There is a question most people do not ask aloud because asking it destabilizes the scaffolding of their lives. It arrives uninvited in quiet moments late at night, at funerals, in hospital corridors, in traffic jams where ambition briefly loses its urgency. The question is simple, almost naïve, and therefore dangerous: If we are all going to die, why are we running this hard?
Humanity is the only species that sprints toward accumulation while knowing the finish line ends in erasure. We are born unfinished and anxious, and from our first breath we are enrolled without consent into a curriculum of pursuit. Learn. Compete. Acquire. Ascend. Secure. Repeat. Childhood is training. Adulthood is acceleration. Old age, if we are lucky, is the slow realization that the race never had a prize sturdy enough to keep.
Across cultures and centuries, the objects of desire mutate but the appetite remains intact. In one era it is land and livestock; in another, titles and territories; in ours, credentials, capital, visibility, access. The modern human does not merely want to survive; he wants to count. To be seen. To be certified. To be inscribed somewhere that feels permanent in a world that offers none.
This is not greed in the cartoonish sense. It is something more intimate and more tragic. The craving is not for money, or status, or power as such. It is for reassurance. For the quieting of a fear that hums beneath consciousness: What if I do not matter? What if I am forgotten? What if my life leaves no trace? Accumulation becomes a coping mechanism for impermanence. Achievement becomes a sedative against mortality.
Look closely and you will see it everywhere. The executive who already earns more than she can reasonably spend but cannot slow down because stopping would force a confrontation with emptiness. The academic who collects degrees and citations long after intellectual curiosity has been replaced by professional survival. The politician who clings to office not because he still serves, but because power has become the only proof of relevance. The influencer who measures existence in metrics because silence feels like annihilation.
Even societies behave this way. Nations hoard wealth beyond use, weapons beyond reason, influence beyond responsibility. Corporations chase growth long after it begins to corrode the very ecosystems human and natural that made growth possible. Institutions inflate mandates, budgets, and prestige, mistaking expansion for legitimacy. We have built a civilization addicted to more without ever asking to what end.
Competition, in this context, is not an accident. It is the inevitable byproduct of a world that frames worth as scarce. When dignity is conditional, when recognition is rationed, when meaning must be earned through external validation, rivalry becomes the default posture. People fight over symbols because symbols have been elevated into substitutes for intrinsic value. We battle for seats at tables whose meals never satisfy.
History’s great conflicts, stripped of their rhetoric, often reduce to this pattern. Land wars, religious schisms, ideological crusades, corporate turf battles all animated by the same subterranean impulse: the terror of insignificance projected outward as domination. We tell ourselves stories of destiny and progress, but beneath them lies a simpler anxiety. If I do not take, someone else will. If I do not win, I will disappear.
Modernity has refined this impulse with unprecedented efficiency. Markets reward restlessness. Algorithms amplify comparison. Education systems turn learning into ranking. Social platforms transform attention into currency and selfhood into a performance. Even virtues are gamified. Productivity becomes morality. Busyness becomes status.
Exhaustion becomes a badge of honor.
We are told this is progress. That constant striving is evidence of ambition, innovation, civilization itself. But progress toward what? Faster movement is not the same as direction. A treadmill, no matter how advanced, still returns you to the same place only more tired.
Death, however, remains unimpressed by our stories. It is the one institution that has never been disrupted. It does not negotiate with resumes or net worth. It does not recognize titles or timelines.
When it arrives, everything accumulated becomes instantly transferable, irrelevant, or abandoned. The house still stands, but not for you. The money still circulates, but without your name. The accolades persist briefly, then fade into footnotes, then dust.
This is not morbid pessimism; it is empirical fact. Cemeteries are full of indispensable people. Archives are crowded with once-famous names no one remembers. Entire empires now survive only as elective courses. Time does not argue; it erases.
And yet, rather than letting this knowledge sober us, we conspire collectively to forget it. We anesthetize ourselves with motion. We schedule meaning into the future after the next milestone, the next promotion, the next acquisition. Life becomes a deferred project, always about to begin, never fully inhabited.
There is a quiet cruelty in this arrangement. People postpone joy, intimacy, rest, and presence in service of goals that promise fulfillment but deliver only momentum. Parents miss childhoods chasing security they hope to someday convert into time. Young people borrow against decades not yet lived to buy symbols of arrival. Elders cling to relevance by refusing to relinquish control, terrified that stepping aside means vanishing.
Consider a familiar scene: a successful professional at the peak of his career, sitting in a hospital waiting room after an unexpected diagnosis. The phone is full of unread emails. The calendar is packed for months ahead. Yet none of it matters in that moment. What matters are conversations not had, relationships thinned by neglect, days traded too cheaply. This reckoning arrives for some through illness, for others through loss, for many only at the very end. But it arrives.
The real tragedy is not death itself. It is the misallocation of life before it.
If everything we chase is temporary and it is then the rational question is not why humans seek, but what kind of seeking makes sense under impermanence. There is a profound difference between pursuits that inflate the ego and those that deepen existence. Between accumulation that terminates with the self and contribution that outlives it.
This distinction is rarely taught because it is not profitable. Economies run on dissatisfaction. Power structures depend on perpetual aspiration. To suggest that enough might be enough is to threaten entire industries. Yet history’s most enduring figures were not those who amassed the most, but those who oriented their lives toward something beyond themselves—ideas, institutions, art, justice, care.
Think of the teacher whose influence ripples through generations of students she will never meet. The engineer who designs infrastructure that quietly improves millions of lives without bearing his name. The activist who absorbs ridicule and risk so others might breathe easier. These people may or may not be celebrated, but their work compounds meaning rather than merely stockpiling reward.
Even at smaller scales, the pattern holds. The parent who chooses presence over prestige. The professional who leaves money on the table to preserve integrity. The community leader who builds capacity instead of loyalty. These choices rarely trend, but they stabilize human systems in ways accumulation never can.
This is where a genuine global rethink must begin not with abandoning ambition, but with interrogating its object. Not with romanticizing poverty or stagnation, but with refusing the lie that endless acquisition is synonymous with a life well lived. Excellence is not the enemy. Compulsion is.
The future will belong to those who can distinguish growth from swelling, success from excess, progress from acceleration without purpose. In an era of ecological limits, psychological burnout, and social fragmentation, the old model of relentless expansion is no longer just hollow; it is dangerous. A civilization that cannot say “enough” eventually collides with reality, whether through collapse or correction.
What would change if societies measured worth not by GDP alone but by resilience, cohesion, and generativity? If organizations rewarded stewardship as much as performance? If individuals pursued mastery not as a ladder out of anxiety but as a way of serving something larger than their fear?
Such a shift would not be utopian. It would be pragmatic. It would acknowledge that mortality is not a bug in the system but its defining constraint and therefore its guiding principle. When time is finite, attention becomes sacred. When life is brief, what we build must justify the cost.
We cannot escape the fact that we will exit someday. But we can choose whether we leave behind only evidence of appetite, or traces of wisdom. Whether our lives read like inventories, or like contributions. Whether the race we ran was merely fast, or finally meaningful.
The question waiting beneath all our striving remains unanswered only because we keep running past it. But it does not go away. It waits patiently, at the end of every pursuit, asking the same thing it has always asked: Was this worth all the struggle?
About the author:
Dr. Charles Obiajulu Ugwu is a Contrarian thinker and writes from Lagos
