Doing God’s Work

I see younger generations wanting to do good in their work. Helping the impoverished. Protecting the environment. Shedding light on the corrupt. Changing policies. Innovating society. Challenging the status quo.

We want the heavens to open up all kinds of paths for us now that we have decided to dedicate our lives to such noble causes. You might think to yourself, ‘I’m breaking my back trying to fix the world, and nobody else is trying as hard as I can, but nobody is noticing my hard work and on the contrary, I have to live on my small salary. The world is so unfair!”

In fact, our compensation system seems to work almost exactly in opposite. If you are a public school teacher trying to teach hundreds of inner city children, you get paid just a fraction of what you get paid as a corporate employee in Finance making the rich few even richer. No matter how noble your life purpose is, you will not get be compensated in terms of material wealth. Nobody might even care.

But I don’t think that means that we all have to give up entirely and live only for paychecks. In an ideal world, the amount of money you are paid and the level of material wealth you have will be directly proportionate to the “positive” benefits that you give out to the world. In that way, the “good” people will be largely rewarded and incentivized to do more, while the selfish people who only care about themselves without positively impacting society can be compensated less. But we all know the world does not work like that. So, we accept that reality. The ideal system is not here and may never come. The ideal system only exists in heaven.

So no matter how unfair this system is, We must give our all to impact the world in those noble ways with or without monetary compensation. Hell, nobody might even give us kudos for doing good.

The conclusion I came to is this. We do the Work no matter how poor or rich we are, that’s actually completely arbitrary. My parents’ generation and previous generations before them had to scrape a living doing whatever they would. Purposeful, purpose-less, it didn’t matter as long as it brought food on the table. And that’s completely understandable because back in olden times, food was actually scarce. We can barely think about fixing society when we can barely imagine how to feed ourselves in our next meal. But it’s different now.

People like us, especially young people in developed countries in the 21st century who have never known hunger and poverty, are in a prime position to think about purposeful work because we don’t have those urgent needs to satisfy anymore. We don’t have to worry about hunger because food is abundant here and now. We do, however, have to think about the repercussions of OVER-production of meat and other activities that will impact the finite resources of this planet.

What are we going to use our education and advanced degrees for? How do we use our god-given talents, resourcefulness, intelligence and privileges to do what God would have wanted us to do all along? No matter what form or shape that “Work” is. If your destiny is not in the convenient shape of a job (that makes you feel fulfilled but also pays well), and it usually isn’t, it doesn’t matter — you still keep going.

If you currently feel “stuck” at a place that has a very low-paying salary with bad work-life balance because you made a decision to find a more “purposeful” job, you must be willing to look at your life realistically. The world is not black-and-white. It’s not a decision between “find a noble job but be poor and miserable” vs. “find a high-paying job but be a selfish corporate slave.” The answer is more complicated than that. You must find the balance that works for you. If it’s not working out, you pivot.

We all need to survive first, yes, to satisfy those needs first. And after that, that’s when we can dedicate ourselves to those higher callings.

But the most important rule, I believe, is this:
Never give up doing God’s work through your life.

The War of Social Media Domination

Bill Gates was right in that “Content is King,” and that it’s not exactly the engineers who create new hardware, applications and messaging protocols that have revolutionized the digital landscape.

You would think so, but that’s not exactly how it works. Yes, the engineers get their kudos for introducing something brilliant into the world, as they should. But then a new game begins. It’s a game for dominion over the new game. Who will leverage the strengths of this new platform, and become king/queen? And the interesting thing is, the game is open to the whole world, thanks to the Internet, and thus open for anybody who wants to fight for a claim to that title.

Imagine that an innovative engineer invents a new tool, maybe a new axe. And this new axe is so good that it can cut down anything. So the inventor sells a ton of these axes to regular people. And you would think that’s the end of this story. But no. Among the thousands or millions of these regular people who now have this amazing tool in hand, they can do whatever they want with it. In fact, it’s the one who creates the best “Use Case” with the axe that will win the most.

Whether the person uses this new tool for selfish gain, self-promotion or the good of the public … now that’s up to the person’s ethics. But most of the time, people just are fighting for the top spot … to claim all the rewards that come from being the top dog in this game. Individuals play. Businesses play. Corporations play. If you asked me, it’s a tool that shouldn’t be wielded lightly, and definitely not something that should solely be used for monetary gain.

Once somebody creates a new social world, like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok … it actually gives a whole new group of people “opportunities” to capitalize on the invention. And these people who create content don’t have to do anything with technology or messaging protocol or application development, or any of that nitty-gritty engineering details. They work with a different set of rules. And that game, to be honest, in essence is a game that has been played as long as we can remember. The game of “Impression Management.” The game of “Branding”. The game of Public Relations. The game of “Image Creation.”

It sure is interesting. The one that I wanna play and master.

Uniquely in my case, I do care about the impact of media toward its viewers, and am personally keenly aware of all the negative impact that can come from irresponsible movie producers and TV creators. That whatever people watch impacts them on a cerebral and neural level.

To create the kind of media that impacts people beneficially in all levels and guide them toward the path of truth, freedom and creativity