Sacrificing Business for FaceBook

Sacrificing Business for FaceBook

Why do we sacrifice business and livelihood for our simple expressions on FaceBook?  Our expression on FaceBook can likely hurt our business.  People read something that they should not have read and now you lose business.  Your boss sees your page and now you get fired.  Our personal lives have intertwined with our professional lives and now it is very difficult to create a separation like it was in the past before the invention of social media.  Employees know more about their bosses then they should, bosses know more about their employees than they should. 

Even though our personal expression on FaceBook can hurt our potential to accumulate more money, why are we still drawn to FaceBook, or other sorts of creative outlet in social media?  I feel it’s because life is not just about accumulating money.  Once your financial needs are satisfied, there is a feeling deep within that saids, “what more is there to life other than accumulating money?”

I feel that FaceBook and other forms of social media such as Vimeo are ways of creativity and self-expression, something that we rarely ever get to express in our places of employment.  In our places of employment, our opportunities to be self-expressive and creative are very limited.  We cannot dress the way we want to dress, we cannot speak the way we want to speak, we cannot sing, we cannot dance, we cannot rap, we cannot write, we cannot make love, we cannot exercise, we cannot be honest, we are essentially paid to be false. 

For 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, possibly even more, we are paid to be somebody that we are not, we are paid to be controlled and restricted.  Social media allows us to be free to a certain extent.  We are still bound by the law on what we can and cannot express online but we are much more free online than we ever will be in our place of employment.  It is natural that when your creativity and self-expressiveness is bottled up for so long at work, you just want to be free and let your creativity loose, social media creates this outlet of expression. 

Here we can speak about what we want to speak about, we can share videos, we can share music, we can share poetry, we can share writings, we can share pictures, we can share our passions, we can drop our guards stop worrying about accumulating money and just be real and honest. 

The employer pays us to become machines when we are in the factory or office but to allow the employer to start controlling our outside lives outside of the factory or office just seems to be unbearable.  Then the question is, “where has my personal life gone?”  “Is my entire life professional now?”  “Is everything that I say and do dictated and controlled by whether or not my expression is acceptable by society enough in order to accumulate more income?” 

Police Officers are paid to shut their mouth, the Police Department will not allow the Officer to state his true feelings about what is occurring with all these protests, a wrong slip and they will lose their jobs.  The more money you make, the more mechanical you will be, the more robotic, the more fake, the more of a slave.  What the boss says, inside or outside of the office is what goes.  The boss tells you to shut your FaceBook off, you shut it off, you are controlled by money.  The Officers lose connection to their inner spirit, they are no longer humans, they are slaves of authority.  The more money the department pays them, the more they will be dedicated slaves.  Now if the Officers were being paid minimum wage, if the Officers were getting paid only $9 per hour, I can guarantee a lot of these Officers will say “Fuck this shit, I’m gonna say what I want to say, I have nothing to lose.” 

The beauty of being paid less money is that it allows you to be freer, it allows you to drop your guard, you really have nothing to lose.  If you drive a fancy BMW that costs $50,000, you might be worried about it getting damaged, scratched, vandalized, the car then starts to control your life and decisions that you make, you are too much attached to the car.  The beauty of having a run down junk car is that you don’t care if it gets damaged, you don’t care if it gets scratched, if something happens to it, you’ll just get another one, probably a even better one. 

This is the same that goes with our reputations and social status.  The more you are “respected” by society, the more you have to protect your reputation, the more you are worried about what you say and do so that the people on the outside will continue to give you respect.  But when you are a nobody, when nobody even knows who you are, there is nothing to protect, you can be honest and real, you don’t have to worry much. 

The society is paying you to be a slave.  You are ultimately the one who decides how much you will sell your freedom for.  The less you are attached to material things the simpler you live your life, the freer you will be.  The more attached you are to material things, the more luxurious your lifestyle, the more of a slave you will be, unless you have the courage to drop all of it if it really came down to it.  Somebody can be driving a BMW, but it does not necessarily mean he is attached to his BMW.  The attachment is what creates slavery. 

There is much more to life than just accumulating money, it’s not all about the money.  We might meet the love of our lives in social media, this makes it all worth it.  The little creative things we say or do can change the life of someone far away that we don’t even know, and this makes it all worth it.  Something that you say or do can actually inspire somebody to not commit suicide like the way Robin Williams did and this makes it all worth it.  Something that you say or do can actually prevent somebody from randomly going out and killing two cops, and this makes it all worth it.  Something that you say or do can help people better understand racism and start putting forth efforts in their own lives to stop contributing to the problem and that makes it all worth it.  Social media gives us, the people, the power to make a positive contribution to this world and that is why we are drawn to it so frequently even though at times it can hurt our pockets.