In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales there is one story that feels like it was written for our time: The Pardoner’s Tale.
It is short, brutal and absolutely merciless.
Three young men, drunk and angry, stumble into a tavern one morning and hear that their friend has died. They swear an oath to find Death and kill him.
Their quest is not noble. It is ego, rage and bravado, the usual human cocktail.
They run there with weapons ready.
But instead of Death, they find a pile of gold coins.
More wealth than any of them could ever dream of.
Instantly, the vow to kill Death evaporates.
The real killer has already stepped onto the stage: greed.
They decide to move the treasure at night. One of them goes into town to buy food and wine. While he is gone, the two remaining men whisper to each other and hatch a plan. They decide to stab him when he returns so the gold will be theirs alone.
Meanwhile, the one in town buys rat poison. His idea is the same. He will poison the wine, they will drink, they will die, and the gold will be his.
They carry out their plans perfectly.
The two stab the first man.
Then they drink the poisoned wine to celebrate.
All three die under the tree.
They found Death exactly where the old man said they would.
Chaucer ends the tale with a quiet and lethal moral.
Greed kills more surely than any plague.
This is the story.
But the real knife is this:
The man telling the story is the Pardoner, a religious fraud who sells fake relics, fake miracles and fake salvation. He preaches against greed while being consumed by it himself.
He knows exactly who he is and he does not care.
He tells the pilgrims that he needs money, that he preaches for money and lies for money.
Chaucer gives you the tale and the industry built on the tale in the same breath.
This is where we jump into our own time.
The self-help world today is the Pardoner’s marketplace, only digital and global.
People come to it confused, afraid, lonely, insecure and hungry for meaning.
The modern pilgrim does not walk to Canterbury. They scroll through Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, X or Substack.
And the same old voice greets him.
It is clean, polished, enlightened and authoritative.
A person who claims to know how to wake up and how to unlock potential, how to live your highest truth and how to stop being asleep, how to be wealthy and free and happy and unbroken.
Behind the curtain is the same game the Pardoner played.
Transformation becomes dependency.
Inner freedom turns into monetized insecurity.
Authenticity is reduced to performance.
Rejecting the system becomes another system.
And the sermon against greed ends up feeding it.
Every message is crafted to produce a tiny wound. The listener hears that he is not enough, that he has not arrived, that he is still asleep and still needs guidance. The cure is always behind a paywall. Authenticity becomes a costume. Enlightenment becomes lighting, posture, tone, mystique. The sermon becomes a product. The identity of the guru becomes the relic.
If someone truly wanted to help others awaken, they would do it quietly and without performance. They would not turn awakening into a marketplace. They would not charge for access to truth. They would meet people where they are, not in the funnel but in the real world. The Pardoner never did this. The modern self-help figure does not either. The pilgrim’s confusion is the product. If people actually woke up, the industry would collapse.
And the three men under the tree are simply us.
Every modern pilgrim looking for a shortcut to meaning walks the same path.
Chasing some idea of freedom while trying to outrun fear.
Moving toward the tree that promises gold.
Believing salvation can be bought.
Trying to outsmart everyone else on the way.
What they get instead is burnout, disappointment and disillusionment.
They get more insecurity than before.
It becomes three kinds of deaths: the death of hope, the death of agency and the death of clarity.
All of it under the same tree.
Chaucer did not moralize.
He simply showed the mechanism:
Three men plus gold plus greed equals death.
A fraudulent preacher plus desperate pilgrims equals industry.
Nothing has changed.
The tale exposes a truth older than literature.
The fastest way to control someone is to convince them that they are asleep.
Once you accept that idea, you become a pilgrim walking toward the tree, waiting for someone wiser to show you the gold.
The Pardoner smiles.
He always has.
He always will.
The costume changes, never the profession.
If you see the pattern, if you see the tale inside the sales pitch, you walk away.
And that is the only real awakening that exists.
PS: You are probably wondering right now whether I am that Pardoner.
To be honest, I can write anything I want to make you believe that I am different or that this is not just another scheme. The only way for you to find out is to look at my actions. Yet this is also the sort of thing a clever Pardoner would say.
Where does this leave you? It leaves you exactly where you should be.
Thinking for yourself and seeing things as they are, not as they appear.