We all know several ways in which the world could be improved. Many of us experience them every day; many millions suffer deep and ongoing injustice, and some of us fight to make positive change. There is always more work to do to bring justice and improve the human condition, so both the work and its intended results are needed.   
 
Making even small improvements to big systems can be daunting, heartbreaking, almost impossible work. The ability to persist in this work requires we recognize that the world does not want to change.   
 
It is not that the structure of everyday life and of big, collective pursuits cannot be improved; the problem is that the world as it has been until now has resulted in the world we live today, so the logic of past experience and decision-making is embedded in the structures that we inhabit and utilize. In this sense, the world is as it wants to be, and it will push against progress in surprising and disheartening ways.

This is what makes the work of charity and changemaking so noble a pursuit—not that it is right and worthy, but that it is right and worthy and sometimes painfully difficult. Those who try to heal societal wounds, counter injustice, and help those in need—the do-gooders—must brave the frustrations of a world that responds to their forthrightness, heart, and kindness, with dismissal and discourtesy.

The world does not want to change, but it will always evolve as we make it our own, as we make of the fabric of human interactions either a hope or a devastation. We rely on the do-gooders to keep going, to be exemplars of right and reason, to serve as guiding lights, pointing the way toward a way of living in which no one need fear any threat.

We rely on the do-gooders. Our fortunes and freedoms depend on their resilience, their defiance, their conscientious persistence. 

Let's acknowledge that, and let's try to make life easier for them, by consciously willing the world to want to be better.