Professionalism Is A Straitjacket

Think about any behavior that constitutes professionalism: wearing business suits, ties, leather shoes, addressing people with formal speech, prostrating yourself before abusive customers, sitting upright in your chair, etc. None of these behaviors are necessarily things you’d choose to do on your free time. In your free time, you wear comfortable clothing, speak naturally and honestly, stand up for yourself, lounge around comfortably, etc.

Professionalism is an unnatural set of behaviors forced upon you by someone else to improve their company’s image at the expense of your freedom and comfort. Professionalism ties your hands behind your back and prevents you from living how you want to…just like a straitjacket. This is inhumane and defeats the purpose of working in the first place.

Why does your job exist? What does your business provide society and why? Why does our economy exist in the first place? We work to survive and find happiness. The whole point of working or even having this gigantic, intricate, thriving economy, is to streamline the hunting/gathering/tool making process so that we don’t have to waste our lives fighting for survival.

In other words, our economy has grown out of the desire to be happier, but professionalism stifles us all day every day. So if your company enforces strict standards of professionalism and makes a lot of money, and even if it makes its customers happy, it defeats the purpose of its existence by making its workers less happy than they could be if they were allowed their basic human rights.

If you ever see a company that has very strict standards of professionalism you automatically know that that company’s C.E.Os don’t care about their workers’ rights, dignity or comfort. For a dollar, they’d gladly put their workers in a straitjacket and tell them to like it.

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