Retiring the Gods: The Modern Human’s Obsession with Money and Time

Let’s try to imagine a world in which money and time are not sacred.

Because I have to confess:

For a long stretch of my life, I too looked for the gods in the wrong place.

Not in the sky, in books or in rituals;

I found them in banking apps, calendar notifications, and screens full of performance charts.

And one day I realised:

The gods of the modern human no longer shine in temples; they glow in the light of our screens.

That’s why these gods need to be retired, because the modern human is deeply obsessed with money and time.

The figure we call “the modern human” is not a theoretical concept.

That person is me.

Most likely, it is you.

Everyone you know.

The one who, upon waking up, reaches not for their heart but for their phone;

who, before asking “How do I feel today?”, asks, “How much do I have to do today?”

Someone whose first reflex is not an inner check-in, but surrender to the demands of the outer world.

Before they even get out of bed, two gods start taking attendance:

Money and time.

“How much have I earned, how much more do I need to earn?”

“How late am I, how far behind am I?”

We don’t call any of these questions “worship” out loud.

But the rhythm beating inside us looks exactly like that.

Like an invisible chant we repeat dozens of times a day.

In this small inner shrine set up in our mind, the gods have already taken their seats:

One is the clock, one is the balance, and the third is that vague but ruthless measure we call “success”.

Money and time behave like masters who have stopped being tools.

Money is not evil.

Time isn’t either.

When both remain in their proper place, they are two utterly innocent words.

But the modern human no longer uses these two words merely as tools.

They turn them into a measure of their own worth.

“How much time do you have?” becomes “How valuable are you?”

“How much do you earn?” becomes “How much do you deserve to be taken seriously?”

So money and time move from organising the outer world to becoming the scales with which we weigh our inner world.

And the result?

Time that is never enough, money that is never sufficient, and a self squeezed between those two axes, constantly feeling indebted to itself.

It is exactly here that an invisible pressure to succeed is born.

To succeed no longer means simply to “do” something; it comes to mean proving your right to exist.

Alongside success have come our invisible rituals of worship.

Once, success was an outcome.

Now it is an identity.

The question “What do you do?” may sound soft on the surface, but its subtext is often this:

“Where is your worth hidden?”

The modern human feels compelled to answer this question anew every single day.

And that answer increasingly turns into numbers:

Completed projects, rising graphs, follower counts, check marks of approval…

All of them sit like little signs in the ledger kept by the invisible gods inside us.

We may not say to ourselves:

“Today I appeared before the god of success.”

But what we actually do is often not so different:

At the end of the day, we put ourselves on trial in an inner court.

How productive was I?

How much did I produce?

What did I do to deserve this day?

And every night we fail to close that account, a small burnout grows a little more inside us.

Burnout: the exhaustion of the servant who cannot keep up with their gods.

We usually explain burnout syndrome with workload.

Yet most of the time, the issue is not merely working too much; it is the existential fear hiding behind the work.

If success has become the measure of your “right to exist”, then on every day you do not succeed, you feel as if you are disappearing a little more.

If money has become the only thing that makes you feel safe, every account that drops into the red seems to reset not just your balance, but your sense of worth.

If time has ceased to be “a space to meet yourself” and turned into “a list of tasks you have to catch up with”, every minute becomes a courtroom clock ticking against you.

Burnout is not only the fatigue of doing a lot; it is often the shame of failing to live up to the values you have turned into gods.

While writing Lines of the Void, this was exactly the shame I had to face.

I had to ask myself:

What do I really believe in?

And who, in truth, do I worship?

In this title I deliberately used the phrase “retire” the gods.

Because money, time and success do not need to be killed.

We need them.

Money is still a medium of exchange.

Time still allows us to experience infinity in slices.

Success is still the fruit of something, the natural outcome of effort.

The problem is not that they exist; the problem is who owns the throne.

To retire the gods does not mean saying, “I no longer want money, I no longer need time.”

It means this: “You will not be the one to measure my worth. You are a tool, not a master.”

It means that when you look at your bank account, you begin to see not yourself, but just a number.

That when you look at your calendar, you see not a life running late, but merely the sum of the moments you chose and did not choose.

That when you look at success, instead of saying, “This is who I am,” you can say, “This is just one of the things I have done.”

To retire the gods is not to erase their names; it is to take your own name back from under theirs.

The personal-growth trap: new gods, old fears

At this point I have to say this as well:

Today’s personal-development world often just repackages the old gods and replaces them with new ones.

Produce more, be more efficient, be more aware, vibrate higher, manifest better, be a better “you”…

The slogans change, but the pressure remains the same: As you are, you are not enough.

Personal development sometimes becomes less an inner journey and more a new company you set up on top of yourself.

There too, you are the boss, the worker and the inspector.

And you never get a break.

While writing Lines of the Void, I also questioned this language.

I had to look again at the word “growth”.

Maybe real growth was not about adding more and more, but about slowly retiring the wrong gods.

Sometimes, when I form sentences that criticise the modern human, I never forget this:

That human being is, above all, me.

I too have loaded extra meaning onto money.

I too have seen time only as a list of things to catch up on.

I too have used success like a bandage over my inner sense of worthlessness.

Retiring the gods was not some revolutionary decision I made in a single day.

It is a process that is still ongoing.

Every new day, I try once more to hear this voice inside me:

“These are not your masters. These are the tools in your hands. You are not the sum of those tools.”

If you catch yourself while reading these lines — checking the time dozens of times a day, opening your banking app, crafting the “success image” you show in other people’s eyes…

Know that you are not alone.

This is not one person’s wound; it is the wound of an era.

This text was not written to tell you, “Money is meaningless, time is unnecessary, success is ridiculous.”

Such cheap romanticism would be unfair to the truth.

All I am suggesting is this:

Perhaps it is time to retire the gods within us and accept being simply human.

When money and time return to their places — that is, when they become tools again — and when success steps down from its throne, something simpler sits in its place:

The state of being human.

Incomplete, fragile, anxious, searching, and ultimately not the “master” itself, but a heart trying to bear witness to itself.

If one day, while looking at your bank account, your calendar, your projects, you ask yourself:

“Who am I apart from all of this?”

On that day, it means you have begun, quietly and without killing them, to retire your gods.

And perhaps real personal growth begins exactly there.