this

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day
trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is
no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice
we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing
some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be
it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or
some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything
else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if
they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have
enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body
and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time
and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally
grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified
as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great
story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will
need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid,
a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing
about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that
they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day,
getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure
value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. 
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on
your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money
and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration
and craving and worship of self."

-David Foster Wallace