#36: Rat Park and the Soul: Why the World Feels Empty

Addiction, Disconnection, and the Architecture of Meaning

This is not just art. It’s a map. Of the soul’s journey through seduction, simulation, and collapse - By Hieronymus Bosch - http://boschproject.org/dzi/00MCPVIS.dzi, Public Domain - link

Some people would say, “Honey is a wicked and treacherous thing. It is best avoided if you want to avoid being cut.”

Others say, “Taste the sweetness, even if it bleeds you.”
But what if the honey and the blade… were never separate?
What if addiction, success, and suffering are not detours… but the very path?
What if the ache isn’t the exception… but the door?

And what if it all began… with a rat in a cage?

I. The Experiment That Changed Everything

It started with a cage. A single rat. Two bottles.

One bottle held plain water. The other was laced with heroin or cocaine. The results seemed clear and conclusive: the rat almost always preferred the drugged water, consuming it compulsively until overdose or death. It became the textbook image of addiction. A simple cause-and-effect … drug hooks brain, brain wants more, end of story.

This study, repeated and amplified across popular psychology and drug policy debates, painted a dark but tidy narrative. Drugs were the villains, and addiction the inevitable consequence of exposure. Criminalize the substance, eliminate the addiction. Logical. Scientific. Proven.

But what if the logic was flawed from the start?

Enter Bruce K. Alexander, a Canadian psychologist with a trained eye and a stubborn curiosity. He looked at the original rat experiments and saw something others had overlooked: or perhaps never questioned. It wasn’t just the drug that mattered. It was the context.

Why, Alexander asked, were the rats alone? Why were they confined to tiny, sterile cages with no stimulation, no social contact, no meaning? Wasn’t it possible that the environment … the isolation, the deprivation … was playing a hidden but crucial role?

So he built something different: Rat Park.

Imagine it. Not a barren metal cage, but an enriched playground: spacious, vibrant, filled with tunnels, toys, wheels, nesting areas. More importantly, filled with other rats. Social life. Community. Mating. Play. Stimuli designed not to reward the brain artificially, but to meet its design.

He offered the same two bottles: plain water and morphine-laced water.

And something astonishing happened.

The rats in Rat Park mostly ignored the drugged water. Some tried it. A few used it occasionally. But none overdosed. Even rats who had previously become addicted in isolated cages significantly reduced their consumption when moved to the enriched environment (Alexander et al., 1981; Alexander 2010).

Suddenly, the narrative cracked. If addiction were purely the result of chemical hooks: of biochemical inevitability … how could a change in social and environmental context reverse the behavior so thoroughly?

This wasn’t a marginal tweak. It was a paradigm shift.

Addiction, it seemed, might not be about the drug after all. It might be about the cage.

Not just what’s in the bottle, but what surrounds it. What possibilities exist outside the bottle. What kind of life is being lived when the bottle is the only escape.

The implications were … and remain … seismic.
But why was this overlooked for so long?

Could it be that we’re more comfortable blaming substances than questioning systems? Is it easier to declare war on drugs than confront the deeper architectural violence of loneliness, alienation, and purposelessness? Can a society admit that its design might be the problem: not just its contraband?

Alexander’s Rat Park experiment is not merely a footnote in behavioral science. It is a mirror. One that asks: before you judge the addiction, look at the architecture of the life that surrounds it.

And once you’ve looked at the rat’s cage… ask what cage you’re living in.
And if the cage isn’t made of steel, but silence?

If the bars are built from meaninglessness, and the floor is paved with endless performance?

What happens when the soul forgets what it was made for?
What happens… when even the winners feel empty?

II. Johann Hari and the Question of Connection

Years later, a journalist named Johann Hari picked up the thread that Bruce Alexander had tugged loose. But he didn’t just stay in the lab. He widened the lens, took the rat out of the cage, and placed it into our world … into the streets of Glasgow, the rehab clinics of Arizona, the slums of Manila, and the bustling sidewalks of New York.

Because if the cage is our world… then where do we see its symptoms most vividly? Not in theory. But in the trembling hands of the addict. In the emptiness behind fame. In the places where hope leaks … and still, somehow, refuses to die.

In his 2015 TED Talk, Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong, Hari begins with the same image … the rat in the cage with two bottles … and then delivers the pivot:

“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.”

It lands like a reversal, but it’s actually a return … to something older than neuroscience and deeper than behavioral theory. To the idea that human beings, like rats, are not built to live in sterile cages, but in connection. To each other. To meaning. To the divine.

Hari’s thesis builds on Alexander’s, but he speaks in the grammar of story. He tells us about a heroin-addicted man who had no one left. About Portugal’s revolutionary decriminalization experiment. About addicts who healed not through cold-turkey withdrawal or pharmaceutical replacement, but through re-integration into life: through jobs, community, purpose.

We like to think of addiction as a moral failing. Or perhaps a genetic trap. Or a neurological hijacking. But what if those are just surface-level symptoms?

What if addiction is really a kind of bonding … a substitute connection?

Hari suggests this very thing:

“Human beings have an innate need to bond and connect. If we can’t connect with people, we will connect with anything we can find… the whir of a roulette wheel, the prick of a syringe, the screen, the bottle, the packet of white powder... because that’s our nature.”

Pause here.

What if it’s not just addicts who are bonding to substitutes?

What if most of us, scrolling endlessly, shopping compulsively, bingeing shows late into the night … are living in smaller, softer forms of the same craving?

We don’t call it addiction. We call it culture. Productivity. Self-care. Entertainment. But beneath it, is it not the same pattern?

A disconnection from the real, replaced by a relationship with something that numbs or simulates the real?

This is why Hari’s framing matters. It is not about blaming the user. Nor merely the substance. It is about decoding what the addiction is for. What it replaces. What it silences.

And once we see it this way, we begin to ask dangerous questions:

• What kind of society produces chronic disconnection?

• What systems teach people that they are alone, disposable, or never enough?

• What kind of built world of architecture, economics, screens, routines… leads millions to bond with things that harm them?

If the answer to addiction is connection, then the failure that breeds addiction is disconnection. And disconnection is rarely accidental. It is often systemic.

Hari doesn’t make the religious leap, but his conclusion opens the door wide: connection is not simply a therapeutic tool… it is the foundation of human thriving. And when that connection is denied, distorted, or downgraded into simulation, the soul will find something to grip… even if that something is the very thing that destroys it.

Which leaves us with this:
What, or who, are you bonded to?
And is that bond nourishing you, or numbing you?

Ask yourself this:

Is it really connection… if no one sees your pain? If your soul is not known… only your highlight reel?

III. The Modern World: A Designer Cage

Let’s stop pretending the rats were the only ones in cages.

We live in boxes too... some steel, some concrete, some digital. We sleep in rectangles, travel in rectangles, stare into glowing rectangles. Our calendars are boxed into hourly slots. Our emotions squeezed into emojis. Our “freedom” sold back to us as a subscription.

But unlike the lab rats, we built our own cage. Or at least, we were handed the blueprint and told it was the pinnacle of progress.

Think about it.

You wake up, often alone, to an alarm that interrupts your rest. You spend most of the day either working to survive or scrolling to forget. Your moments of “connection” are algorithmically filtered and fragmented. You’re surrounded by people, yet rarely with them. And when the ache of meaninglessness begins to whisper… you numb it. Coffee, newsfeed, food, task, podcast, screen, sleep. Repeat.

So ask:
Is this living, or is this managing?

We have more material comfort than almost any generation in history, yet anxiety, depression, and substance abuse are rising across the globe (WHO, 2022). Why? What’s missing?

What if, like the rats in the original experiment, we’re overdosing not because we’re inherently broken… but because the world we live in is?

Bruce Alexander called it a "dislocation theory of addiction" — that modern capitalism tears people away from meaningful roles, identities, traditions, and places. It doesn’t merely leave people poor… it leaves them unrooted. And rootlessness breeds craving.

Now think of modern life as a system:

• It rewards distraction and penalizes stillness.

• It celebrates individualism, yet punishes loneliness.

• It sells choice, but erases purpose.

• It multiplies convenience, while hollowing out community.

This is the cage: a life engineered to maximize autonomy and minimize transcendence.
But isn't autonomy freedom?

That’s the great myth. Freedom from constraint is only half of freedom. The other half is freedom toward something… something meaningful, noble, eternal. Without that, freedom collapses into emptiness.

As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”

Or addiction.
So, perhaps the problem isn’t that we’re weak.

It’s that we’re hungry. For meaning. For sacred purpose. For connection that isn’t mediated by profit or pixels.

Yet instead, we live in a world where ambition has replaced aspiration. Where image has replaced presence. Where productivity has replaced prayer. Where success is measured by metrics that cannot hold a soul.

Look around at those who "made it." The actor. The influencer. The executive.

Why is there so much collapse at the top?
Why does the mountaintop feel more like a cliff?…

Because the ladder they climbed was leaning against the wrong wall.

We were never meant to live disconnected from our own nature, from each other, from the Source of our existence. When we do… even in the name of comfort, even in the name of progress… something fractures inside. And into that fracture, all manner of replacements flood in.

Addiction isn’t the anomaly of modern life.
It is its symptom.

Which brings us back to the question:
If the rat’s cage created addiction, what has ours created?
Even the ones who "won" seem weary.
The stage lights are on… but the script feels hollow.
So we distract, consume, curate... anything to feel again.
Or at least to forget.
And more urgently:

If the rats escaped addiction by returning to a natural environment of connection, what environment… what naturally-aligned habitat, might free us?

IV. The Paradox of Success and Isolation

We’re trained to believe that the climb will heal us.
That if we rise high enough, fast enough — the ache will vanish.
That the emptiness gnawing at the edges of our lives will be swallowed by applause, buried beneath medals, soothed by followers.

But what if the summit is lonelier than the struggle? What if the view from the top shows you just how far you’ve drifted… from yourself?

Let’s talk about success…
not as society defines it,
but as it’s experienced behind the scenes.

A 2024 study by Harvard Business Review found that more than 50% of CEOs reported feeling isolated in their roles… and of those, nearly 60% believed it was affecting their performance (HBR, 2024). And that’s just one data point. Rates of depression among physicians, lawyers, professional athletes, and entertainers are significantly higher than the general population. In some fields, more than double.

So what gives?

Isn’t success supposed to be the reward for all that striving?

Here’s the paradox: the more “successful” you become in worldly terms, the more distant you often become from others. From your peers, who now see you as competition or a brand. From your roots, which may now seem naïve or irrelevant. Even from your own self… because the image you’ve built must be maintained at all costs.

This is the golden cage. Polished, admired, envied… and utterly hollow.
The problem isn't just that success isolates… it’s that it does so invisibly.

On the outside, the achiever shines. They’ve got the resume, the reach, the recognition. But inside, they’re often suffocating under the weight of a persona. The pressure to always win. The fear of slipping. The inability to be seen as anything but exceptional.

Ask yourself: how do you confess your weakness when your entire identity is built on strength?

This phenomenon has been termed the “success paradox” — where high achievers, especially those in leadership or celebrity roles, suffer more from imposter syndrome, anxiety, and existential fatigue. A study from the University of California found that successful individuals often report “reduced access to intimacy,” and feel that “the people around them only love their image, not their essence” (UC Berkeley, 2018).

And this is not just emotional fatigue.

It’s spiritual starvation.

Because the soul was not created for admiration…
it was created for intimacy.
Not performance, but presence.
Not validation, but connection …

Is this the price of the climb?
More urgently: Is it worth it?

Let’s return to our question: what is addiction?

Is it only the drunk on the corner? Or could it be the mogul who can’t sleep without pills? The entrepreneur who checks their metrics obsessively, needing validation every hour? The actor who feels safest only when pretending to be someone else?

Maybe addiction isn’t the escape from failure.
Maybe it’s the consequence of a kind of success that severs us from meaning.

The Prophet ﷺ once warned:

"Every nation has a trial, and the trial of my nation is wealth."
(Tirmidhi, 2336)

He knew. That the trial of prosperity is not in comfort, but in disconnection from need… from humility, from people, from God.

Now consider this: the same modern system that isolates the poor through deprivation, isolates the successful through elevation. The lonely at the bottom and the lonely at the top share a common wound, just different wrapping.

And herein lies the cruelty of the system. It doesn’t just fail some people. It fails everyone, in different ways.

The addict in the alley and the CEO in the penthouse are not opposites. They’re echoes. Both are trying to soothe a wound the world told them didn’t exist: a yearning for meaning in a world built to distract from it.

So ask:

• Is your success drawing you closer to your soul, or further from it?

• Who are you becoming in the process of becoming someone?

• And when the noise dies down, when the followers go to sleep… who still knows you?

V. The “Why Me?” Threshold: Where Suffering Becomes Trauma

Everyone suffers.

That is not unique. It is, in fact, the most universal human experience. From scraped knees to shattered hearts, from losing a job to losing a child… suffering touches all, sooner or later.

But trauma? That’s something else.

Trauma is suffering that stays. That refuses to pass. That roots itself in the nervous system, in the gut, in the soul. And one of the most consistent findings in trauma research is that trauma often arises not merely from the event… but from the meaninglessness of the event.

Let that settle.

It’s not just what happened that breaks people. It’s what it seemed to mean… or not mean.

When something devastating strikes… a cancer diagnosis, a betrayal, a tragic accident… the first words to rise from the chest are often:

“Why me?”

Not “why did this occur” in the physical sense… but “why to me, now, like this?”

And this question becomes the crossroads between healing and collapse.

If you can answer it… not with clinical certainty,
but with moral coherence… you may endure.
You may even emerge stronger.

But if the answer is silence? If the universe shrugs? If randomness is the only author of your story? If your pain serves no purpose and your suffering holds no wisdom?

Then the wound festers. And trauma sets in.

Researchers Janoff-Bulman and others call this the shattering of assumptions… when trauma breaks three core beliefs that most humans unconsciously carry:

1. The world is benevolent.

2. The world is meaningful.

3. The self is worthy.

Now consider this: all three are assaulted by secular modernity.

It teaches that the universe is cold and indifferent. That meaning is invented, not discovered. That your “self” is just a bundle of neurons and genes, and any idea of a soul or sanctity is sentimental residue.

So when suffering comes— as it always does— how does one not shatter?

Here’s the trap: in the modern, materialist worldview, the question “Why me?” is not just unanswerable, it is meaningless. The very act of asking presumes a logic to the universe that this worldview denies.

Which means: to be human is to ask “why.”
And to live in a system that treats that question as an error... is itself traumatic.
A society that strips people of transcendent purpose leaves them psychically naked in the face of suffering.

But the Qur’an does not reject this question. It absorbs it.

Over and over, it presents pain, loss, and fear— not as anomalies, but as integrated parts of a divine curriculum:

"وَلَنَبْلُوَنَّكُم بِشَيْءٍ مِّنَ ٱلْخَوْفِ وَٱلْجُوعِ وَنَقْصٍۢ مِّنَ ٱلْأَمْوَٰلِ وَٱلْأَنفُسِ وَٱلثَّمَرَٰتِ ۗ وَبَشِّرِ ٱلصَّـٰبِرِينَ"
“We will surely test you with something of fear, hunger, loss of wealth, lives, and fruits — but give glad tidings to the patient...” Surah Al-Baqarah 2:155

And who are they?

"ٱلَّذِينَ إِذَآ أَصَـٰبَتْهُم مُّصِيبَةٌۭ قَالُوٓاْ إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّآ إِلَيْهِ رَٰجِعُونَ"
“Those who, when calamity strikes them, say: Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we return.” Surah Al-Baqarah 2:156

This is not poetic fatalism. It is metaphysical orientation.

Your suffering is not random. It is not waste. It is not unobserved. It has weight. It has a direction. And in this framing, “Why me?” becomes not a cry into the void— but a whisper in a classroom.

Because there is a Teacher. And there is a test. And you… are not alone in it.

It’s no accident that studies show spiritual frameworks dramatically increase resilience post-trauma. In fact, among trauma survivors, those who “turned to religion” or sought “spiritual meaning” consistently showed lower rates of PTSD and depression (Pargament, 1997; Ano & Vasconcelles, 2005).

But those findings don’t tell the full story.

Because religious meaning does not just soothe the pain. It reconstructs the world. It gives you a why. It reintroduces the soul to a cosmos where nothing, not even your tears: is wasted.

"وَمَا أَصَابَ مِن مُّصِيبَةٍۢ إِلَّا بِإِذْنِ ٱللَّهِ ۗ وَمَن يُؤْمِنۢ بِٱللَّهِ يَهْدِ قَلْبَهُۥ ۚ"
“No calamity strikes except by Allah’s permission. And whoever believes in Allah — He guides his heart.”
Surah At-Taghabun 64:11

This is the architecture of peace.
Not peace as in comfort.
Peace as in coherence.

Because the heart doesn’t break from pain alone. It breaks when pain has no place. And the Qur’an, unlike the secular world, gives it a place. A purpose. A path.

So when the wound is opened, and the cry escapes — “Why me?” — the answer is not silence. It is the whisper of a Companion, saying:

Because I know you.
Because I see you.
Because this… too… is part of your return.

VI. The Hereafter as Logical Architecture

So far, we've followed the ache: from cages of addiction to the ache of disconnection, from worldly success to existential collapse, and then to the raw cry: Why me?

But now we must ask something deeper:

If the “Why me?” cry is not a glitch, but a signal, then what sort of system can answer it? What kind of worldview can hold that question without either denying it, trivializing it, or dissolving it into randomness?

Let’s pause. Imagine a man who’s lost his child in a senseless accident. Another who’s been wrongfully imprisoned for decades. A woman who’s endured relentless abuse despite her goodness. Imagine asking any of them: Why did this happen?

What answers could you offer, honestly… in a framework where this life is the total story?

Could you say, “It’s just evolution?”
“An unfortunate statistical anomaly?”
Or worse: “There is no reason. Life has no direction.”?

If the highest answer you can give to someone in the grip of agony is “these things just happen,” then the system you are operating in is not sufficient for the human soul.

This is not about emotional comfort. This is about logical coherence.

Because if we are creatures of reason, and we are — then we must demand that our worldview can make sense of not just success and pleasure, but also grief and horror.

Which brings us to the most radical idea modern secularism has tried to discard:
The Hereafter.

Let’s strip the theology for a moment.

Let’s treat the idea of the Afterlife as a hypothesis: a metaphysical postulate.

What happens if you remove it? You remove justice. You remove resolution. You remove the very possibility of completion.

Without the Hereafter, what happens to the mother who never finds her lost child? To the victim whose oppressor dies unpunished? To the disabled man who never gets reprieve? To the one whose life is cut short before he ever got to live it? Is there any framework in “this-world-only” thinking that can make sense of their pain?

There isn’t. Not if you're being honest.

And so you get either brutal nihilism… or shallow positivity.

“You can move on.” “Time heals.” “Try to focus on the good.”

But the Qur’an offers something else.

It gives suffering a telos — a direction, a function, a weight that doesn’t vanish into entropy.

"وَمَا خَلَقْنَا ٱلسَّمَآءَ وَٱلْأَرْضَ وَمَا بَيْنَهُمَا بَٰطِلًۭا ۚ ذَٰلِكَ ظَنُّ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ ۚ فَوَيْلٌۭ لِّلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ مِنَ ٱلنَّارِ"
“We did not create the heavens and the earth and everything between them in vain. That is the assumption of those who disbelieve. So woe to those who disbelieve — from the Fire.”
Surah Sad 38:27

Here, denial of cosmic meaning is not just error — it is injustice. It is a form of cruelty — because it erases the promise that every suffering, every injustice, every unanswered prayer will be accounted for.

In the Qur’anic framework, the Hereafter isn’t an add-on. It is the spine.

It completes the arc of justice. It justifies the apparent disorder of this life. It transforms suffering from meaningless cruelty to potential elevation.

It turns the pain of now into the investment of forever.

And most critically, it allows us to live, and die, with dignity.

"أَفَحَسِبْتُمْ أَنَّمَا خَلَقْنَـٰكُمْ عَبَثًۭا وَأَنَّكُمْ إِلَيْنَا لَا تُرْجَعُونَ"
“Did you think that We created you in vain, and that you would not be returned to Us?”
Surah Al-Mu’minun 23:115

This verse does not ask for belief, it confronts you with a question. If there is no return — no accountability, no beyond — then what was this life? A cosmic joke? A chemical hiccup?

Because without return, creation becomes cruelty.

And your suffering becomes collateral. But with return — everything shifts. Suddenly, injustice is not final. Suddenly, hardship is not waste. Suddenly, silence is not absence.

The Qur’an closes the loop… not with platitudes, but with metaphysical architecture.

It says: You were made for more. And every sorrow will be seen. And every pain will be answered… if not here, then there.

So the “Why me?” becomes:

Why not me… if through this, I return clearer, cleaner, closer?

Because with the Hereafter, even the unbearable can be borne…
Not through delusion,
But through design.

ٱعْلَمُوا أَنَّمَا ٱلْحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنْيَا لَعِبٌۭ وَلَهْوٌۭ وَزِينَةٌۭ وَتَفَاخُرٌۭ بَيْنَكُمْ وَتَكَاثُرٌۭ فِى ٱلْأَمْوَٰلِ وَٱلْأَوْلَـٰدِ ۖ كَمَثَلِ غَيْثٍ أَعْجَبَ ٱلْكُفَّارَ نَبَاتُهُۥ ثُمَّ يَهِيجُ فَتَرَىٰهُ مُصْفَرًّۭا ثُمَّ يَكُونُ حُطَـٰمًۭا ۖ وَفِى ٱلْـَٔاخِرَةِ عَذَابٌۭ شَدِيدٌۭ وَمَغْفِرَةٌۭ مِّنَ ٱللَّهِ وَرِضْوَٰنٌۭ ۚ وَمَا ٱلْحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنْيَآ إِلَّا مَتَـٰعُ ٱلْغُرُورِ
Know that the life of this world is but amusement and diversion and adornment and boasting to one another and competition in increase of wealth and children - like the example of a rain whose [resulting] plant growth pleases the tillers; then it dries and you see it turned yellow; then it becomes [scattered] debris. And in the Hereafter is severe punishment and forgiveness from Allāh and approval. And what is the worldly life except the enjoyment of delusion.
Surah al-Ḥadīd (57:20)

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What if atheism didn’t just deny God — but erased the only ladder out of suffering? What if by removing meaning, we turned the most intelligent creature on earth into the most restless, self-destructive, and confused?

"لَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ فِىٓ أَحْسَنِ تَقْوِيمٍۢ – ثُمَّ رَدَدْنَـٰهُ أَسْفَلَ سَـٰفِلِينَ"
“We created man in the best of forms: then, We reduced him to the lowest of the low.”
Surah At-Tīn (95:4–5)

What if the hollowness inside you isn’t dysfunction —
but the echo of a trust you once accepted?

"إِنَّا عَرَضْنَا ٱلْأَمَانَةَ عَلَى ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ وَٱلْجِبَالِ فَأَبَيْنَ أَن يَحْمِلْنَهَا..."
“Indeed, We offered the Trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, but they declined to bear it… and man undertook it.”
Surah al-Aḥzāb (33:72)

What if this burden is what makes the soul noble — not ease? And what if that’s the one thing the modern world cannot compute — that it is precisely because we suffer and continue

What if that’s why Gaza unsettles the world?
Not just because of the horror inflicted upon it —
but because, despite it all, they still marry in tents.
They still rebuild their children’s graves with their bare hands.
They still sing beneath drones.
They still bless the foodless table.
And when the sky collapses...
they still whisper it.
Allāhu Akbar.

Not as defiance.
As truth.
And what if that whisper…
not the machines, not the degrees, not the flags…
is what terrifies the world that forgot God?

...

I cannot answer your questions.
That’s your journey.

I’m not here to convince you.
At least… that’s what I like to think… that I don’t even care for that.
But maybe I do. So much that watching you drift feels like a kind of grief I can’t name.
But I write.
Not because I think I see…
but because I follow the one who did.

The one who said:

"إِنَّمَا مَثَلِي وَمَثَلُكُمْ كَمَثَلِ رَجُلٍ أَوْقَدَ نَارًا، فَجَعَلَ الْجَنَادِبُ وَالْفَرَاشُ يَقَعْنَ فِيهَا، وَهُوَ يَذُبُّهُنَّ عَنْهَا، وَأَنَا آخِذٌ بِحُجَزِكُمْ عَنِ النَّارِ، وَأَنْتُمْ تَفَلَّتُونَ مِنْ يَدِي" "My example and your example is like that of a man who kindled a fire. Moths and insects began to fall into it, and he tried to keep them away. I am holding onto your waistbands to pull you away from the fire, but you are slipping away from my hands."

(Bukhārī 6483, Muslim 2284)

Because he pulled…
and we must too.

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