicians that might stop by for 5 minutes for a picture of them holding a pan in one hand, and a sponge in the other. You might have young kids trying to get into civil service in city or county government (Board of Supervisors or Councilperson) The AC's are right. These folks are all repeating the politicians talking points, who are just repeating the talking points of benefactors. Barry Swenson construction, Sobrato property management, the list goes on, and they all say the same thing. "WE NEED HOUSING TO FIX THE HOMELESS PROBLEM"
It's no coincidence that these folks are some of the biggest construction, real estate, and property management companies in the bay area. Their motives are transparent and clear, they want to make more money off the backs of the limited resources here in the valley. It's not the fix though...
California has a nasty habit of making fun of "Those Red States have the highest amount of people on welfare" OK, well, those Red states also have housing. They have a social safety net. The welfare projects might not be in the most sought after places in the state, but they're there. They might not have the best schools, the best police, the best of everything, but they exist.
There's no reason California can't do the same. 50 miles south of Palm Springs you have the Salton Sea, an already depressed area that has a ton of potential to house all these people in the bay area shooting up, dropping needles, and crapping on our streets. Yet you don't EVER hear any of these volunteer organizations even suggest that we build housing there. You can buy a lot of land with power, water, and sewer hookups for $3500. Another $40,000 and you can plop a pre-fab house fully assembled. Yet where I live (San Jose) projected cost for each "low income housing unit" is $100k. More than double what I'm proposing here.
The real issue, as I pointed out is there's too many people making a profit off this mess. They're guilting people by way of virtue signalling to give them what amounts to free labor, to feel better about stuffing themselves into a tin can with 500,000 other tin cans to travel 18 miles in 2 hours. People don't care about the quality of housing here anymore because they don't have time to enjoy it.
I was in that trap myself for a while. Then on the weekend some program coordinator would call me, "WE REALLY NEEEEEEEED YOU!" as if I was the only chump they could find. Was I? Not by a longshot. After a while, I realized I was giving up the only time I had to recharge my own batteries for free, so some connected twit-fuck CEO making 5x what I made at my day job could enjoy another month of house payments for their Atherton house far removed from the swill in our city.
In the end, it didn't make me happy. What made me happy was reconnecting to my hobbies, and being fucking selfish. Fuck volunteering.
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You can find a used trailer/RV in decent condition for $5000 and house a homeless person. But if there are never going to be any jobs in the Salton Sea, does it make sense?
Housing is the one thing high speed rail could've helped with if done right. Build a truly fast train between Stockton/Modesto and Silicon Valley, and the latter's housing crisis would be greatly relieved by people moving to the former.
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high speed rail sounds pie in the sky. Like traffic systems, if you build capacity people just use it up because of the psychological effect and all you wind up doing is spending money solving a problem that really is not the root of the problem.
We need to get away from this need to pile on top of each other inside of megalithic office buildings and build our infrastructure around transportation systems and start building transportation around a quality life style. We need to get rid of most zoning laws a
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Stockton and molesto already suck ass. Making them bedroom communities for the silly valley would make them even worse, and fast.
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There's not many jobs in other welfare centers in the flyover states. These folks have mental illness or drug dependancy problems, they can't work. What I'm proposing is give them a place they can afford to live on assistance (which is not the bay area) and the counseling they need for their issues. If they refuse to go to the counseling, just let them live off the dole, but make sure we have a planned parenthood or two in the neighborhood.
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Just because a person works for a charity, doesn't mean they have to live in poverty. They shouldn't be getting rich off of donations either. They should make a fair livable wage. I think this qualifies.
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Also, the thing where people complain about red state welfare is really about hypocrisy: the people who complain about welfare the most (red voters), also benefit the most from welfare. It's not an indictment of welfare in general.
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https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]
https://taxfoundation.org/fede... [taxfoundation.org]
https://www.foxbusiness.com/fe... [foxbusiness.com]
I'd give you more but my ctrl-c control-v fingers are getting tired.
Obvious but not. (Score:5, Insightful)
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might want to revise your sig if you ever wondered why you didn't have friends before
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might want to revise your sig if you ever wondered why you didn't have friends before
I stand by my sig. There are some exceptions of course. To every rule there is an exception, except rule 34.
It's Like Winning The Lottery (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I suppose if volunteering works out for you, it could be amazing. New lifelong friends with similar life goals, community respect, media exposure, and turning a corner in your life where everything starts looking up.
Except it very likely won't. Charities assume you won't be around long, and often just rush you through orientation, training, and putting you to work without engaging you and treating like you're a real part of the program. Other volunteers all sit around glumly, disinterested in friending any of the other volunteers once they've seen them. The ones you strike up awkward conversations with never return or volunteer again. Anything that happens could spell your termination. There's no respect for people who have any kind of personality or sense of humor. You're just a troublemaker to them. They want bland people who work hard and don't talk a lot.
In my own particular case, I had an evil woman from the neighborhood association monitoring my cheerful updates on faecebook, then reaching out to each charity I talked about to tell them god knows what, to poison my relationship with them. Then, one of the groups I joined was domineered by a small core clique who called all the shots while pretending to be all about love and democracy. I discovered that they had been helping themselves to the funds donated for their annual event. They sued me (yes, in court) to be silent, seized all of the media, lists and works I'd built for them, and also framed me for some nonexistent "hacking" issues.
It's just not worth it. The problem with the world is people. The fewer people there are, the better. And best to stay away from the ones there already are. Don't volunteer unless your middle name is "sucker".
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Well, I didn't know she was monitoring me until one day she popped up in that last group's facebook (which I was reading with an alt account since they'd blocked me) gloating about how pleased she'd been "to help".
Solution to poverty : "don't be poor" (Score:3)
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I can't volunteer full-time, because I too have a day job. But I still run an inner city Boy Scout troop, where we teach boys trade skills and outdoor skills. I also volunteer in many short-term projects. And yes, it DOES help me not be lonely!
Full-time work is no excuse not to volunteer.
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Wealth has little to do with the ability to volunteer. I have worked with other volunteers who themselves live below the poverty line. They feel personally enriched by helping others, despite being poor. My own parents lived below the poverty line, until well after I left home. That never kept them from volunteering. Now, they are elderly and homebound, but they still maintain relationships with those they have helped through their selflessness.
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Good and bad (Score:2)
Volunteering can be good. Because they are not paying you, they may be very generous with non-monetary forms of appreciation, and it can be almost as good as paid employment in terms of experience and references.
On the other hand, protections for employees are horribly weak and volunteers don't even have that.
It depends on what you mean by "volunteering" (Score:5, Interesting)
Service to others truly is a path to greater happiness, but only if it's the right kind of service.
My wife often volunteers to assist with the homeless, and with people with substance abuse issues, and typically finds it exhausting and frustrating. It is so very, very hard to make a difference with people who are trapped in a cycle of self-destructive behavior, no matter how effort you put into helping them.
On the other hand, I teach engineering classes and volunteer to advise student organizations. In my case I'm generally dealing with people who want to learn, and who will eventually go out to make the world a better place. It's something that provides a lot of fulfillment, even though I could make more money in a different job.
In addition, I work with a non-profit organization that supports native (not foreign) social workers in Sierra Leone. In this case I salvage older laptops that I pick up at estate sales or recover from recycling bins, and rehabilitate them for use in a training center overseas. I have fun fixing the laptops, I reduce the amount of electronics in landfills, and I make a difference with a group of people who truly appreciate getting the laptops.
So the trick is to volunteer to work with people who want to improve themselves or the world they live in, and to do it on your own terms. Volunteering for education is a great outlet, as is volunteering to support grass-roots organizations that work to improve the home-grown infrastructure in another country.
WOW is it cynical in here...eh, volunteering works (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get invested in it; don't let it become a second job. Do something that has immediate by-the-end-of-the-day results, and find a charity that will let you do one day at a time without trying to guilt trip you into doing more (you can tell them going in that you're not sure how much time you're going to be able to devote to this.)
As long as you do it for yourself, not allow yourself to become an instant slave to the cause, I think this is actually really good advice. Volunteering led to me meeting all kinds of people I wouldn't have otherwise met, several of which are still in my life many years after I stopped volunteering. Including my wife. (Estranged, ok yeah, but still I can't call it a bad thing.) It also led to a couple of of paid jobs that helped me make ends meet for a while. Yes, there were a several assholes I encountered and the politics of charities can get really depressing, but when I stopped getting anything out of it I simply stopped showing up.
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Reading these comments, I can see that a lot of people equate volunteering with working for a charity organization. I'll argue that if you open your eyes, there are loads of ways to work within your community that don't have a thing to do with some non-profit company.
I've had the mixed blessing of being able to semi-retire fairly early in my career and it's surprisingly fraught with peril. Especially if you go straight into a career as you're becoming an adult, it's hard to see how many needs in your life t
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I'd be first in line to shed my physicality and transition to something post-human if the technology was ready, but until then... if petting bunnies and planting fruit trees with other primates keeps this body's neurochemistry copacetic, so be it.
So you could say that... you've learned to accept it?
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This canâ(TM)t be right. (Score:2, Funny)
I volunteer online as a grammar nazi and sjw yet despite my daily toil I have never felt so empty inside.
Yeah, for extroverts (Score:1, Insightful)
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To a certain extent.
I'm quite the introvert, but even I go a bit odd and start talking to myself if I've not had human contact for over 6 weeks.
It's not hard to deal with. Just join a Meetup group and there's always someone somewhere who wants to have a drink with company.
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Maybe if you're an extrovert who feels pain unless he's surrounded by people all the time. Introverts are completely happy to spend time by themselves.
I know TFA is a pit passe here but you couldn't even be bothered t get to the 4th word of the title before "weighing in" with your "opinions".
You see the bit about loneliness in word 4? That means is't about people who AREN'T happy in isolation. So you can dial back you weird shoulder-chip about extroverts.
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Introverts can get lonely too. Stop being an arse and projecting your own misanthropism on others.
Step Zero: Leave 'social media' behind. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do I hear the pizza guy? (Score:1)
I'm in my mom's basement because I want to be.
It sure looks like it ends loneliness (Score:3)
A Solution For Loneliness: Get Out and Volunteer, Research Suggests
That's good. What else though? What about those late night movies where a lonely, bored housewife goes out and joins an upscale brothel? That could work too.
This is also a mating strategy (Score:3)
One of the best ways of meeting partners of whatever gender is to join organizations, and there is a ton of volunteer work out there to be done. And...all organations want people to do internal duties, like getting out the newsletter. Organization relationships are the new office romances, because there is no HR to criminalize all human relationships.
no good deed goes unpunished (Score:3, Funny)
The problem is not with volunteering as such. The problem is the things people volunteer for are generally useless activities and can often just be slave labor for someone else to profit from.
OTOH volunteering for a group like Abu Sayyaf or other so called terrorist groups or as a sicario or kidnapper for the Mexican drug cartels is highly rewarding because you are helping to reduce the human infestation. Another option is to join with me and start a group to promote immediate global thermonuclear war as a means to a greener planet.
Generally working for free is a mug's game, but if even 30% of the scientists and engineers on the planet were willing to volunteer their time toward some grand project we might be able to do great things that neither corporations nor governments can do like build a settlement on the moon or Mars or Europa or Titan or build an interstellar spaceship and travel to the stars.
Kidnapping for profit as is so popular in many places around the world can also be an excellent way to both avoid being lonely and of making money. Keep a hostage long enough and Stockholm Syndrome may kick in and they can become your bestest friend too. It also gives you a way to "date" the prettiest girls who otherwise might not otherwise even glance in your direction.
If you combine both of those ideas you could start a Space Pirate organization which boards and hijacks government space ships and habitats and demands ransom for the people as well as the spacecraft. Even unmanned missions could be intercepted and captured until or unless a ransom were paid.
Volunteering drives away paid workers. (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to want to volunteer at a local library. Not now, when I retire.
Then I was reading about how a few communities were cutting back on the funding of their local libraries because they had a lot of volunteers and didn't have to hire as many full time positions. Instead of putting the money into other library infrastructure, the money was funnelled into something else in the community.
I now tell people that are retired to use the library to find clubs and other communities that they may be interested in.
Duh (Score:2)
Open source vs volunteering (Score:3)
It's strange to see how most of slashdot supports open source programming (working at home, alone, without payment) over volunteering (going outside, with people, without payment). Really feels like a lot of people here are just conditioned to do nothing more in life than to program. How convenient for the corporations, to have such drones.
Not volunteering isn't the problem, so (Score:2)
Plus, I have a sneaking suspicion that for many, "volunteering" will mean spending more time on social media shouting about things.
Here's Another Solution (Score:1)
Do what conservatives in America do to refocus their loneliness: create accounts on every social media platform you can and use every waking hour to shitpost propaganda. Maybe Donald will send you a birthday card.
Solution to Loneliness: Get out and (Score:4, Insightful)
could be "volunteer", but also "visit pubs", "participate in a team sport", "attend some club activity" (anything from lock picking via chess to knitting) ...
So the recipe against loneliness is meet others and do something together with them, who'd have thought.
Someone who is the "going out and meet people" type will have no problem finding some activity. I think the bigger hurdle for most lonely people isn't finding a suitable activity, but the "going out and meeting people" part (for various reasons ranging from limited mobility via personal insecurity to social ineptitude).
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I was coming around to say 'team sport' myself. I started swimming with a masters club about 5 years ago, and I just celebrated the wedding of one of my teammates this weekend. I'm quite introverted, but I'm happy to sit and talk with them when I stretch after practice, and it's 90% of the socializing that I need to, and it doesn't come with all the baggage of socializing with work people. There aren't any politics, we have a good time and go for brunch and complain about the coaches or the sets or whatever
Oh yes (Score:3)
In other news (Score:2)
I must be doing it wrong (Score:2)
I guess I'm doing it wrong? I have volunteered at a feline rescue for eight years now; it's open to the public and my job every Sunday is to greet, monitor, and herd visitors and initiate the adoption process along with managing any other volunteers on the shift I work
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Why do you continue?
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It's my lone social activity, so I probably benefit more from it than I feel. I also have a strong sense of guilt since there would be no one to replace me (we're always short on volunteers, especially at the "manager"-type level) and overall I still like the place, the volunteering just doesn't fill me with any positive feelings anymore.
There are different types of volunteers (Score:2)
Young Professionals' Volunteer Groups (Score:2)
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Look on the bright side... if we find out who posted this trash by the time everyone is done pissing on your grave when you die, you might be resurrected!
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And now I shall direct you to have a good hard look in the mirror at yourself.
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If you were a ham, you wouldn't be capitalizing the word. It's not an acronym.