Philosophy

Please don’t use this extension because you think Amazon is evil but can’t live without the convenience of it.

I wrote this extension because I wanted to make myself happier, and because I care about Amazon.

We all know that Amazon exploits its most vulnerable employees because of its greed for profit and power. I don’t think that this is even a very controversial statement. Many would prefer to sugar coat it with some euphemisms like “efficiency” and “productivity” or avoiding the “march to mediocrity,” but at the end of the day would agree with the statement and posit that it is a good thing. After all we need some amount of greed and inequality to motivate production and ensure our survival, lest we lose our species’ (or our nation’s) fitness and get selected out of the gene pool. But somehow it doesn’t feel quite right, especially if you are one of those vulnerable employees. You might find it hard to reconcile the apparent conflict between our survival as a species and your day to day survival as a human being.

We are a society that lives in great confusion about the nature of greed, but the truth is there if we look for it. Greed makes us unhappy. Imagine being the manager at Amazon who is trying to block the activities of the labor union. You look your employees in the face and tell them that they should not advocate for themselves in the way that seems best to them. They should trust your understanding of fairness and justice over their own. This feels terrible! But the manager might not even be aware of it. They have lost their own connection to the instinct for justice, and with that they have lost the capacity to feel joyful and free. They have come to believe that feeling tense and unhappy is just the way it is. And this continues all the way up the chain–through greed for money people gain money but simultaneously lose their capacity to enjoy it. In a real way the money becomes tainted. We know this is true. When motivated by greed, people (including me, more often than I care to admit) think they are chasing happiness but are in fact chasing relief from the constant stress. Greed-tainted money can only buy the relief of pleasure, and that is quite temporary and fleeting. Even the pleasure of living on a superyacht doesn’t last very long.

Amazon is a company that is slowly crumbling under the weight of its greed. Not financially of course, greed is quite profitable in our society, but it is losing its ability to produce real economic value, or that which sustains human health and happiness. These days no one joins Amazon as a software developer or product manager to change the world. They do it to make money, and their concern is salary and share price. We can be sure that this stifles the creativity and vitality of the organization. The company’s turnover rate for low wage workers is so high there is worry they will fully exhaust the available labor pool. In this way, greed is a force that promotes death.

As customers of Amazon.com we can feel it too. Amazon encourages and exploits the greed of its customers to have everything they want at the lowest price possible. The result being that now Amazon.com is flooded with cheap useless products that are not even worth the space they take up in Amazon’s databases. The modern online buying experience is a complete waste of our time. Instead of using our brainpower to discern the pros and cons of competing products, we are at times reduced to the task of guessing whether the product we are looking at is even real. It certainly doesn’t feel good, does it?

But what I am talking about here is not “Jeff Bezos’ greed” or “the shareholders’ greed.” Their actions are perfectly logical and justified from their point of view and I don’t fault them in the slightest. I care about them too and all I wish is that they begin to notice which of their actions lead to their own happiness and which do not. The enemy is the force of greed itself, which casts its spell over us and creates mass confusion that leads us to doubt whether morality, happiness, and survival are aligned. The truth we must understand is that greed is anti-life, it creates great suffering for all, and no amount of money and power can shield us from the effects.

The good news is that greed has its opposite: non-greed. Non-greed is life promoting, creates happiness, and allows you to use your money and power for the benefit of others. So please, don’t use this extension because you think Amazon is evil but can’t live without the convenience of it. Use it because you see the diamond in the rough and stand in solidarity with all of Amazon–it’s employees, it’s customers, and it’s shareholders. You know that their happiness and survival are not a zero sum game. Use it because every time you spend a little bit more than you need to in support of those who are being treated unfairly, you practice non-greed and you create a little bit of real happiness and peace for yourself.