A friend told me something recently that stayed with me for hours.
“You adopted spirituality because you feel like a failure. You are using it to justify your existence. You are hiding behind it.”
He was not trying to hurt me. He was being honest. And because I respect him, I could not just brush it aside. I had to really think about it.
Is he right?
I can see why it looks that way from the outside.
When someone talks about detachment and inner peace in a world where everyone is running after promotions, salaries, and recognition, it can seem like that person has quietly given up. Like they are dressing their disappointment in spiritual language and calling it wisdom.
I understand that perception. But perception is not always the full truth.
It Did Not Start Because Something Went Wrong
More than twenty-five years ago, when I was still quite young, I made a small personal decision. I stopped using bad words. I decided to hold myself to a higher standard in how I speak, how I behave, and how I treat people. Not because someone told me to. And certainly not because I had failed somewhere and was trying to fix myself.
There was no big event. No crisis. No rock bottom.
It was just a quiet choice. Private. No one was watching. That is not an escape. That is the beginning of a certain kind of character building.
A person who turns to spirituality after failure is looking for comfort. I turned toward it out of genuine curiosity: who am I really, and am I becoming someone I respect?
That is a very different thing.
What Spirituality Means to Me
For me, spirituality has nothing to do with religion in the formal sense. No rituals, no temples, no rules about what to eat or not eat.
It is more like an honest self-examination.
Why do I get irritated in certain situations? Why does seeing someone else succeed sometimes disturb my own peace? Why does ego come up even when I don’t want it to? Why does achieving something after working so hard for it sometimes feel a little empty?
These are not comfortable questions. But they are real ones.
The Bhagavad Gita has a word for this kind of practice: svadhyaya. Self-study. It does not mean sitting in a corner feeling sorry for yourself. It means making an honest effort to understand your own mind, your own patterns, your own reactions. That is what I am doing. Slowly, imperfectly, but sincerely.
I Am Still Ambitious
I want to say this clearly, because this is where people misunderstand me.
I want to do well in my career. I want to earn good money. I want my family to live comfortably; it is not for show, but because I genuinely want them to have that security and ease. I want to create work that actually matters to people and the organization whereever I work.
None of that has gone away.
But I have also started asking – what kind of person do I want to be while pursuing all of this? That question is what spirituality is helping me with.
Krishna says in the Gita, “Karmanye vadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachana.”
Your right is to do the work. Not to control what comes from it.
People sometimes think this means be lazy and don’t try. That is a completely incorrect interpretation. Krishna was talking to Arjuna on a battlefield. He was telling him: fight with your full effort, give everything you have. Just don’t make the outcome the center of your identity.
That is actually a harder way to live. Not easier.
Outcomes are like the weather. Some days rain, some days sun (actually, we feel drier than it is). You cannot control it fully. But who you are, your values, your character, your integrity, that is something more permanent. It should not keep changing based on what happened last quarter.
I don’t want success to make me arrogant. I don’t want failure to make me feel worthless. Both are just things that happen. They are not who I am.
Spirituality is not stopping me from being ambitious. It is stopping ambition from eating me alive. If ambition is the engine, then this inner work is the steering. Without the engine, nothing moves. Without the steering, you will crash.
I need both.
The Journey Also Has to Be Liveable
One thing I have slowly accepted is that if I keep saying, “I will be happy once I reach there,” then I may never be happy. Because when you reach one place, the next place is already waiting. Brutal truth from my own personal journey. I wanted X amount of wealth 25 years ago to feel that I had arrived. I probably have more than that, but I postponed happiness in the journey. I could have done it differently.
Life should not feel like a waiting room where joy is always just ahead but never quite here.
I want to do my work seriously and also feel okay while doing it. Work hard, yes. But not with this constant inner violence toward myself. Not with this feeling that I am always falling short. That balance is not laziness. It is actually quite difficult to maintain.
The Real Question
My friend’s real question, beneath the words, was this: Are you using spirituality to avoid facing life?
I have thought about this carefully.
And what I see is the opposite. The more I have done this inner work, the more accountable I have become. More honest with myself. More consistent in my values. More willing to sit with difficult situations without pretending they are something else. That is not what hiding looks like.
People see retreat. I see recalibration.
People see withdrawal. I see the slow, boring, invisible work of building something solid; something that does not collapse every time external circumstances change.
I am not hiding behind spirituality.
I am building with it.Not as an excuse.
Not as comfort for failure.
As a foundation for everything else: the ambition, the work, the family, the contribution.
Fully. Honestly. With No Apology.