Everyday Gods
The drives running your life may not be the values you would choose. Naming them is the first act of freedom.
During the busiest stretch of my early-thirties, I told multiple friends, on separate occasions, that I had a gut feeling I wouldn’t have a long life. This was not suicidal. I wasn’t wishing for an end. I was simply stating, as casually as you’d mention the weather, that I felt like my days wouldn’t continue into later life. I just had a feeling.
At the time, I genuinely thought this “intuition” was telling me I’d die young and that it was some type of foreshadowing. Looking back, I think it was signaling something more honest than I realized. My life, as I was living it, was not sustainable and, in some gut-level language I couldn’t have articulated, I didn’t see it lasting. Not because of the pace, though that was real, but because that life was organized around something I’d never chosen and just didn’t...love.
I was serving gods I didn’t want to grow old with.
In the last essay, we talked about the Sponge and the Gardener: the part of you that absorbs beliefs without choosing them, and the part that examines them deliberately. But absorbed beliefs don’t stay scattered. They cluster.
Over time, the beliefs you’ve sponged up from your family, your culture, your peers, and your experience organize themselves into something larger: a worldview. A complete picture of what matters, what’s true, what a good life looks like, and where you should aim. That worldview then produces drives, the specific motivations and priorities that shape your daily life, without you ever having chosen them.
Beliefs become worldviews. Worldviews become drives. Drives become your life.
I’ve started calling that worldview your everyday god. Not because it’s literally divine, but because it functions the way a god does: it sits at the center of your life, directs your energy and attention, and demands your loyalty. The only difference between an everyday god and a traditional one is that you usually don’t know you’re serving it.
I can trace this in my own life with uncomfortable clarity.
During my twenties and thirties, I had drives I never consciously chose:
Achieve: climb the ladder, optimize the calendar, never waste a minute. At a particularly intense stretch, my dad kindly raised the observation that it was strange I took my laptop into the bathroom. I looked at him with “you don’t get it” eyes and explained that a lot can happen in five minutes. He didn’t push back. He didn’t need to.
Appease: keep everyone around you happy, say the right things, stay on the right side of every social current. Project the version of yourself that the room requires. If everyone likes the projection, you are safe.
Inflate: maximize yourself in all situations without being obvious about it. The quiet, unspoken belief that you, as an individual, are the most important variable in every equation.
I didn’t choose any of these. I would not have listed them as my values. In fact, underneath all three, still running quietly, were the values I actually cared about but hadn’t named: kindness, curiosity, truthfulness. The drives and the values were at war, and I didn’t realize.
I thought I was thriving. Good job, fun city, lots of friends, exciting travel. The kind of life that would have looked great from the outside. But I wasn’t living with joy or being powered by a deeper purpose that felt effortless and sustainable. I was on a hamster wheel where the energy expenditure was very real in order to reach the next rotation. After weekends off work, spent experiencing something that projected “fun”, I was more exhausted than when I’d begun.
Where did these drives come from? Not from nowhere. They were the output of a worldview I’d assembled without realizing it. A worldview pieced together from absorbed beliefs about what success means, what other people think of me, and what I deserve. I never sat down and designed that worldview. The Sponge built it for me. And it ran my life for years.
The modern world is saturated with worldviews that function as everyday gods, and most of them are never presented as worldviews at all. They’re presented as obvious. As just how things are.
A few of the most common:
Science as complete worldview. Science is extraordinary, a disciplined method for understanding how the natural world works. But somewhere along the way, the method became a worldview: the belief that what cannot be measured does not ultimately matter. That human reason and technological progress will solve our deepest problems. Science can tell you how life evolved. It cannot tell you whether your life matters, or whether love is real. That gap is filled by belief, not data. But it’s rarely framed that way.
The authentic self as highest authority. The belief that the path to a good life is to discover who you really are, name what is true for you, and live in alignment with it. This has all the structure of a religion: a view of human nature (we are fundamentally good), an account of suffering (it comes from external forces acting on innocent selves), and a salvation narrative (healing through self-expression). It just uses the vocabulary of psychology rather than theology. The problem is that if each of us is the highest authority, we as a whole are conflicted.
Progress as destiny. The belief that history naturally bends forward. That we are collectively heading somewhere better. Automatically. That the future will improve upon the past if we move to the next thing. This is an eschatology, a vision of where the world is going and why. It requires faith, not in God, but in the long-term trajectory of humans making a continuous string of great decisions. It also tends to define progress in narrow, measurable terms.
Achievement as worth. The belief that your value is a function of your output. That productive people are more valuable than unproductive ones. That rest must be earned and idleness is a kind of moral failure. That you’ll sleep when you’re dead. That notches on your belt show that you are developing and growing. This one ran my life for a decade without my permission.
Each of these tells you what matters, what’s true, and where to aim. Each produces specific drives that organize your daily life. And each is absorbed, not chosen. You don’t sign up. You soak them in.
The people around you are almost always a better judge of your everyday god than you are. My dad and the laptop were one example. Here’s another: think of a friend who gets a dog and then rearranges their entire life around that new relationship, the schedule, the social circle, the vacations, while being completely unaware that they’ve collected a new organizing principle: a safe companion. Or the highly active social media account that’s always tuned to the latest outrage or virtue signal and claims to “just care about people.” The more accurate translation might be: just care about what other people think.
We can see other people’s gods clearly. Our own are invisible.
When I finally invited the Gardener in, the focus that surprised me most was not achievement. That one was at least partially visible. What genuinely surprised me was that I’d organized my life around accommodating other people. I maintained a large group of friends, and when I looked honestly at those relationships, I realized I was providing nearly all the effort. I met people where they were. On their terms. To do what they liked, often to talk about them. I didn’t mind, so I morphed to fit.
There was a much smaller number of people where the effort ran both ways. Where we were actually meeting in the middle. Where there were shared values. Those were actual relationships. When life got busy with a wife and kids, I bet you can guess which relationships thrived and which fell away.
I would never have named accommodation as my god. I would have called it being a good friend. But the Gardener, once awake, saw it clearly: I was organized around keeping other people comfortable, at the cost of my own authenticity. That’s a worldview producing a drive. I just didn’t notice it because it looked like kindness. Two of my values in conflict.
I said earlier that during my thirties, I told friends I didn’t expect to have a long life. I thought I meant it literally. I now think I meant something else entirely.
I think some part of me, maybe the Gardener stirring in its sleep, already knew that my everyday gods were not the answer. That the drives they produced - achieve, appease, inflate, accommodate - none of them were mine. None of them were chosen. And a life organized around a god you didn’t choose is a life that eventually runs out of fuel.
For me, it didn’t end dramatically. It ended the way these things usually do: slowly, then all at once.
Here is the invitation. The first step is not to throw your everyday gods out the window. It’s not to perform a dramatic reckoning. The first step is just to name them.
What is your life focused on right now? Not what you’d say if someone asked at a dinner party. Not your projection. What your calendar, your energy, your first thought in the morning, and your last worry at night actually reveal. Your reality.
There’s a decent chance you didn’t choose most of it. But you can start choosing now.