From Goddess to Girl Boss: The Reinvention of Lakshmi

An article exploring the goddess we turned into an aesthetic: the perpetual spiritual poverty of wanting more, and the rather uncomfortable possibility that abundance has very little to do with how much we possess.

"Have we turned the sacred into another self-improvement project?”

Today, I bring to you something almost poetic about the Internet: a new way to invent or optimise a relationship with a goddess.

The algorithm shows us content somewhere between morning affirmations, gold jewellery, and carefully curated vanity tables, all promising a more luxurious life. These have now been associated with Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune, beauty, and auspiciousness, who has acquired a new job description. The trend also borrows from the language of aspirational femininity and personal branding, where looking successful can become almost as important as being so.

She is now a lifestyle philosophy, a mood board, a personal branding strategy, or perhaps even a five-step plan to become the sort of woman who attracts money or the sort of man who exudes quiet luxury. This is the promise that this Internet fad presents.

Let us welcome the trend of Lakshmi-maxxing.

The vocabulary is rather contemporary, but the irony is ancient. Here, we have taken a goddess whose symbolism encompasses material prosperity, fertility, grace, generosity, and spiritual well-being, and placed her inside the same machinery that has taught us to optimise our faces, bodies, productivity, relationships, and net worth.

Just as the Internet discovered Lakshmi, it has already asked her to improve its life.

But perhaps the question here is not whether Lakshmi-maxxing is an authentic representation of Hindu philosophy. It is this: What happens to a civilisation that has forgotten how to define a good life and begins treating the divine as a technique for acquiring one?

1. The Goddess Has Now Entered the Algorithm

The modern Internet has an extraordinary ability to turn almost anything into an optimisation problem.

There is looksmaxxing, where the face has become a project. There is wealth-maxxing, where money becomes a measure of someone's personal competence. There is productivity-maxxing, where even rest must justify its existence in one's life. And now, finally, we have arrived at Lakshmi-maxxing, where the divine itself risks becoming another instrument for the Internet's self-improvement.

Let's be fair: the formula is seductive. Become more beautiful! Make your surroundings cleaner! Dress elegantly! Cultivate gratitude! Wear gold! Speak positively about money! Give generously! Learn to receive without guilt! Build a life that looks and feels abundant!

Some of these practices are perfectly sensible, in my opinion. Cleanliness can definitely be a form of self-respect; gratitude can surely change how we experience our circumstances; and financial discipline can transform a life. Beauty can be a source of pleasure rather than vanity for some people, and generosity can make prosperity feel meaningful.

But here is where the problem begins: these practices are now presented as a mechanism for attracting divine favour, as though the universe were a customer relationship management system and supposedly the right combination of rituals, aesthetics, and affirmations could move us into its premium tier, like an unlimited Claude Pro subscription.

In simple words, goodness is now a transaction.

So the question is no longer whether one is good, grateful, or generous. It becomes whether these qualities are working towards the goal of divine favour. This means we are not necessarily becoming more spiritual; we may simply have discovered a more sophisticated vocabulary for wanting things.

2. Shri: The Thing Money Cannot Quite Explain

To understand what is lost in this promotional format, we must return to a word that is older, subtler, and considerably more interesting than the contemporary language of abundance.

श्री or Shri.

Shri is a term associated with Lakshmi and with radiance, auspiciousness, splendour, and prosperity. It appears repeatedly in Hindu religious and cultural life in ways that extend beyond a narrow definition of financial wealth. Think about what radiance actually means. A person can be wealthy without being radiant. A room can look expensive without feeling beautiful. A family can possess considerable material security and still live in fear and insecurity. A successful person can command attention while, at the same time, making everyone around them feel smaller.

We recognise these contradictions instinctively. We know the difference between a person who has everything and a person whose presence makes life feel richer as a whole.

Yet our contemporary vocabulary often struggles to articulate that difference. We have metrics for income, engagement, productivity, and growth, as well as rankings for desirability and formulas for financial success. But what measures a life that makes other people's lives more bearable? What is the wealth of a person who can be trusted with another person's vulnerability? What is the splendour of someone who does not need to humiliate others to feel powerful? What is the abundance of a household in which nobody is made to feel worthless because they have less?

These are questions we can ask through the idea of Shri, a way of thinking about flourishing that is not exhausted by possession.

This does not mean that I preach material prosperity as unimportant. Poverty is not a spiritual achievement, and financial insecurity is not a moral failure. Money can certainly purchase safety, healthcare, education, independence, and the freedom to leave exploitative circumstances. But if I were to romanticise deprivation in the name of spirituality, that would be another kind of dishonesty.

Money is a means of flourishing, but it is not the complete definition of it. The deeper question is whether prosperity can become something more meaningful and beautiful in the way we use it and the way we live with it.

3. The Lotus Is Not a Luxury Accessory

As with many Hindu symbols, there is a reason Lakshmi is so often depicted upon a lotus.

The lotus is not merely a prop in a divine portrait. Across Indian religious traditions, it carries associations with purity, unfolding, and spiritual possibility. It is often understood as rising above the mud and dirt that can symbolise earthly or mortal desires, blooming upwards and onwards towards the spiritual plane. In Lakshmi's case, it invites us to contemplate a beauty that emerges without being reduced to the conditions from which it emerges.

Just as the lotus does not require the world beneath it to have been immaculate, it is interesting to bring an image like this into a conversation about a digital culture that is increasingly obsessed with perfect conditions.

Everyone goes on about the perfect apartment, the perfect skin, the perfect morning routine, the perfect relationship, the perfect financial circumstances, and the perfect self, all finally assembled into one enormous list of tips and tricks for achieving them.

We are encouraged to believe that life begins when the mess has been removed.

But the lotus challenges the popular belief that beauty is the reward for having engineered a flawless existence. Beauty can emerge through the way we inhabit an imperfect one.

Again, I am not making an argument against caring for our bodies, our homes, or our finances. This is an argument against making perfection the price of one's self-worth.

And I want you to repeat after me:

“You do not need to become aesthetically immaculate before you deserve dignity. You do not need to become wealthy before you can practise generosity. You do not need to eliminate every insecurity before you can be worthy of love.”

And, most importantly, you do not need to manufacture the illusion of abundance to acknowledge what is already meaningful in your life. Just like the lotus, do not pretend; just grow. There is a huge difference between these two things.

4. The Most Popular Question: Can You Manifest Something You Refuse to Build?

One of the most appealing promises of manifestation culture is that desire can somehow be converted directly into reality.

We visualise wealth, speak abundance into existence, align our energy with the life we want, and try to become the person who already possesses what we seek. At its most harmless, this can be a form of imaginative rehearsal. Visualising a goal can help clarify what we want. Optimism can support long-term persistence. Affirmations can interrupt patterns of self-defeating thought. But there is a considerable distance between cultivating a useful mindset and claiming that thoughts or vibrations independently cause external events to occur.

And let's be real: the latter has no established scientific basis.

Worse, when financial outcomes are framed as evidence of spiritual alignment, the logic can become cruel. Those who prosper may be told that they manifested correctly, whereas those who struggle may be encouraged to search for a defect in their thoughts, their gratitude, or their relationship with abundance. Structural inequality can then be reframed as a failure of imagination, or bad luck as a sign of spiritual deficiency. The blame ultimately lands on the person in poverty, as though they must have attracted it.

And I must warn you: this is not liberation. It is the privatisation of misfortune.

A person can be hardworking, generous, and disciplined and still encounter unemployment, illness, economic instability, or circumstances far beyond their control. No serious philosophy of human flourishing should require us to pretend otherwise.

And this is precisely where the traditional framework of dharma becomes important.

In the broader framework of Hindu thought, artha, material well-being and the pursuit of resources, is one of the four aims of human life. But artha exists alongside dharma, which concerns righteous conduct and duty and has no direct one-word translation into English; kama, pleasure and desire; and moksha, liberation.

These aims are not simply interchangeable parts of a prosperity formula. Their relationship invites us to consider what we pursue, how we pursue it, what place pleasure occupies in our lives, and whether our ambitions ultimately serve something beyond endless acquisition. The point is not that wanting wealth is wrong. It is that this pursuit does not absolve us of the responsibility to think about what wealth is for.

You can affirm your way through an entire morning and still need to learn a skill, negotiate a salary, build a business, challenge an unjust system, or ask for help. You can pray for prosperity and still need a financial plan.

Faith and effort do not need to compete.

But neither should faith be marketed as a substitute for effort, nor prosperity as proof that the universe has given you its golden mandate of approval.

5. The Eight Forms of Lakshmi and the Poverty of a Single Number

In devotional traditions associated with Ashta Lakshmi, or the eight forms of the goddess, Lakshmi is understood through different dimensions of flourishing. The precise lists and interpretations vary across traditions, but these forms are commonly associated with material prosperity, food and agricultural abundance, courage, victory, knowledge, progeny, and other forms of well-being.

The philosophical significance here is difficult to miss. If wealth were simply money, why would its symbolic vocabulary need to be so expansive?

A bank balance tells us how much money someone has, but not whether they have the courage to face difficulty, the knowledge to use their resources wisely, or the relationships and security that help a household withstand adversity. Money matters, but it cannot tell the whole story of a life.

We acknowledge this in ordinary conversation when we describe someone as rich in friendships, experience, or knowledge. Yet, when measuring our own lives, we often return to the narrowest possible unit: How much do I have compared with someone else?

It would not be wrong to say that the Internet intensifies this habit. Every scroll introduces a new standard of success. Someone is younger, wealthier, more beautiful, more travelled, more desired, or more accomplished. The comparison becomes an endless loop because the metric is designed to keep moving. There is no final number at which the algorithm announces that you have flourished sufficiently, that you can finally call it a day and rest. If abundance is understood only as being ahead of someone else, it becomes impossible to arrive, because someone will always have more.

This is where Lakshmi-maxxing misses the broader symbolism of what Lakshmi invites us to consider: What are the dimensions of a well-lived life, and which of them have we neglected while pursuing the ones that are easiest to display?

A person with less money may have greater freedom. A person with more money might have greater security. But neither tells us the whole story. The point is not to pretend that these forms of wealth are equal in every circumstance; financial resources matter enormously. It is to resist the idea that one number can tell us everything that matters.

6. So, What Would Lakshmi-Maxxing Look Like If We Took Lakshmi Seriously?

I believe it would look less impressive on social media. It might mean managing money because financial stability gives us choices, not because a perfectly organised budget proves that we are cosmically aligned. It might mean dressing beautifully because beauty is a pleasure worth experiencing, not because the right aesthetic makes us more deserving of love or divine intervention. It might mean caring for our homes while recognising that a messy room or a difficult season does not make us spiritually deficient.

It might also mean practising gratitude without using it to silence legitimate dissatisfaction. We can appreciate our lives and still want to change them; acknowledge our privileges while recognising our struggles. For those who worship Lakshmi, it can mean approaching her not as a technique to be mastered, but as a deity deserving of devotion, humility, and respect within the traditions in which she is worshipped.

These are not universal prescriptions for religious practice. Hindu traditions are diverse, and different communities understand Lakshmi through different theological perspectives. The difference is between treating the sacred as a checklist for achieving abundance and engaging with a tradition that invites reflection. The first risks turning the sacred into a service to be used.

A more meaningful engagement with Lakshmi-maxxing would therefore ask not how to make life look abundant, but how we pursue prosperity, what we expect it to do for us, and what we are willing to sacrifice to obtain it. Faith and ambition need not be abandoned; they need to be considered alongside our responsibilities to ourselves and others.

7. Perhaps We Have Been Asking the Goddess the Wrong Question

Let's look at a hypothetical scenario. Imagine, for a moment, that you receive everything you've been trying to manifest. The money arrives, the career succeeds, your appearance improves, and the admiration comes. The life you have spent years imagining becomes your ordinary Tuesday. But then, what happens next?

Do you become kinder because you no longer feel threatened by scarcity? Do you become generous because you have enough to share? Do you become more courageous because financial security gives you the freedom to take meaningful risks? Or do you finally have the time to pay attention to the people you love?

Let's be honest: do you simply discover a new collection of things you still do not have?

There is no automatic answer. Prosperity does not guarantee wisdom, just as hardship does not guarantee virtue. Wealth can expand our capacity for generosity, but it can also expand our capacity for indifference. Success can create freedom, but it can also create new dependencies. What matters is not only what we acquire, but what our acquisition makes possible and what it does to us along the way.

A vision board cannot answer these questions for us. They require introspection, effort, and discernment and, for the devotee, a relationship with the divine that cannot be reduced to a transaction. Lakshmi-maxxing begins with a desire to attract abundance, but the deeper question is whether we have developed the character, wisdom, and generosity to live well with the abundance we seek.

One approach asks how to make the universe give more to us. The other asks how to participate more consciously in the flourishing of the world. The difference is not merely in how we get what we want, but in what we believe a good life should be.

Let Me Try to Conclude More Straightforwardly

Lakshmi is not a cosmic ATM. She is not a skincare routine, a luxury aesthetic, or a collection of affirmations that can guarantee financial success. Nor should the richness of a living religious tradition be flattened into a single definition of prosperity.

The real question is whether, in our pursuit of everything Lakshmi has come to symbolise, we have forgotten how to recognise what is truly auspicious. We do not need to become perfect before we deserve abundance, and we should not have to treat hardship as evidence of personal or spiritual failure. We need to build lives in which prosperity can be used wisely, and success does not require the diminishment of someone else.

Maybe the point was never to maximise Lakshmi. Maybe it was to understand what we mean by abundance before we spend our lives chasing it.

Yours truly,

Ganit Cariappa