Ethical Conundrums

A good friend texted me to ask about the ethics of one of the ecommerce businesses the wife and I are working on (i.e. is it aimed at a sufficiently good thing, or is there any reason to do it other than making money).

My first reaction to this (which was actually just him asking the question for himself) was anger.

I was angry because I used to wrestle with exactly those questions. What’s the point of this? So I build up this business, now what?

These lines of thinking seem to be predicated on the idea that I will actually succeed at what I set out to do, and that I have some sort of grand control over the universe.

However, after I collected myself, I thought more. Do we have the same standards for how we spend our time? If something sounds fun and interesting, how much do we interrogate it?

There’s a word for people who micro-interrogate all their actions and motivations – scrupulous.

So are we just avoiding getting started, falling prey to more discouragement (which is of course not from God), giving in to “pretty thoughts” (I got this from Metanoia Catholic when they were talking about nice-sounding pious thoughts with terrible life trajectories)?

I have to conclude, in this case, yes. It’s just putting too much weight on just getting started.

As long as you’re not doing anything actually immoral, it’s okay to do something just because it sounds fun, and maybe even better, because you might actually be interested in it for whatever reason.

Maybe you’ll learn something about something, or about yourself.