One person can never do enough. It’s a truism, and a dull one at that, but living that inadequacy is a whole new deal. In the US, you can mostly ignore the pain and inequality in your life. You can go from home to car to office to car to home again, and only encounter other middle class people. You don’t see the sweatshop laborer that made your clothes, or the environmental impact of the pollution caused by your car.

You don’t get a bubble in poor countries. The sick, starving, and unemployed are your friends and neighbors. Kids swarm your car to beg for money in the street. The pollution hangs in the sky and makes you cough black. Your staff members need more days off to attend funerals than you could have ever imagined. There is no way to pretend you’re not living in a world of colossal needs; that everyone is as comfortable as you are.

That never stops being painful for me, and I know I am not the only one. There are a few time-honored ways of dealing with the problem. You can try to tune it out – focus only on your job and refuse to notice all the other needs. That turns pretty quickly to blocking out the entire world you live in. You can refuse to think about it at all, but that turns pretty quickly into refusing to think about everything. Or you can tell yourself a story to help you accept your tiny little place in the world. A story helps give yourself some kind of handle to hang on to when the big eyed children with malnutrition-orange hair beg you for bread and candy.

I’m a storyteller, myself. A good story about what I am doing and why it’s worth doing it can take me through a long of dark nights of the soul. I define my project, and its immediate impact. Then I try to think about the ripples it may have, spreading out into the world. It’s not that my work is necessarily the most important work, or the only work that matters. But it does matter. Insert your metaphor of choice here: starfish on beach, candle in darkness. Sisyphus and his rock, by the way, are not a good metaphor choice.

I have other types of stories for other types of projects. International development is powerfully complex. Everything is linked, often in ways you wouldn’t expect. Situating your little effort into a large whole is easy. Education projects are essential because educated people improve economic growth and are healthier. Agricultural development efforts can prevent small farmers from starving and improve GDP. Even something as technical as land reform ties into state stability, agricultural support, and individual empowerment. I tell myself a story for every project I work for. I find a reason to love my work, and I hold to that reason.

So I had an answer for my office manager – I had my own story. I told him you can’t change the world when your child is sick. You can’t start a business, run for political office, or form a community association. All you can do is try to save your child. That’s just the nature of the human heart. And by helping the children of Uzbekistan be happy and healthy, we were freeing up a lot of human energy to make the country a better place.

The office manager accepted my answer. At least, he seemed calmer after we talked. He kept going. He didn’t do anything drastic like quit his job or emigrate to Russia. But I am willing to bet he’s still haunted by the problems he can’t solve in Uzbekistan. Just like I am.