WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE HATE THEIR WORK?

 

Something is deeply wrong with how most people experience their work. A recent study by Gallup, the globally respected research and polling organisation, found that only 20 percent of workers worldwide actually feel genuinely engaged in and enthusiastic about what they do every day. That means eight out of every ten people are either doing just enough to get by or have mentally checked out of their work entirely. 

We have come to accept this as normal. It is not normal. It is a signal. And it is worth listening to seriously.

The most obvious explanations people reach for are money and management. They say people hate their jobs because they are underpaid, overworked, or poorly led. These things are real and they matter. But they do not explain everything. There are people earning excellent salaries in well-run organisations who dread Monday mornings with the same quiet desperation as those trapped in poorly paid roles under toxic management. If compensation and leadership were the whole story, the well-compensated and well-managed would all be thriving. Most are not. The problem goes deeper than either.

At its root, the dissatisfaction most people feel about their work is a conflict between what they are doing and who they are. When the work we do does not align with the values we hold most deeply, something in us refuses to be at peace with it. We may continue performing our duties. We may even perform them competently. But the inner person is not present. And that absence has consequences, not just for productivity, but for the soul.

There is a profound distinction between work that arises from genuine inner conviction and work that is merely carried out for external reward. The person who works from conviction, who loves the cause they serve and finds their values reflected in what they do daily, brings something entirely different to their work. It is alive. It has energy and meaning. The effort does not drain them because it flows from a place of inner willingness, not merely complying.

The person who works without that inner alignment, performing duties they cannot truly acknowledge as right within themselves, is engaged in a kind of slow inner conflict. They fulfil their obligations. They meet their targets. But somewhere beneath the surface, the intuition is restless. It knows that something is misaligned. This is not weakness. It is actually a sign of spiritual sensitivity, an inner person that refuses to be entirely silenced by circumstance.

Duty and inner conviction must always harmonise. Where they do not, the performance of duty, however reliable on the outside, becomes hollow. It becomes what it was never meant to be: a transaction. Time exchanged for money. Effort given without love. And work without love, however technically accomplished, carries no lasting spiritual value. It benefits the earthly position but nourishes nothing deeper.

This is what the widespread hatred of work is really telling us. It is not primarily a management problem or an economic problem. It is a values problem. Millions of people are performing duties that their inner being cannot affirm, in service of goals they do not believe in, within systems that do not reflect who they are or what they care about. The result is disengagement, restlessness, and that familiar Sunday evening dread that signals another week of going through the motions.

The way forward is not simply to find a better paying job or a more pleasant office. It is to ask the harder question: does what I do reflect what I believe? Is there love in this work? Not romantic love, but the deeper love that comes from caring genuinely about what one is doing and why. Where that love is present, duty ceases to be a burden and becomes something closer to purpose. The work comes alive. The person carrying it out comes alive with it.

The fulfilment of duty that flows freely from genuine conviction is one of the most beautiful things a human being can offer, both to the work itself and to all who receive the fruits of that work. When we bring our whole selves to what we do, when our values and our labour point in the same direction, what we give is no longer merely a service or a product. It is an expression of who we are. And that quality, invisible yet unmistakable, touches everything it reaches.

But the gift is not only to others. The one who works from genuine conviction derives something equally profound in return. There is a deep joy and satisfaction that arises naturally from work that is aligned with one's innermost values, a quiet but powerful sense of rightness that no external reward can replicate or replace. The work ceases to feel like an obligation and becomes something closer to joyful activity, freely chosen, freely given, and freely fulfilling. This is not idealism. It is the natural fruit of a life in which what we do and who we are have finally found each other.

If your work fills you with dread rather than meaning, do not ignore that signal. It is your inner person speaking. It is telling you that somewhere between who you are and what you do, a gap has opened. That gap is worth closing, not by abandoning responsibility, but by honestly examining whether your work, your values, and your deepest convictions are pointed in the same direction.

Where they are, work becomes prayer. Where they are not, it becomes punishment.

THE CONNECTION WE MUST NEVER SEVER: HUMANITY AND THE ELEMENTAL BEINGS

This is the fourth reflection in a series that began with the story of an Elder who saved his church and lost his membership, continued with an honest examination of who taught us to call African traditional wisdom darkness, and deepened further into the world of elemental and nature beings and how every culture on earth has perceived and named them. Today we arrive at what all three previous essays were quietly moving toward: the question of how we as human beings ought to relate to these beings, and the sobering recognition that we have largely lost the connection that once made that relationship natural, living, and real.

There was a time when this connection was natural and unquestioned. The Greeks, the Romans, and the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe lived in conscious relationship with the substantiate beings, great and small. Many of them could see beyond the visible world of matter into the realm where these beings operate, and they experienced them directly, with a clarity that left no room for doubt about their existence or their ceaseless activity in creation. This was not primitive superstition. It was real knowledge, held with reverential awe and childlike confidence, and it was among the most sacred things those peoples carried.

It was also, as we explored in our second essay, systematically destroyed. When Boniface attacked the sacred shrine of the Teutons, he did not correct a false belief. He demolished a true one out of ignorance. What he should have done was confirm the truth of their knowledge and then lead them onward with explanations to higher recognitions. Instead, by declaring Wotan and the other substantiate beings non-existent, he severed a connection those peoples had cultivated over generations. These beings are not gods, but they do exist through the Power of God and work actively in creation. Denying their existence did not make them disappear. It simply made human beings blind to what was still there.

The same pattern played out across Africa, as we noted in our earlier reflections. The same ignorance. The same arrogance of the missionary enterprise. The same destruction of genuine knowledge in the name of a faith that itself lacked the deeper understanding of creation it presumed to teach.

But let us move from history to the question that matters most for us today. How ought we to relate to these beings now?

The answer charts a path between two errors that human beings have consistently fallen into. The first error is worship, treating these beings as divine powers to be propitiated, feared, or petitioned as though they were gods. The second error is dismissal, the modern mind's reflexive contempt for anything it cannot weigh or measure, labelling the entire subject as myth, superstition, or the residue of primitive thinking. Both errors sever the connection. Both leave us poorer for it.

The right posture is something altogether different. It is recognition, gratitude, and a willingness to learn. The Grail Message of Abd-ru-shin, from which much of my understanding on this subject flows, states it with clarity: we must not look upon the great substantiate beings as gods, for they are not gods but faithful servants of the Almighty, great in their serving. Equally, we must not look down upon the smaller elemental beings in arrogance, as though they exist for our convenience. They do not serve us. They serve only the Creator. It is we who must approach them, not the other way around.

There is a quiet but profound teaching in that. These beings have never deviated from their purpose. They have never abandoned their post. They tend the elements of creation with a constancy and devotion that puts human inconsistency to shame. In their faithful service, they model something we would do well to study and emulate.

And they are not distant or abstract. They are active in the very elements we interact with every day. The water we drink. The air we breathe. The earth beneath our feet. The fire that warms and powers our lives. Every time we engage with the natural world, we are moving within their field of activity whether we know it or not. A deeper understanding of their work is therefore not an esoteric luxury reserved for mystics and scholars. It is practical wisdom that could fundamentally change how we relate to the natural world around us, and how responsibly we use the gifts it continually offers.

There is also a consequence to ignoring this connection that deserves to be stated plainly. When the link with these substantiate helpers is eliminated, a great gap is torn that harms us. And when we look at the state of the natural world today, the environmental degradation, the plastic pollution, the destruction of ecosystems, the climate instability, it is worth asking seriously whether part of what we are witnessing is the consequence of that torn gap. A humanity that no longer recognises the beings who tend creation will inevitably treat creation carelessly. How could it be otherwise?

The path forward is not a return to the worship of nature beings. It is something more mature and more demanding than that. It is the cultivation of conscious, grateful, and humble awareness of the order of creation in which we dwell. In practical terms, this means learning to acknowledge these beings and their ceaseless activity with quiet thankfulness, even when we cannot see them with our physical eyes. When rain falls and replenishes the earth, when a river runs clear, when the wind shifts and the air freshens, these are not merely natural events happening of their own accord. They are the work of faithful servants going about their purpose. To move through the natural world with that awareness, to receive its gifts with genuine gratitude rather than casual entitlement, is already the beginning of restored connection.

The beings were always here. The connection was always real. But somewhere along the way, as the intellect rose to dominance over the spirit, ignorance and arrogance followed, and with them came the systematic destruction of ancestral knowledge that had taken generations to accumulate. The connection was severed. And what made the severance so costly was that we lost even the willingness to acknowledge that anything had been lost.

It is time to find that willingness again, and through it, to reconnect meaningfully with the substantiate beings who have never once abandoned their post in creation.

THEY WERE ALWAYS HERE: THE ELEMENTAL BEINGS THAT SERVE IN CREATION

 

This reflection is the third in a series that began with the story of an Elder who saved his church using native traditional knowledge, and continued with an honest examination of who taught us to label African traditional wisdom as darkness. Today we go deeper still, into territory that most modern minds dismiss without examination, the world of elemental and nature beings, and why their existence deserves neither fear nor worship, but honest recognition.

Long before the first human beings drew breath, creation was already teeming with life of a kind most of us have never been taught to see. Alongside the visible world of plants, animals, water, and stone, there exists another order of beings, nature beings, whose field of activity is what we simply call nature itself. These are the beings associated with water, air, earth, and fire. They are known in various traditions as elves, gnomes, nixies, salamanders, sylphs and so on. They are not metaphors or fairy tales. They are real inhabitants of creation, servants assigned roles within the vast and intricate machinery of the natural world.

Their work is essential. These elemental beings co-operated creatively in the development of matter itself, and they continue to do so today in its maintenance and further development. They know exactly when and where sudden changes in nature are about to take place. Landslides, volcanic eruptions, the caving in of land undermined by water, floods, earthquakes, the falling of a great tree. They know because they are themselves involved in the preparation and execution of such changes. When danger is imminent, these beings will often attempt to warn any creature approaching the affected spot. An animal senses their presence instinctively. Its hair bristles. It refuses to move forward. Even the best trained animal will disobey its master in such a moment, quite contrary to its usual nature. We observe this behaviour and call it strange. What we are actually witnessing is a creature responding to a warning we ourselves can no longer perceive, because we have, over generations, closed off the finer senses that would allow us to receive it.

These elemental beings have been perceived and named in every culture on earth, and the remarkable thing is not how different those perceptions are, but how similar they turn out to be across peoples and continents who for a long time had no contact with one another.

The Yoruba Sango, deity of thunder and lightning, wielding his double-headed axe as an emblem of justice and worshipped across Nigeria, Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, and Trinidad, maps remarkably closely onto Thor of Norse mythology, the powerful hammer-wielding protector of humanity whose weapon could control lightning and always returned to his hand after being thrown. Two traditions, separated by an ocean and centuries of independent development, perceiving and describing the same elemental force in strikingly similar terms. Similarly, Yemoja, the Yoruba water being perceived as a great maternal presence associated with rivers, oceans, motherhood, purity, and fertility, and typically depicted as a mermaid, finds her counterpart in the water beings of European tradition, the French Melusine and the Merrows of Irish folklore, all of whom are linked to the water element and carry similar qualities of mysterious feminine power. That traditions so geographically distant arrived at such strikingly similar perceptions is not coincidence. It is confirmation that the same order of beings has always been present, waiting to be honestly acknowledged.

When peoples across the globe, without consultation, arrive at similar perceptions of the same beings operating within the same elements, it tells us that what they are perceiving is real, not invented. The African elder who spoke of Sango and the Norse poet who sang of Thor were not fabricating rival mythologies. They were, each in their own language and cultural context, describing the same servants within creation. 

And that is precisely the point. These beings are servants, not gods. They operate within creation under the authority of the one Almighty who made all things. They are no more to be worshipped than a river is to be worshipped for quenching our thirst. But they are equally not to be dismissed, feared, or condemned as darkness simply because they are unfamiliar to the modern mind, however educated it may consider itself. Every major tradition on earth, African, European, Asian, and beyond, has perceived their presence and given them names. That alone should humble us before we reach for the word darkness.

The honest recognition that creation is far more populated, far more ordered, and far more purposefully structured than our modern education has taught us is not superstition. It is the beginning of a deeper and more truthful understanding of the world in which we dwell. These beings were always here, long before we arrived, and they continue their quiet, faithful service within creation even today whether we acknowledge them or not.

Perhaps it is time we did.

WHO TAUGHT YOU TO CALL IT DARKNESS?

 

There is a question that has sat quietly at the edge of many conversations for a long time, one that most people feel but few are willing to ask directly. When we look at the practices, knowledge systems, and spiritual expressions of African traditional life and instinctively recoil, labelling them as dark, evil, or demonic, we rarely stop to ask where that instinct came from. Who taught us to call it darkness? And more importantly, were they right?

The honest answer requires us to go back further than our own memories. The wholesale condemnation of African traditional religion and its associated knowledge systems did not emerge organically from within African communities. It arrived with colonialism and missionary enterprise, both of which had a vested interest in delegitimising indigenous knowledge, dismantling existing spiritual authority, and replacing it with imported frameworks. To call something evil is one of the most effective ways to ensure people abandon it without examination. And it worked. Generations of Africans grew up inheriting a deep suspicion of their own ancestral knowledge, a suspicion planted by those who stood to gain from it.

That history does not mean everything within African traditional practice is good or beyond scrutiny. It is historically true that some practices within African traditional society were repugnant, harmful, and rightly abolished over time. But here is the point that honest reflection demands: that process of shedding harmful practices is not uniquely African. Every society in human history has had to evolve beyond beliefs and customs that later generations recognised as wrong. Europe's own record is instructive and humbling. During the infamous witch trials, anyone who possessed knowledge of healing herbs, whether acquired through practical experience or inherited tradition, was relentlessly persecuted by European ecclesiastical and civil authorities, the very institutions that would later claim the moral authority to define what was civilised and what was not, including what was light and what was darkness in Africa. Torture was routine. Death at the stake was the frequent conclusion, if the body had not already succumbed to the cruelties inflicted before the flames. The healers, the herbalists, the custodians of natural knowledge, were branded agents of darkness by those same European authorities. The condemnation of African traditional knowledge therefore did not arrive from a place of moral superiority. It arrived from a civilisation that had itself only recently emerged from its own brutality.

Now let us go deeper, to the question of power itself. There is only one Creator, and from that one Source flows the single power that animates and sustains all of creation. This power permeates every living thing, every element of the natural world, every dimension of existence. It is not African power or European power or Christian power. It is the power of creation itself, neutral in its nature, moral only in its application. What determines whether its use is good or evil is never the tradition it comes from. It is always the intent behind it and the fruit it produces.

The herbalist who heals a child with roots and leaves is drawing on the same creative power as the surgeon who operates with a scalpel. The elder who protects a community using knowledge passed down through generations is working with the same animating force as the pastor who prays for divine intervention. The outward steps may differ greatly. The source does not.

African traditional knowledge, in essence, is a sophisticated system of understanding the natural world, the spiritual world, and the laws that govern both. Like every knowledge system that man is permitted to employ, it can be directed toward healing or toward harm, toward protection or toward destruction. The moral character of any act within that tradition depends entirely on the intent of the practitioner and the outcome it produces. That is the only honest standard of discernment, and it applies equally to every tradition without exception. There are expressions within African tradition, as there are within organised religion, medicine, law, and every other human system, that are directed toward manipulation, harm, and the exploitation of fear and vulnerability. Those deserve to be named honestly and resisted firmly. But the existence of misuse within a tradition does not condemn the tradition itself, any more than the existence of corrupt clergy condemns the entirety of the Christian faith, or the existence of poisonous plants condemns the botanical world.

We were taught to call it darkness by people who needed us to believe that. The deeper invitation, the one that genuine spiritual maturity extends to each of us, is to look again, this time with our inner eyes, and to judge not by the label someone else applied, but by the fruit we can see clearly and intuitively sense for ourselves. After all, a tree that heals cannot be evil at its root. No matter what anyone taught us to call it.

THE MAN WHO SAVED THE CHURCH AND LOST HIS MEMBERSHIP

 

I came across a video recently that stopped me in my tracks. It raised a question so fundamental that I felt compelled to share it and invite your honest reflection.

The story goes like this. A group of kidnappers wrote to a church, threatening to attack. On the appointed day they arrived and chaos erupted. In the commotion, an Elder of the church rushed to the pastor and sought permission to employ native traditional measures at his disposal. The pastor gave his approval. The Elder stepped forward, raised his hand, and within moments a swarm of bees descended on the attackers with such ferocity that they fled. Not one church member was harmed.

Four weeks later, the church committee met and expelled the Elder permanently. Their conclusion was that the power he employed was from darkness.

Let us sit with that for a moment.

The committee's objection was specifically to the native and traditional nature of what the Elder employed. But that objection, however sincerely held, cannot survive the most basic test of discernment: what did the Elder's action actually produce? It produced no casualties, protected every life in that building, and repelled evil without bloodshed. That is not the fruit of darkness. And there is a further point worth considering. Darkness does not typically work against its own. The kidnappers who came to terrorise that congregation were clearly the ones operating on the side of darkness. If the Elder's power truly belonged to that same side, one would reasonably expect it to have aided them, not routed them.

The committee also conveniently overlooked something important. The pastor who authorised the action in the heat of crisis bore equal responsibility for the decision. Yet it was the Elder alone who paid the price.

There is also a biblical dimension worth noting. The sacred scriptures are replete with accounts of nature intervening decisively in defence of the innocent. The plagues of Egypt alone tell the story clearly enough. Frogs, locusts, flies, hail, and darkness were all mobilised against an oppressive force to protect a people under threat. None of those interventions were labelled as darkness. They were recorded as deliverance. The record is widely known and needs no elaboration.

There is a deeper truth worth pausing on here. There is only one Creator, and from that one Source flows the single power that animates and sustains everything that exists. This neutral power permeates all of creation. What determines its effect is how it is employed by the one who wields it. A knife can heal in the hands of a surgeon or harm in the hands of an assailant. The knife itself is neither good nor evil. The hand determines that. In the matter before us, the Elder directed that pervading neutral power toward the saving of lives. He put it to good use. And a power put to good use cannot, by any honest reckoning, be condemned as evil.

What this story ultimately reveals is the danger of confusing the unfamiliar with the ungodly. Is it that whatever is native and traditional is automatically to be suspected? The Elder possessed knowledge that others did not. He used it to serve others and to protect lives under threat. To label that darkness is to punish a man for the very gift that saved his community.

The fruit of an action is its truest testimony. A tree that produces good fruit cannot be evil at its root, regardless of how unfamiliar its branches may appear to those who have never climbed it.

The Elder deserved gratitude. He received expulsion. And that verdict says far more about the committee than it does about him. But let us be honest. That committee does not sit in one church alone. It sits wherever people judge what they do not understand, wherever the unfamiliar is condemned without examining what it produced. Perhaps the real question is not what happened to the Elder, but how many of us have, at some point, been the committee.

WHY ORDINARY LIFE IS BECOMING EMOTIONALLY AND FINANCIALLY HEAVY

 

There is a quiet shift happening in ordinary life that many people feel but struggle to name. Life is not necessarily collapsing, yet it no longer feels light. The effort required to maintain a basic standard of living now feels disproportionately high, both financially and emotionally, and simply getting through a normal day carries a weight that did not exist in the same way a generation ago.

Three layers explain this heaviness. The first is financial compression. Income rarely expands at the same pace as expenses. What used to be routine decisions now require calculation. Transportation, food, rent, education, healthcare. Each carries more uncertainty than before. The result is not always visible hardship, but constant mental arithmetic.

The second is psychological fatigue. Modern life demands not only labour but attention, responsiveness, and emotional availability around the clock. Work, family, social obligations, and personal ambition now overlap in ways that leave little space for genuine recovery.

The third is the pressure of dignity. Many people are managing significant strain without allowing it to show. The effort to appear stable becomes an additional burden layered silently on top of everything else.

Yet when we step back from the surface, a deeper question emerges. Could this condition reflect something more fundamental about how we have collectively organised life? When heaviness touches nearly everyone, even in different degrees, it invites reflection on whether certain underlying principles have been neglected.

The condition we are describing is not simply bad luck or poor economic management. It is the accumulated consequence of choices made collectively over time. A society cannot endlessly invest its best energies into competition, conflict, and extraction without consequences in the quality of everyday life. When disproportionate energy flows into speculation and inefficiency, less remains for foundational needs such as food systems, education, health, and meaningful work.

The response therefore is not only personal adaptation but collective reorientation. We must begin to sow differently: mindful contribution rather than unchecked consumption, cooperation rather than fragmentation, long-term thinking rather than short-term gain. Prosperity is not merely a financial outcome. It is a reflection of alignment with deeper laws of balance.

The weight people feel today is uncomfortable but instructive. It invites a return to what sustains life, not just what accelerates it. Ultimately, what secures true human welfare is the recognition and faithful adherence to the fundamental Laws of Creation, which govern balance, consequence, and renewal in all things.

The heaviness is a signal. The question is whether we are listening.

YOU WILL OVERCOME: NINETEEN YEARS LATER, I STILL BELIEVE IT

 

Nineteen years ago today, on Friday the 1st of June 2007, I published my very first blog post on a platform I called Spiritual Activism. The words were simple, the audience was unknown, and the reach was modest. But the conviction behind those words was real. I wrote about gratitude, about perspective, about the tendency we all have to assume that everyone else is living more easily than we are. And I ended with three words that felt less like a conclusion and more like a prophecy: You will overcome.

Much has changed since that quiet Friday evening in Dundee, where I was pursuing my Masters degree with my family. The world has grown louder, faster, and considerably more anxious. Social media has turned every opinion into a broadcast and every setback into a public spectacle. We are more connected than any generation in history and yet more isolated in our struggles than ever. We drown in information while thirsting for wisdom. And we still do what I wrote about in that very first post, we look across at other people's lives, see only the highlights, and conclude that our own burden is uniquely heavy. It was true in 2007. It remains stubbornly true today.

But here is what nineteen years of writing, living, failing, rising, and paying attention have confirmed for me: the original insight was right. Someone, somewhere, has always been looking at your life and wishing they had your problems instead of theirs. The grass still looks greener on the other side. And help is still nearest at the moment of greatest need, even when, especially when, you cannot see it.

What the road has taught me above everything else is that faithful showing up is its own form of wisdom. You do not need to go viral. You do not need a massive platform. You need the courage to keep speaking truth as you understand it, to keep refining your understanding, and to trust that the words meant to reach someone will find their way there.

I have also learned that gratitude is not a feeling you wait for. It is a discipline you practice. On the days when the work felt pointless, when the audience was silent, when circumstances were difficult, choosing to look up in calm confidence was never weakness. It was strategy. It was faith in motion.

So tonight, nineteen years after, I return to where it all began with the same conviction, only deeper. Life will test you. The road will surprise you. But above all, place your total trust in the Almighty. His wisdom rules the world and it shall remain so forever. Stay faithful. Stay grateful. Keep showing up.

You will overcome!