I work in customer service, and if you ever have a desire to see the ugly side of humanity, I highly recommend a job in this field. I don’t get to witness mass genocide or death by starvation, but I have regular contact with people who think that retail injustice, or their perception of such injustice, especially when they are the alleged victim, is just as infuriating, if not more so.

I’ve been with the same company for roughly two-and-a-half years, and although I found my current position enjoyable at first, the job and the industry have served to highlight just how skewed our priorities are. Our price adjustment policy “victimizes” the customer. Our shipping charges are “a crime against humanity.”

This is our Darfur.

I am uneasy about having to feed the ideal of American Consumerism in order to feed myself. My job requires me to embrace the idea that the customer is Number One, that it is all about them and their little world. A world where tragedy is paying too much for a sweater and outrage doesn’t begin to describe the reaction to a sold-out pair of shoes.

This is our Blood Diamond.

I’m tired of helping people who don’t have actual needs. Spoiled rich kids mourning over a jacket as if they’ve lost a child to AIDS.

I’m sick of it, and I want out. I’m still young (by most standards anyway), single, and I’ve got nothing keeping me here. Except debt.

Ah yes, debt. The thing we love to celebrate with the ringing of bells and raucous cheers and applause.

That’s not a metaphor. We actually do this where I work.

God willing, I will have paid off my credit card by January, leaving myself with only student loans, which I will carry with me for many years. Thankfully, I have options for forbearance and deferment, which means I could be temporarily without any debt-related bills as early as next winter. Once that is ironed out, I will (hopefully) make my great escape. But to where?

I want to do something real. Something that matters. I want to get out of my own little world and start serving people with actual needs. I want to wake up in the morning knowing that I have the chance to make an actual difference, however small. Not through some side project or weekend trip, but all the time.

Although the prospect scares me a lot, I’ve been looking at the Peace Corps website recently and considering it. I don’t think I would deal well with not bathing and having to eat mushy/liquidy food. Then there are other creature comforts like running water and air conditioning that would be difficult to live without. But maybe something like this is what I need. Maybe I just need to try a short-term mission trip and see how that goes. I feel like I need to see the world to truly grasp the big picture. Not the world I see on TV, but the world as it truly is. I want to go away and experience culture shock, then come back and experience it again in America.

Most of us don’t realize just how shocking our culture is.

Japan might have us beat, though.