We for You | Daily Reflection | *by Maryam* ❤️

Assalamu Alaikum dear Brothers and Sisters, 🌿

Recently, I’ve been thinking about our relationship with money and how much of our lives are organised around earning it.

So many people want to earn more, become financially secure or wealthy. Of course, money is important, it allows us to provide for ourselves and our families and gives us a degree of security and choice.

But sometimes I wonder: will money always have the same importance that it has today?

With the incredibly fast development of AI, automation and technology, perhaps over the next 20 or 30 years the way we work, earn and exchange resources will change dramatically. Maybe money won’t disappear but simply change its form. And perhaps we will eventually spend much less of our lives working simply to survive.

This leads me to a much more interesting question:

If you no longer had to work simply to survive, what would you choose to do?

Not what job would you have.
Not how much would you earn.
Not what title would appear after your name.

But what would you do if your basic needs were already taken care of and you had nothing to prove to anyone?

For me, this is where the idea of self-realisation becomes much deeper.

Interestingly, self-realisation is the third most common topic that comes up in my consultations. People may initially come with different concerns, but underneath I often hear similar questions:

Who am I beyond my responsibilities? What am I actually good at? What do I want to do with my life? Where can I be useful while also feeling fulfilled?

It makes me wonder whether our growing need for self-realisation is simply a modern trend, or whether it reflects something deeper about the world we are moving towards.

In Islam, our worth was never supposed to be measured only by our profession, status or wealth. First and foremost, we are servants of Allah, and our lives have a purpose.

Allah SWT says:

“I did not create jinn and humans except to worship Me.”
Qur’an 51:56

And worship in Islam is not limited to salah and fasting. With the right intention, caring for our families, working honestly, seeking beneficial knowledge, helping others, teaching, creating and serving our communities can all become acts of worship.

So perhaps self-realisation shouldn’t only be about asking:

“What do I enjoy doing?”

Maybe we should also ask:

What abilities has Allah given me?
How can I use them meaningfully?
How can they benefit other people?

One person may naturally be good at teaching. Another at caring for or healing people. Someone else may have an ability to organise, create, connect people, listen, research, solve problems or see possibilities that others don’t yet see.

Our greatest abilities do not necessarily have to match our job title.

I often think about the difference between our grandparents’ lives and ours.

Many of our grandparents didn’t have much space to sit and ask, “Who am I? What is my purpose? Am I reaching my full potential?”

They had children to raise, families to care for, food to provide, homes to maintain and winters to survive.

Our world is very different.

Today, someone can seemingly have everything, a job, home, car, holidays and financial stability — yet still quietly wonder:

“But where am I in all of this?”

Islam gives us an important direction here. The purpose of life isn’t simply to maximise our potential or endlessly “find ourselves.”

Our abilities are an amanah -something entrusted to us by Allah.

So the question becomes not only:

“What can I achieve?”

but also:

“What am I doing with what Allah has given me, and what is my intention behind it?”

Perhaps one of the challenges of the future will not be a lack of work, but a lack of meaning.

If technology eventually removes more of the work we currently have to do simply to survive, we may be left with a question no algorithm can answer for us:

Who am I when my profession is no longer my identity?

And perhaps an even more powerful question:

If Allah had already provided enough for me and money were no longer my main motivation, how would I choose to spend the life and time He has given me?

Perhaps today it is worth thinking not only about how to earn more, but also about who we are becoming, what we are contributing, and what we would continue doing even if money were no longer the motivation.

Maybe the answer tells us something important about our values, our gifts and how we want to use the limited time Allah SWT has given us. 🌿

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