Life is so profoundly distracting. The insatiable drive for success, the hustle culture**,** is a pervasive philosophy saturating society. Personal accomplishment, and self-validation propels us to act in ways antithetical to God's purpose. The tragedy is this: any high-performing individual is prone to deriving their identity from their achievements, ultimately erasing their inherent identity as a child of God.

This pervasive philosophy saturates society, hustle culture, even corrupting the very institutions from which one would seek correction and conviction. Instead, these places often affirm this lifestyle, enabling the obsession with hustle, ostentation, glamour, status, and achievement. These, silently, become the markers of one’s worth. Many churches even rebranded this as "blessings."

I ultimately withdrew from the church, concluding it was no longer a refuge from the world's values. Instead, it often mirrored and even rebranded the 'hustle' as 'blessings,' affirming the obsession with status, achievement, and outward validation. I know plenty of people whom I greatly respect who don't fit the description. However, I use inductive reasoning to reach these conclusions while maintaining a flexible view and acknowledging exceptions. It is with that thinking that I’ve come to understand that the church is indeed the most suitable place for these individuals to seek restoration, much like a hospital provide care for the sick. My logic is that healthy people don't congregate in hospitals where severe transmissible illnesses are present, and I am careful about taking my children into those environments. Specially after witnessing multiple families whose kids grew up in church but the kids ultimately don’t know God. While some seem capable of enduring this without spiritual infection, I've come to the conclusion that I am not. I am vulnerable to the hustle culture and I hold very firmly to the true understanding of God’s Word. The church can’t lead me into correction in this area, instead it enables the behavior, and I know that this behavior is the door for a host of problems but by leaving a broken institution, I unknowingly traded one worldly influence for a more direct, secular one. Lacking a reliable environment with reasonably spiritually healthy people with a sharp eye on worldly influence while being constantly fed by the hustle culture. This, too, carries its own impact and influence.

The Distortion of Reality

What we watch and hear daily fundamentally defines our reality, how we perceive and conceptualize the world. If that foundational view becomes distorted, our interpretation of reality will, in turn, shape our perception of God. If we permit the world, the media, the sinful, and those unconcerned with God’s truth, to dictate our perception, it is unavoidable that we will drift away.

In my own life, the distortion was rooted in my understanding of success. The world supplied its definition, and I found myself challenging God, demanding to know why success had been withheld from me while others seemingly attained it. I was completely missing the point, which was simply to ask, "What is Your definition of success for your people?" I was constantly surrounded and validated by worldly, high-performing thinkers. In some environments, I was the over achiever and in other groups, I was the under achiever (or lacker the mutt). I tend to enjoy the feeling of being the under achiever, it's what pushes me to achieve and set goals. My flesh screams, "Let's show them what this mutt can do, let's face this head-on!". This challenge moves me, fuels me but most of all it distracts me.

I realize my criticism of the church has been harsh, but the truth is that the influence I absorbed from the world was strikingly similar to that of the churches. Petty politics are played out in both spheres but at church we also get misleading narratives from the Bible. A person's perceived importance often hinges on their accomplishments, fame, charisma, and the size of their following. Validation is found in the outward display of "blessings", the possessions one owns and the influence one has. This path unavoidably leads people to compromise the truth but the reality is that anything apart for true Biblical thinking will push you away from God.

The Path to Self-Betrayal

Here is the crux: by allowing the world to define success, I also allowed it to prescribe the path to achieving it. Selfishness, arrogance, and unchecked ambition began to lead the way, creating a profound spiritual danger. Achieving success through these means only reaffirms and entrenches that very path. Consequently, I spent time researching and reading about people who had succeeded that way.

What we habitually consume is what ultimately wins the battle for our minds, that is what we become. It operates like a parasite that gradually assumes control. Success itself does not inherently change a person, rather, it increases the chances of removing them from their spiritual safe place, leaving them exposed. We are only as strong as our weakest day, and finding ourselves vulnerable and isolated from our refuge can lead to a slow, insidious drift from the truth as we begin to feed on lies. David’s sin was not an overnight event, it was a cumulative series of micro decisions and moral compromises. He fed his heart with lust, and eventually, sin was born.

My belief system was never shaken, my understanding of God’s word was never in doubt but my perception was, and this is the true problem. We become numbed to our own faith and convictions. My personal moment of conviction came through a series of events that culminated in a single, stark realization. One night, on the Sabbath, we were watching movies, and in the middle of it, my 11 year old daughter let slip a word which we consider to be a curse word without even noticing. My duty was to protect them, yet I was willingly exposing them to the point where such language was becoming normalized. It simply slipped out, on the Sabbath, a holy day meant to be kept sacred. That made me realize how much I had compromised to get to that point, and that I had some work to do to get back to where we, as a family, should be. My job was to teach the Torah to my kids, and I was allowing them to be taught by the world.