The Meaning Of Making A Difference

The Meaning of Making a Difference

What do people get for all their hard work under the sun?

Ecclesiastes 1:3

The character Warren Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson in the film About Schmidt, is a man leading a life of quiet desperation. He retires from his vice-president position at an insurance company, looking back on a meaningless life and ahead to a meaningless retirement.

One day while watching television, Warren sees an opportunity to give money and write letters to an underprivileged child in Tanzania. Warren responds to the appeal, and throughout the movie he faithfully sends the twenty-two dollars a month and writes poignant letters to a child named Ndugu.

On one occasion after a long road trip, Warren comes home to an empty house—a metaphor for his empty life. He walks in with an armload of impersonal junk mail, ambles up the stairs, and looks disappointedly at the disheveled state of his bedroom. Throughout this scene, the audience hears Warren’s voice-over narration of a letter he recently composed to Ndugu. He pours out his intense feeling of emptiness:

I know we’re all pretty small in the scheme of things, and I guess the best you can hope for is to make some kind of difference. What difference have I made? What in the world is better because of me? I am weak, and I am a failure. There’s just no getting around it. Real soon I will die. Maybe twenty years—maybe tomorrow—it doesn’t matter. Once I am dead and everyone who knew me dies, it is as though I never existed. What difference has my life made to anyone? None that I can think of. Hope things are fine with you.

Yours truly,

Warren Schmidt

At the end of the narration, the depression on Warren’s face gives way to wonder as he stares down at a letter from Tanzania. It is a letter from a nun who works in the orphanage where six-year-old Ndugu lives. She tells Warren that Ndugu thinks of him every day and hopes he is happy. Enclosed is a picture drawn by Ndugu for Warren—two stick people smiling and holding hands. Warren is overcome by the realization that he has finally made a difference. He lifts his hands to his tired face and cries.

Let’s never forget that our meaning on this earth becomes most clear when we are making a difference in other people’s lives—when we are meeting each other’s needs, especially the needs of our spouses.

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

—Elie Wiesel