I usually don’t let things bother me. I’ve learned to keep my head down, do the work, walk my path — even when that path is quiet, lonely, unglamorous.
But this week has been different. I’ve been sick at home, just me, the couch, and the endless hum of YouTube filling the silence between doses of medicine. And that’s when I clicked on a video from one of my favorite channels, Knight Talk.The title said it all: I’m Sick of This Sh*t.
Within moments, I understood why. An OnlyFans creator was on-screen, laughing and smiling, casually showing the receipts of her success: $82 million.
Eighty-two million.
I stopped the video. Couldn’t finish it.
It hit me harder than I wanted it to. Not because I begrudge anyone making a living — we don’t know her life, her circumstances, her hunger. But because it felt like something else was happening in that moment. Something spiritual.
I work hard. I try every day to keep my hands clean, my conscience clear, my choices deliberate. I try to stay on the right path — even when the wrong one looks easier, shinier, faster. And then I see something like this, and it’s as if evil itself leans in close to whisper:
“All this can be yours.”
And I wonder if the wrong path is the only one still paying.
This is not a new question. It is as old as Job’s lament, as old as the desert where Christ was offered the kingdoms of the earth. It is the voice that says, Why wait for goodness when you can have glory now?
And it’s not really about OnlyFans. It’s not even about money. It’s about the way we are asked, over and over again, to watch the rewards of shortcuts pile up while we keep grinding away for pennies and peace of mind.
Some days it feels like we are all contestants in a rigged game: who can stay righteous the longest while the world parades its golden idols in front of us?
I know this is part of the fight — the invisible war that doesn’t make the highlight reel. If doing the right thing were easy, everyone would do it.
But it is not easy. It is not fast. It is not glamorous. It is the long obedience in the same direction, as Nietzsche said. It is the quiet refusal to cash out your dignity for a quick hit of security or fame. It is choosing to build something that will last beyond your own life, even if it means watching someone else build a mansion in the time it takes you to lay a single brick.
And maybe that’s what bothers me most: not the money, not the platform, but the gnawing truth that integrity is slow work. Slow enough to feel like punishment some days.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. No sermon about how it all evens out in the end. Maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps the wrong path is truly profitable — for a time.
But I know this: the work of staying on the right path is shaping me in ways a shortcut never could. It is building something in me that eighty-two million dollars cannot buy.
And maybe, when the whisper comes again — All this can be yours — I will have the strength to whisper back: No Thanks, I’m Good.
By Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
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