We work 8 hours to live 4. Work 6 days to enjoy 1. Work 8 hours to eat in 15 minutes. Work 8 hours and sleep 5. We work all year just to take a week vacation. And we work all our life to retire in old age and contemplate only our last breaths.
Read that again. Slowly. Let it sink in. Because it’s the arithmetic of modern life, and it doesn’t add up to anything good.
Eventually we realize that life is a short journey. That’s the revelation that comes, usually too late, when we’ve spent decades chasing things that don’t matter and ignoring things that do. When we’ve traded presence for productivity, connection for career, living for the promise that someday—after we’ve worked enough, earned enough, achieved enough—we’ll finally get to actually live.
But someday keeps moving. The goalpost shifts. We tell ourselves we’ll slow down after this project, this promotion, this milestone. And then we reach it and there’s another one waiting. And another. Until we wake up one day and realize we’ve spent our entire lives preparing to live instead of actually living.
We become so accustomed to material and social slavery that we no longer see the true value of our lives. That’s the real trap. Not that we’re forced into this pattern, but that we accept it. Internalize it. Start to believe that this is just how life works. That everyone is exhausted, everyone is stressed, everyone is trading their present for a future that never quite arrives. So we stop questioning it. Stop resisting it. Stop imagining that life could be different.
But it could be different. It should be different.
There’s only one solution: before steps out of the door in the morning, come to God first in a devotion prayer every day. That’s the prescription offered here—a spiritual one, a reorientation of priorities that puts connection with something larger than ourselves before connection with work, achievement, productivity.
You don’t have to share that specific solution to understand the underlying truth: we need something that grounds us. Something that reminds us, every morning before the rush begins, what actually matters. Something that forces us to pause and remember that we’re humans, not machines. That we have souls, not just schedules. That life is meant to be lived, not just survived.
The woman in the photograph looks out from a bus, tired, contemplative. She could be any of us. Commuting to work. Thinking about everything she needs to do. Calculating how many hours until she can rest. Wondering if this is all there is.
And the answer is no. This isn’t all there is. But we have to choose differently. We have to wake up one morning and decide that the equation doesn’t work. That trading 8 hours for 4, 6 days for 1, our entire lives for one week of vacation isn’t sustainable. Isn’t worth it. Isn’t what we want when we’re old and contemplating our last breaths.
We work all our life to retire in old age and contemplate only our last breaths. Read that line again. Is that what you want? To spend your entire life working so hard that when you finally get to rest, all that’s left is dying?
That’s not cynicism. That’s the reality we’re living if we don’t change course. If we don’t start valuing time over money, presence over productivity, living over preparing to live someday.
The solution isn’t to stop working. It’s to stop letting work consume everything. It’s to protect the 4 hours, to savor the 1 day, to insist that eating takes more than 15 minutes because meals should be enjoyed, not just consumed. It’s to take more than a week of vacation because rest isn’t a luxury—it’s necessary. It’s to recognize that retirement shouldn’t be the first time we actually live.
Before you step out the door in the morning, ground yourself in something bigger. Prayer, meditation, gratitude, silence, whatever practice reminds you that you’re more than your productivity. That your value isn’t measured in hours worked or promotions earned. That life is happening right now, not someday, and you get to choose how you spend it.
We’ve become so accustomed to the slavery of constant work that we don’t see the true value of our lives anymore. But the value is still there. We just have to decide to see it. To protect it. To live like we understand that life is a short journey and we don’t get to replay it once it’s over.
Eventually we realize that life is a short journey. But eventually might be too late. The time to realize it is now. The time to change it is now. The time to step out of the trap we’ve built and start actually living is right now, this morning, before you walk out the door and let the machine swallow another day.