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Who do we serve?

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It is 247am and I have decided to write. I want to write but have no topic. It has been a while since I wrote about tech. Samsung launched their latest flagship phones. Nice if you can afford these phones. What is the purpose of technology? The first thing that comes to my mind is to make our lives easier. To be more productive. Tech does the things we do not want to do. To solve problems. Tech is quite useful if I look through a noble lens. But the tech companies want to make money. They want to get rich (in my mind) no matter how they sell their aspirations. Why does everything have to be about money? What if we had a not for profit mobile phone company? Would that be any better? Tech is nice when everyone can afford it.

Technology is supposed to be the servant instead it seems we have become the servants to technology. Marshall McLuhan said, "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." Maybe the problem is not just tech companies. Maybe the problem is societal. There are too many poor people. There is wealth inequality. Modern day slavery. What is at the heart of this? I think we have this problem because life is structured as competition instead of collaboration. What is the goal of humanity? What is a goal that leads to competition and what is a goal that leads to collaboration so that I can make my point clearer? Let us look at accumulation versus actualisation.

In an accumulation-based society, the primary goal is the collection of symbols of value (money, property, data). In an actualization-based society, the goal is the realization of human potential. It is based on the idea that a human is not a bucket to be filled, but a fire to be lit. When we look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs we can think that society is stuck in the bottom two layers. Accumulation keeps us here: Physiological needs and Safety. We are obsessed with "securing" our spot. Actualization is the top of the pyramid. It is what happens when we stop worrying about "having" and start focusing on "being." Actualization is the ultimate threat to the current markets because it suggests that "enough" is a real destination.

Back to modern day slavery. We must answer the question. Who do we serve? All things considered it makes sense to me to serve God. We were promised that technology would set us free, but we forgot that freedom requires a direction. Without a higher purpose to serve, we did not become free; we just became available for whoever wanted to buy our time. God gives us that higher purpose. We have a choice, serve our Creator or the things that we create.

Serving the Creator (firstly) makes sense because everything else we can serve eventually demands more than it gives. Markets, technology, and systems of accumulation require endless growth, endless attention, endless labor. The Creator does not. God does not need to be enriched, optimized, or scaled. Serving the Creator is not about production but alignment—about ordering our lives toward dignity, sufficiency, and meaning. In that sense, serving God is not the loss of freedom, but the condition that makes freedom possible.

We might be inclined to think - What about serving each other? Service to fellow men? Serving each other is essential, but it only works when human worth is grounded in something unchanging. Without a higher reference, service becomes conditional, selective, or transactional, and can collapse into exploitation. Serving the Creator provides that foundation: it recognizes the intrinsic value of every person, giving service to others a stable purpose. In this sense, serving God does not replace serving people—it makes genuine service to them possible.
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