When Life Gets Easy, Attention Gets Slippery
In Deuteronomy 8, Moses recounts the Israelites' time in the wilderness—a long, uncertain period where they relied on something beyond themselves to get by. But the emphasis isn’t really on the hardships. Instead, the focus shifts to what comes after: the arrival in a good land, full of food, water, and resources. It's a pivot point. The tension isn’t about surviving scarcity, but about navigating abundance.
The Success Amnesia Problem
There's a line that caught my attention: "When you have eaten and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God." Setting aside the theological framing, the underlying human pattern is interesting. When things are difficult, people often reach outward—seeking help, support, clarity. But when life gets easier, when routines stabilize and the pressure lifts, that outward posture can fade. Self-reliance kicks in. Gratitude and perspective start to slip.
Spoiler Alert: No One Is Actually Self-Made
Moses cautions the people not to say to themselves, "My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me." It reads like a warning against taking full credit for one's position, especially after a long stretch of difficulty. I found myself thinking about how that dynamic plays out today. The idea of the "self-made" person is common in modern culture—as if success can exist in a vacuum, disconnected from systems, timing, or luck.
Forgetting Isn’t Loud—It’s Just Easy
This part of the text got me wondering: what are the things I’ve stopped noticing? The basic stability of my day-to-day life, the infrastructure I rely on, the people who've helped me along the way—none of that happened in isolation. It’s easy to drift into a kind of complacency when everything appears to be working. Not out of malice, just out of habit.
Comfortable Doesn’t Have to Mean Checked Out
The passage doesn’t seem to criticize abundance itself. Instead, it raises a question: how do people stay grounded when there's no immediate pressure forcing them to be? What keeps someone connected to their values, their past, or the broader context of their lives once things start to go smoothly?
Maybe It’s Just About Noticing
There aren’t clear answers here, at least not for me. But the questions feel worth sitting with. Maybe it's about creating pauses in the routine. Maybe it means recognizing that even stability has a backstory. Or that our actions ripple outward, whether we’re aware of them or not.
The idea of "forgetting" in this chapter doesn’t come across as a dramatic failure. It feels more like a quiet drift—a slow loss of attention. And if that’s the case, then the opposite isn’t grand or heroic. It might just be about paying attention. About noticing. About finding small ways to stay aware, even when nothing is demanding it.