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.
