A Life Path is a False God

All hail the vision board in its scrapbooked prophetic majesty.

Let it bestow upon us the riches and revelations afforded only to those who dared ask for them.

Let us worship the vision.

Your vision.

No, my vision.

Yeah, mine’s better. Let’s do mine.

Yours is okay, but mine is divine.

Are we feeling holy yet?

Dreams are like micro-gods. Allah-lite, if you will

We, the dreamers, being the clever mud-monkeys we are, have evolved.

No longer must we scan the skies for some unknowable and eternal creator to give us answers. Instead, now we set our sights on the infinity of potential we see when we turn our eyes inward.

Our personal aspirations may never reap the grandiose and angelic rewards that most religions offer, but we can still indulge in our dreams like a child plays with an action figure. We attempt to encapsulate something awe-inspiring within a manageable form, but deep down, we still know we’re playing with toys.

The idea of having personal dreams for our lives proliferated over the decades until it became the standard for the Western World as a baseline experience.

Dream big, chase, catch, dream bigger.

For the average American, it’s a cultural assignment given to us at an early age.

Choose Your Destiny.

It’s not a question to be answered, but a statement meant to be enacted.

We must decide where we want our lives to take us, what we want to do with our time here, and what ultimate objective we’ll be beholden to.

Or, in other words, what god we want to worship.

(Little “g”)

Outside of the world of classical religion, the modern secular person has no ultimate moral compass outside personal prophecy. Everything we do is done as a corollary to our beliefs about the world, all of which have no basis in anything beyond wish-fulfillment.

I’m stuck in the same predicament as any other overstimulated walking commodity. We’ve spent our lives so saturated in information that in order to make sense of the slew, we must sculpt our gods out of the materials at hand.

We give our gods names like “Artist,” “Entrepreneur,” “Business Owner,” “Politician,” or “President.” An endless parade of labels given to anything we can comfortably hang our hat on and call a purpose.

The modern world has a pantheon of equally trivial and extraneous gods, all being propped up by those who have no other viable recourse against the inevitable headlights barreling towards us at the end of the tunnel.

Bowing to false gods in the pursuit of absolution only leads us to be forsaken by ourselves.

Instead of making connections with people and understanding concepts greater than our own goals, we attempt to evolve ourselves internally to please the masters we’ve constructed out of papier-mâché.

I’m guilty of this all the same

I have crafted my very own holy ruler to preside over my life. It justifies certain sacrifices, vetoes others, and calls the whole thing ‘discipline’ — but at least I know what altar I’m kneeling at.

I see how we embody the phrase “my body is a temple” to a fault. We treat ourselves like our own churches; constructed out of bone and blood, stained glass irises containing the pupils of providence.

At times, this can be more of a gift than a burden, but that doesn’t mean we should forget that these false gods of ours are not what we’ve created them to be. You can’t control your fate just by choosing the right one, but they can still give us a shred of meaning in a world that often feels unforgiving.

I’m not saying don’t follow your dreams because they don’t mean anything. I’m saying be aware of how much meaning you’re truly giving them. Your goals may not be gods, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still make our daily offerings to them.

What do you think I’m doing right now?

This was just one more sacrificial head rolling down the steps of the productivity pyramid.

Have you been sleeping during the sermon again?

Wait, you thought all of this was for you?

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