I like adopting the pretense that among my narcissistic, nocturnal, technophilic generation Y traits exists the most intrinsic one of a globalized citizen—a one-way ticket to moral egalitarianism that leaves me stranded on an island of discontent. Starved for familiarity, I fight my way back to the shore of personal quandaries—leaving my combat against the dilemmas of the world for another time.

Unfortunately, our impulses to be "worldly" nowadays are as sporadic as they are confused. While most of us claim to be torch-wielders of worldly causes and icons of social pursuits, this ideal stands in harsh contrast to the increasingly fast-paced, internalized nature of our daily lives. This incongruous notion of what we call “worldliness”—charity without self-sacrifice, knowledge without self-action, stems from a line of paradoxical paradigms that have followed us through unwittingly adolescent lives. The exposure to generosity and progressivism that our youth faces today—from Oprah’s dissection of social toxins in her “book clubs”, to our one-day charity drives and drive-thru fundraisers, to the blasé criticism of government we endorse and indulge in on shows such as Late Night and John Oliver-- seems incongruous with the debilitating lack of concern we seem to hold for our inability to address the issues we see in our daily lives.

In a 2014 speech regarding his new FAFSA schooling initiative, Obama noted—“Today more of our young people are earning a college degree than ever before… earning their shot at the American Dream.” And yet, while this proclamation of our drive resonates with fire and din with some audiences, this perceived self-indulgence drapes a hefty silence over others. When we succeed on an individual level—leaping from one milestone to the other—what happens to our sense of social good? With such limited time and resources, perhaps it is easy to see how more of our social activism lands in jargoned discourse, while so little is actualized in our pursuits. When we compare our expansionary moral natures with our restrictive inner drive to succeed, therein stems an idea ambiguous and disjointed—a societal euphemism of “worldliness” that is unsettling and profound. Today, more of my friends are taking to social media than are taking to the streets with the issues they most love and care about. While this is a great thing, it allows for a "worldly" passivity that acts as a misleading replacement for doing social good.

The problem lies partly within media. News headlines praise the rich and famous; societal platitudes stem from our desire to homogenize ourselves into the typeset of success. With Selena Gomez raising millions for the UN, to the Melinda and Bill Gates fund capping the top 50 Forbes donors, to the namesakes of patronage inscribed in our institutions of education, ideals of a charity are patronizing icons for our own failures. While our small acts of charity may be organic, they appear to us as small sandcastles among marble domes. What we don’t realize, however, is that to match them in the now would be as impossible as building pillars of marble among sand.

So, how does an angsty teenager or fraught millennial reconcile his or her consummate yearning for a better life with that for a better world? How can these two frenetic worlds of thought—the desire to help others, while still keeping tabs on our own lives--coincide? Is there a way to affect meaningful social change even without access to hefty funds or fame, and as a student mired in his or her own personal lives?

Perhaps we are closer to answering this perceived dilemma than we think – for this paradigm of charity, of worldliness, needs only to be recognized before it is addressed. Perhaps it is the convenience of social media, or perhaps it is the over-dissemination of information, or perhaps it is even the busy-ness of our lives that is causing our passivity towards "worldly" actions. One day, we’ll see our worldly dreams actualized in our personal pursuits. But until then, we need to believe that both can exist.