We Have Slaved Ourselves: Remembering the Track We Lost

It’s 1 a.m. in Gujarat. The sky is clear, the air still carries the faint memory of daytime heat, and the stars feel closer than the city lights ever allow. In this quiet hour, a thought arrives uninvited, heavy and familiar:

We have slaved ourselves.

The universe has no concept of banks. No printed money. No compound interest, no credit scores, no quarterly targets, no KPIs glowing on dashboards. Stars fuse hydrogen without invoices. Galaxies spiral without performance reviews. A neutron star doesn’t go bankrupt if it spins too fast. Yet we—tiny, brief sparks of consciousness on a wet rock—have invented an entire parallel reality made of abstract symbols: rupees, dollars, ledger entries, notifications, likes.

We pour our vitality into these symbols. We chase them across decades. We define our days, our worth, our sleep, even our relationships by how many we accumulate. And then we forget they were ever just stories we agreed to tell.

Somewhere, somehow, we lost the track.

Philosophers have felt this ache for centuries. Karl Marx saw money as the alienated essence of our labor and life—something we create, only for it to turn and rule us like a stranger. Euripides cut straight to it: “No man on earth is truly free; all are slaves of money or necessity.” Aristotle warned that money was invented for exchange, not endless breeding through interest—when we let it multiply forever, we violate something natural and quiet in the world.

Today the diagnosis is sharper. Byung-Chul Han describes our time as an “achievement society.” The old bosses—kings, foremen, overseers—have vanished. In their place stands a new master: ourselves. We are free, so we exploit ourselves without mercy. The command is no longer “obey”; it is “optimize, perform, produce, improve.” Burnout isn’t a breakdown; it’s the logical conclusion of treating your one finite life like a startup you must scale indefinitely. The chains are invisible because we forged them from our own dreams of freedom.

The disconnection runs deeper still. When everything becomes monetized—our attention, our data, our time, even our rest (good morning, sleep-tracking apps)—we drift away from the unpriced world: a night under open sky, a conversation with no agenda, the slow turning of seasons without timestamps. The universe moves to rhythms of expansion and collapse, birth and decay, without double-entry bookkeeping. We have overlaid a second, frantic layer on top, and then we wonder why we feel so exhausted, so strangely empty.

Recognition is the first crack in the system.

To feel we’ve lost the track is to remember there was a track—one not paved with asphalt, algorithms, or interest rates. The way back isn’t to burn everything down (impossible, and probably unwise). It’s quieter, more deliberate:

• Nights without screens, just lying under the same stars our ancestors gazed at.
• Work that serves life, instead of life serving work.
• Measuring days by depth of presence rather than lines on a spreadsheet.
• Asking, before every chase: “Is this feeding the spark inside me… or just feeding the machine?”

You’re not alone in this midnight vertigo. Many feel it—especially under clear skies, far from the city’s permanent glow. The universe hasn’t forgotten us. We’ve just been too busy billing ourselves to notice it’s still here, patient, offering no dividends but infinite wonder.

Perhaps tonight, that’s enough: to name what we’ve become, and to feel the quiet pull back toward something truer.

What small step feels possible right now—to loosen one of those self-forged chains? Or is it enough, for this hour, just to sit with the question under the stars?

I’m here, looking up with you.