SHORTCUTTING APOTHEOSIS - HUBRIS WRITING ITS OWN OBITUARY

The phrase "when your idols become your rivals" makes for a fantastic social media caption. It sounds like the ultimate manifestation of ambition, a hustle-culture battle cry signaling that you have finally arrived at the big table. But that is nothing but a fable, and when you take further inspiration from Greek mythologies, adding eternal wisdoms from Yoruba cosmology, you will fully agree that taking that expression literally isn't just arrogant - it is a fast track to cosmic eviction.

Whether you look at the rigid, multi-step ascension of Greek apotheosis or the deeply relational structure of Yoruba cosmology, the universe has a very specific way of handling mortals who mistake a growth spurt for godhood. In classical mythology, you don’t just stumble into becoming a god. You don't wake up one morning, look at Zeus, and say, "Your time is up, old man." There is a grueling, multi-step pipeline. You need exceptional heroic merit, an elemental purging of your mortality which can literally involve being forged through fire, a cosmic background check by a council of elders, and finally, a literal alteration of your DNA via ambrosia to turn your blood into golden ichor. Apotheosis is not a casual promotion, it involves extraordinary deeds, suffering, transformation, and finally acceptance into a divine order that is bigger than the individual. The mortal does not seize godhood like an NURTW Faction seizes a motor park; it is bestowed like Nigerian Political Parties give Nomination Certificates to morally bankrupt financiers.

In Yoruba cosmology, the barrier to entry is just as steep, if not steeper. The Òrìṣàs (the divine entities guiding our world) are not just powerful beings. they are cosmic forces, personified ancestors, and manifestations of Olódùmarè (the Supreme Creator). To even be mentioned in the same breath as them requires an astronomical level of Ìwà Pẹ̀lẹ́ (balanced, good character) and Orí/Àyànmọ (Destiny/Predestination) that has been nurtured through immense sacrifice.

Yet, in our modern world, we achieve a little success and immediately think we’ve skipped the line. One business win, one viral song, one social media moment, and suddenly people start speaking like they have conquered history. Consider the young fintech founder in Yaba, Lagos, who secures a modest seed round of funding. Suddenly, they are on social media subtly shading the veteran industrialists who built the nation's physical banking infrastructure. They believe the old guard is "out of touch" and that they are the new deity of finance out to disrupt the archaic model. If they do not use the word “disruption” every hour, their oversized ego will probably burst out of their branded hoodies. A rising artist blows up with one “Single” and begins calling himself “a Living Legend”. A newly successful child starts talking to elders like respect is a subscription they forgot to renew. That is not evolution, that is perdition disguised as growth.

This is phase one of the delusion: mistaking the prerequisite (doing something impressive) for the final transformation (knowing how to sustain a universe). Every ounce of talent, drive, or influence you possess is what has been placed in you, it is called “Àṣẹ”, the divine energy to make things happen, the mandate to bring forth inventions. But here is the catch: it is never fully yours, it is only leased to you. It requires the right behaviour to become one with you and allow you to deploy it to rearrange a part of the universe. If you treat the masters who paved the way as peers to be conquered, you aren't demonstrating ambition, you are committing the ultimate sin - hubris.

Yoruba cosmology is too wise to celebrate that kind of folly. The universe is not random; it is structured. There is Olódùmarè, the ultimate source. There are the Òrìṣà, sacred powers who reflect divine order. There are the Ancestors, who remain morally present. And there are Humans/Mortals, who are expected to walk carefully, respectfully, and with character.

The Lineage of Power = Olódùmarè (The Ultimate Source) ➔ The Òrìṣà (Masters/Deities/Idols) ➔ Ancestors (Predecessors) ➔ You (The Leaseholder)

When you declare a rivalry with your idols, you reject this flow. You are claiming that your mandate is entirely self-generated. When you look at your professional or spiritual idols and decide they are now your "rivals," you are effectively trying to uproot the tree while enjoying its shade. The moment a mortal thinks they are independent of the lineage that birthed their opportunity, the universe begins to dial back the power supply.

Why does the universe react so harshly to this kind of arrogance? Because it threatens Àyànmọ (predestination) and cosmic order. In classical mythology, when Asclepius became so good at medicine that he started raising the dead, he thought he was rivaling the gods. Zeus didn't throw him a celebratory gala; he hit him with a thunderbolt. Why? Because disrupting the boundary between mortal and immortal breaks the system. In Yoruba spiritual philosophy, the world operates on an intricate balance between the physical realm (Ayé) and the spiritual realm (Ọ̀run). Everyone has their place in the grand tapestry. The moment you decide to tamper with the balance, you dislodge the order; when you decide to turn a mentor into a rival, you introduce chaos into your own ecosystem.

Imagine a young Afrobeat artist today who hits one billion streams. Intoxicated by the numbers, they stop paying homage to the veterans - the ones who carried massive cassettes and vinyls across international borders when music had to physically travel to radio stations to be heard. They stop bowing for the OGs in the industry. They think they are now the sun around which the culture revolves. What they fail to realize is that the music industry, much like Yoruba cosmology, is governed by a council of elders – the Labels, the Execs, the Promoters, the Media, the Influencers, and even the Fans. You might have the hot track today, but when the dry season of your career inevitably arrives, it is the structural roots built by those "idols" that keep the ground from collapsing beneath you. Without their institutional backing, you are just an unprotected mortal standing in a cosmic thunderstorm.

The final step of the classical progression to godhood is the consumption of divine sustenance, granted only after the pantheon agrees you belong there. It is an act of reception, not arrogation. You cannot steal ambrosia; it must be handed to you. True ascension - becoming a master in your own right - is granted through humility and the blessing of those who came before you. This is the symbolic “getting the blessing of the elders”. It is the ultimate insurance policy for success. When a master looks at your progress, smiles, and places a hand on your head to say, "Oya, come forward, come and dine with the elders", your transition from a student to a peer is legalized. Without that blessing, you are merely a usurper. And history, both mythological and modern, is unkind to usurpers.

Ambition is a beautiful thing, it is a must-have. The Orisha Sango did not become the god of thunder by sitting on his hands, he was a fierce, ambitious king. But his power was deeply tied to his role, his people, and his divine mandate. He understood power, but he also understood the consequences of its abuse. In this worldview, power is never just power. Power is always tied to responsibility, balance, and destiny. That is why the idea of ìwà pẹ̀lẹ́ - gentle, good character - matters so much. Talent without character is noise. Influence without humility is instability. Success without respect is a setup for disgrace. A person may have àṣẹ, the force to make things happen, but that force is not a license for arrogance. It is a trust. It flows through relationship, not isolation. You do not become greater by cutting yourself off from the roots that fed you. You become greater by learning how to carry those roots with honor.

If you are fortunate enough to find yourself sitting across the table from the people you used to look up to, don't view it as an invitation to a duel. You haven’t outgrown them; you have simply grown up to the level where you can finally understand the true depth of their experience and appreciate the scale of what they have achieved. Keep your ambition sharp but keep your ìwà pẹ̀lẹ́ sharper. Take the elevator up, but when you get to the top floor, remember who laid the concrete for the foundation. Even though you might believe you have outgrown your idols and you have consequently become rivals with them, you have not really risen above them, you have simply announced that you no longer understand what made your rise possible.

In Nigerian life, this is easy to see. The apprentice who forgets the master. The younger sibling who suddenly acts like family advice is outdated because Instagram gave them a new “list of things to do away with in 2026”. The politician who once begged for backing and now speaks as though loyalty was a one-way transaction. The artiste who benefits from a genre, then disrespects the pioneers who kept the sound alive when nobody was streaming anything. The irony is that these people often think they are proving strength. In reality, they are advertising insecurity. Arrogance has a familiar script. First, it borrows from the past. Then it succeeds. Then it pretends the past was unnecessary. That is when it starts calling everyone else a rival and a hater. But rivalry born from arrogance is usually a performance, not a destiny. It is the sound of someone who has mistaken applause for authority. And in both myth and moral tradition, that is a dangerous confusion. Greek myth punishes this kind of overreach with dramatic consequences because cosmic boundaries matter. Yoruba wisdom handles it with another kind of seriousness: if you refuse to recognize order, order will eventually remind you. Maybe through shame. Maybe through loss. Maybe through the quiet humiliation of needing the very people you once dismissed.

The universe has a way of correcting people who become too full of themselves.

This is a cautionary tale about why you should keep your feet firmly on the ground, even when your head is in the clouds. In the grand design of the universe, the moment you decide your idol is your rival, you stop climbing, and the universe prepares your descent.

And that, people, is how hubris writes its own obituary.

ORDER IS A BEAUTIFUL DELUSION

We live by the stubborn faith that the world can be arranged, if not perfectly, then at least well enough to make sense. We draw lines, make rules, create regulations, build systems, set standards, mark thresholds, refine procedures, and call the result progress. It is one of the oldest human gestures: to stand before disorder and answer it with form. Yet beneath this discipline lies a quiet tragedy, because the universe does not consent to our designs. It does not become orderly simply because we have decided to improve it.

This is where Camus enters, not as a pessimist, but as a lucid witness to the human condition. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he names the absurd: the rupture between our desire for meaning and the world's indifference. We want coherence. We want a pattern that holds. We want our labor to culminate in something lasting. But the world keeps slipping free of our grip. Every system frays. Every certainty expires. Every solution becomes the beginning of another problem.

And still we build.

That, perhaps, is the most revealing thing about us. We do not stop because the hill is steep. We do not stop because the stone rolls back down. We begin again, because to begin again is what consciousness demands. Order is our answer to impermanence, our attempt to make time inhabitable. It is not merely practical. It is existential. To impose structure is to say: I am here, this matters, and I will not surrender to chaos without resistance.

But order is never final. This is the secret that every serious builder eventually learns. The framework that once brought clarity becomes, in time, too narrow for the complexity it was meant to contain. The rules that once kept a household bonded becomes the cloud that limits its effervescence. The metric that once guided judgement begins to distort it. The process that once saved time becomes the thing that consumes it. Systems do not fail only by breaking; they fail by hardening into idols. What begins as stewardship can curdle into worship.

Camus would have recognized this temptation. He knew how quickly human beings transform their own instruments into consolations. We want not just structure, but salvation. Not just efficiency, but permanence. Yet permanence is precisely what the world withholds. There is no final architecture, only provisional ones. No completed order, only arrangements held together by vigilance, revision, and care.

And that, strangely enough, is where meaning returns.

If the absurd teaches anything, it is that meaning does not arrive as a reward for mastery. It is not the prize at the end of control. It emerges in the act itself: in the effort to clarify, to repair, to maintain, to continue. The builder who knows the structure will one day need rebuilding is not defeated by that knowledge. He is freed by it. He no longer mistakes his labor for immortality. He no longer asks the world to promise more than it can give. He works without illusion, and because of that, he works with dignity.

There is something almost heroic in this refusal to be deceived. The manager who revises the process, the engineer who tightens the tolerances, the founder who rebuilds the company culture after each wave of growth, the parent who restores order to a home that will be undone again by morning - each is engaged in a small rebellion against entropy. None of these acts defeats chaos. They only hold it at bay. But perhaps that is enough. Perhaps nobility lies not in victory, but in the willingness to keep shaping a world that resists being shaped.

Camus calls this revolt. Not the noisy revolt of drama, but the quiet revolt of persistence. To revolt is to continue without illusion, to accept the repetition without surrendering to bitterness. Sisyphus, in this reading, is not a man crushed by his task. He is a man who has outlived false hope. He knows the hill. He knows the stone. He knows there will be no final resolution. And because he knows, he is no longer owned by the fantasy of escape.

This is the deepest transformation Camus offers: not happiness as comfort, but happiness as clarity. One must imagine Sisyphus happy not because the burden has vanished, but because consciousness has changed the terms of the burden. He is no longer a victim of repetition. He is its witness, its participant, and in some sense its author. The same motion that once condemned him becomes, in the light of awareness, a form of freedom.

This is a difficult lesson for any age obsessed with optimization. We are told to streamline, to scale, to eliminate inefficiency, to make systems smarter, faster, leaner, more elegant. And much of that is necessary. Disorder can be costly, and carelessness is not a virtue. But there is a point beyond which optimization becomes a metaphysical habit, a refusal to accept the roughness of life. We begin to believe that if the model is refined enough, the world itself will become manageable. It will not. It never has. The task is not to master the universe, but to dwell wisely within its uncertainty.

So perhaps the pursuit of order is neither noble nor futile, but tragic in the old sense: dignified precisely because it cannot achieve its deepest aim. We build because we must. We refine because we can. We impose structure not to conquer the world, but to make it momentarily bearable. And when the structure fails, as it inevitably will, we begin again - not because we are naive, but because we are human.

There is grace in that repetition. There is even beauty. For what is a life, after all, but a series of provisional orders, each made with care, each destined to be revised, each carrying us a little farther against the dark? We are not architects of permanence. We are custodians of the temporary. We arrange the world as best we can, knowing it will resist us, and in that resistance discover the shape of our dignity.

Perhaps this insight helps explain why Thomas Jefferson wrote in the preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence - “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” rather than “Life, Liberty and Happiness.” He may have understood that happiness is not a permanent condition but a fleeting moment, reached through repeated striving; and what endures is not happiness itself, but the pursuit - the ongoing human effort to seek, shape, and renew meaning, or maybe progress.

Thank You!
God Bless Us All!!
See You Next Time!!!

~ SirRash

X: Rasheed Adewusi

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Instagram: Rasheed SirRash Adewusi

Threads: Rasheed SirRash Adewusi

THE PHYSICS OF PRESENCE, AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE LARGER-THAN-LIFE PHENOMENON

We have all felt it - that sudden, inexplicable shift in the atmospheric pressure of a room. A person walks in, and without saying a word, they seem to occupy more cubic centimeters of space than their physical frame should allow. We call them “larger than life.” But what does that actually mean? Unless we are discussing a literal giant or a particularly ambitious parade float, the phrase is a biological impossibility. Yet, we use it to describe the titans of industry, the icons of cinema, and that one uncle who tells stories with enough kinetic energy to power a small “Lagos Estate”. To understand the “larger than life” phenomenon, we have to stop looking at the person and start looking at the space they displace. It is not about size; it is about density, narrative, and the sheer audacity of being seen.

In the world of physics, density is mass divided by volume. In the philosophy of persona, being larger than life is often a result of emotional density. Most people live within their skin; they are contained, polite, and spatially efficient. A “larger than life” individual, however, exudes a beautiful kind of leakage. Their personality, their convictions, and their sheer will refuse to stay within the established confinement. Many mistake “loud” for “large,” especially in our current digital landscape where shouting is often confused for actual stature. This is the Pufferfish Paradox - inflation without substance. While the loud person operates on volume, the large person operates on gravity. They don’t need to shout because their presence has a gravitational pull that forces the room to orbit around them. They don’t demand attention; they command it through the sheer mass of their character.

Why are we so obsessed with these figures? The truth is, humanity has a “God-sized” hole in its narrative. We are terrified of our own insignificance in a universe that is cold, vast, and largely indifferent to our daily struggles. To combat this existential vertigo, we project our desires for meaning onto individuals who seem to defy the standard constraints of reality. As Joseph Campbell once noted, a hero is someone who has given their life to something bigger than themselves. When we call someone larger than life, we are essentially saying they have become a living myth. They stop being a normal person and start being a symbol. Fela wasn’t just an artiste, he was the symbol of rebellion. Dangote isn’t just an entrepreneur, he is the symbol of the intersection between business and politics. We need them to be large so that we can hide in their shadow when the sun of reality gets too bright.

In current times, this concept is facing a unique crisis. In the mid-20th century, a movie star was a god because you only saw them on a forty-foot screen. They were literally larger than you. Today, we see our icons on a six-inch screen while they are eating breakfast in their pajamas on a livestream. We have traded mythology for intimacy. This is the transparency trap; the larger-than-life aura requires a certain degree of opacity. To be a giant, you need a little bit of fog around your feet. When we use technology to strip away every layer of mystery, we shrink our giants down to a manageable, human size. We have gained relatability, but we have lost the sublime. True stature requires distance; you cannot be an icon if you are also a neighbor.

If we were to apply a mathematical lens to this, we might look at the relationship between energy and mass. Think of it as the E=mc² of charisma:

        Energy = Presence X (Authenticity)²

In this formula, presence is the physical act of being there, but authenticity is the multiplier. When someone is larger than life, it is usually because their internal reality is perfectly aligned with their external expression. Most of us spend nearly half our energy pretending to be someone we aren’t or modulating our voices to fit in. A larger-than-life person spends zero energy on modulation. All that reclaimed energy is poured into their output, making them appear more vibrant, more "charged," and ultimately, larger.

However, there is a heavy cost to this pedestal. It is a lonely thing to be larger than life. When you become a symbol, you cease to be a person in the eyes of the public. If you are a giant, you are not allowed to have a "small" day. You are not allowed to be tired, or petty, or quiet. The world demands that you maintain your bigness at all times. People don’t see you; they see what they need from you. Your actual needs are often ignored because the world assumes giants don’t need help. The bigger the statue, the more devastating the crack, making the larger-than-life figure a prisoner of their own proportions.

Can a regular person become larger than life? The secret lies in what I call Micro-Grandeur. You don’t need a stadium or a billion dollars to achieve this; you only need to be fully present. Most people are actually "smaller than life." They shrink themselves to avoid conflict, mumble to avoid being wrong, and hide their passions to avoid being judged. To be larger than life is simply to stop shrinking. It requires committing to the bit - whatever you are doing, do it with 100% intentionality. It requires mastering the silence, because giants don’t chatter. It requires possessing your space, walking like you own the ground, not out of arrogance, but out of gratitude.

Ultimately, "larger than life" is a collaborative hallucination. It is a dance between the subject who provides the energy and the observer who provides the imagination. We call people larger than life because they remind us of what is possible. They are the proof of concept for the human spirit, suggesting that we don’t have to be small or quiet. The great irony is that the most truly larger-than-life people usually don’t think they are large at all; they are simply too busy living to check their own measurements. In a world that is increasingly segmented, digitized, and automated, being larger than life is the ultimate act of rebellion. It is a refusal to be a data point. You just need to realize that the life you are supposedly larger than is actually just a set of self-imposed boundaries. Break those boundaries, and the grandeur will take care of itself.

So, go ahead. Stretch. The world has plenty of space, for as many "larger than lifes" as you can imagine.

Thank You!
God Bless Us All!!
See You Next Time!!!

~ SirRash

X: Rasheed Adewusi

LinkedIn: Rasheed Adewusi

Instagram: Rasheed SirRash Adewusi

Threads: Rasheed SirRash Adewusi