Category: Purusharth
Artha meaning: why getting rich is a spiritual duty, not a sin
To understand this properly, we first need to clarify Artha meaning in Hindu philosophy. In the Purusharth framework, Artha is one of the four aims of human life. The word Artha is usually translated as wealth, but that translation is too narrow. Artha refers to material well-being, economic security, power, influence, and the practical means…
What is Dharma in Hinduism: the one goal modern life makes almost impossible
To understand why modern life sidelines it, we first have to answer a simple question: what is Dharma in Hinduism? Dharma is the most important of the four aims in Purushartha, and it is the one modern life is least equipped to support. Not because people are less moral than they used to be. Not…
Before Ikigai and Maslow, there was Purushartha.
Somewhere in California, a startup founder is paying $3,000 to attend a retreat trying to answer a very old question. What should a human life actually aim for? A coach with 400,000 Instagram followers has just launched a course on “aligning purpose with profession.” A productivity guru is preparing a TED Talk about the four…
The courage to be ordinary
The courage to be ordinary sounds simple until you try to live it. There is a version of your life that exists only in comparison to other people’s. It is the version that is always slightly behind. Always in the process of becoming something more impressive, more significant, more worthy of being taken seriously. It…
Why do I feel like a background character in my own life?
Why do I feel like a background character in my own life is probably a question that all of us have faced at some point in our lives. You are sitting in a meeting, or on a bus, or at a family dinner you have attended twenty times before. The conversation moves around you. People…
The Illusion of free will in modern society
The illusion of free will in modern society is the great unspoken reality of our time. We wake up, consume, and scroll, entirely convinced that we are the conscious authors of our own lives. But when you strip away the algorithms predicting your next move and the ingrained habits dictating your desires, how many of…
Why everything feels either right or wrong now
Binary thinking is what makes most days feel like a long row of small switches. You say yes or no to a message. You swipe left or right. You clock in or walk out. The grill is on or off. The order is right or wrong. The food is raw or cooked. The phone unlocks…
Why life breaks when everything becomes a goal
Living by rhythms instead of goals modern life is often easier said than done. Life was not organised around arrival. It was organised around return. That difference is easy to miss now because modern life trains attention forward. Forward motion. Forward planning. Forward success. Time is treated as something to be spent correctly, and goals…
Why rejecting your past self never brings peace
Rejecting your past self seems like a sensible move. Modern life makes this refusal feel sensible. We celebrate reinvention. We reward distance. We treat clean breaks as maturity. “That’s not me anymore” becomes proof of growth. But distance, when overused, turns into denial. The past self does not disappear.It stays present, not as memory, but…
Not everyone is meant to be adaptable all the time
Why not everyone can be adaptable at all times? Easy enough question, long enough answer. It is noticed as friction before it is understood as coherence. Someone who does not rush to adjust. Someone who does not soften their edges to make themselves easier to place. From a distance, this looks like rigidity. From closer…
