“The optimist sees a light at the end of the tunnel, the realist sees a train entering the tunnel, the pessimist sees a train speeding at him, hell for leather, and the machinist sees three idiots sitting on the rail track.”
– Old German joke
Recently I attracted a new breed of hater who started messaging me about my site. Rather than doing anything outlandish he went the passive aggressive route. Essentially his entire argument was that activities like writing Amazon reviews, or authoring SEO articles for obscure start ups was immoral and unethical.
My only question is: to who?
The entire argument about morality is stupid. Outside of a few things most most ethical decisions are entirely dependent on how a person sees the situation. One of the old pope’s wrote an erotic novel
By the same token I’m sure that someone would find my “is that really ethical” inquirer to be some kind of blasphemous heathen. A group like the Amish would have considered it sinful for him to be using a computer within his own home. Since the email arrived on a Saturday, we can also guess that he broke the Sabbath, a sinful violation.
This issue also goes to a broader issue, why would you ever care about what someone else does?
Outside a few things like pedophilia, there aren’t a whole lot of activities that I’d feel inclined to try and lambast someone for.
If you’ll notice, my site never falls on classic blog filler “attack” posts. There’s no story that says “some and so is a fraud,” or “stupid businessman starts futile company.” I’d rather spend my energy working on myself than looking for random people to point and laugh at. Media and blog attacks are usually made by people who themselves are failures and want to pander to others like them. There’s no need to seek people out and try to lecture them, or convert them to your way of thinking. Medieval inquisitors could only “persuade” people after pouring molten lead in their eyes, a passive aggressive email will do nothing.
Lastly, who says that any of the businesses that I work with are scams?
Some company in Bulgaria tat wants an article to promote their iPhone app could end up becoming huge. Flappy Bird was made in Vietnam, Apple started in a basement, you don’t know where the next big thing is going to emerge from. Just because something is obscure or didn’t launch in Silicon Valley, doesn’t mean that it is automatically a scam.
The argument that doing business online is somehow immoral or wrong is stupid. I’m working for small companies, not the dudes running that Nigerian Prince scam. If you’re actually that concerned about the morals and ethics of business you should quite your job and never buy anything again. It’s the only way to make sure that you never unwittingly finance another evil capitalist again.