The world has become a place of masks. People no longer live their lives; they live the lives they think others want to see. They wear their lies like fine suits, flashing their wealth, their cars, their watches, and their smiles, all while their souls wither beneath the weight. They don’t just hide who they are—they forget it. And in that forgetting, they lose the fight for meaning before it begins.

These displays of luxury aren’t triumphs. They’re monuments to an emptiness that gnaws at the edges of modern life. We fill our hands with things and call it progress, but our hearts grow lighter, stripped of substance. Compassion, wisdom, humility—these have been traded for trinkets. The result? A world where men and women walk like shadows, craving validation that never satisfies and chasing happiness that always slips further from reach.

Life today is a game played on a black-and-white chessboard. The pieces look solid, but they are hollow, plastic things moved by hands they cannot see. A pawn marches forward, sacrificed for a fleeting victory, and then it’s swept away, forgotten. The game ends, the board is cleared, and the match begins again. It is endless, this cycle of striving and falling, of reaching and losing. The players don’t win because they don’t know what winning means. They only know they must keep playing.

But there is another way if only we’d take it. A man doesn’t find himself in what he owns. He finds himself in what he gives. In what he believes. In the truths, he carries through the storm. Love, kindness, and honesty are the treasures that no thief can steal. A man who lives by them is no pawn. He stands outside the game. He sees the board for what it is, and he knows it cannot hold him.

To break free, we must stop looking outward for answers. The world will not tell us who we are. That’s a question we answer alone, in the quiet moments when no one is watching. And when we find the courage to live by that truth, we free ourselves from the weight of the false and the empty. We begin to live—not for others, not for appearances, but for the simple, untouchable purpose of being true.

Victory, then, isn’t in winning the game. It’s in stepping off the board entirely. It’s in turning from the bright, hollow prizes of the world and embracing the steady treasures that lie within. To choose this path is not easy, but it is honest. And in that honesty, there is life.