Vipul Agarwal, Delhi, 19 September 2024
In today’s world, almost everybody is connected through the internet and social media. We have thousands of friends on Facebook and are connected through Linkedin and Twitter. About 3.7 million videos are being uploaded on WhatsApp daily and watched worldwide. We share our lives and photos on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. Thus, we know quite a lot about so many people. Yet, we are feeling so lonely. As per the estimates, around 1 in every 8 people in the world is living with mental disorders. When we are so connected on social media, why are we so disconnected and facing mental disorders?
One of the most interesting features of such sharing is that it is selective sharing. We share what we “want to share” and not “what we need to share”. We share our happy moments, nice memories, celebrations, and promotions. We do not share our sad moments, loneliness, and need for help. In some cases, certain issues are shared on platforms like Quora but many of the identities through which these questions are shared are fake. There is, however, generally a reluctance to share our deep secrets on social media and probably rightly so because we have seen that social media can be quite brutal and manipulative. That shows that the entire network of social media is quite shallow and perpetuates pretentious and fake image-building. People who are quite troubled at their core may project themselves to be happy souls and vice versa.
I feel that one of the biggest reasons for the rise in mental disorders is that the opportunities for deeper interactions have reduced significantly. We have been hypnotized by the gleam and shine of money which has been deeply embedded into our psyche by the aggressive advertisements by the MNCs, intellectual laziness, fake Babas, lack of role models in the world of spirituality, and overall deterioration of spiritual awareness. I remember that one of my relatives was on the verge of dying and I asked her grandchild to read Bhagwad Gita. They took it quite badly and asked why I asked them to read Gita. They had this firm belief that Gita should be read only in our last moments in this body and they believed that she is going to live more. I was so shocked to see the degradation of the intellect to an extent that we started believing that the book that should have guided how we live is not allowed to be read till our last moment. It is as if we want to read the manual of a washing machine when we are going to dump the same. So many Babas have made spirituality a joke by showing some bizarre magic tricks. The most crucial part is intellectual laziness due to which we do not challenge anything and just accept any rubbish because we just want to be a part of the herd.
Due to all these factors, combined together, we create some fake meaning of life such as being rich or powerful or having fun and comfort. Some feel that life is all about relationships. Some invest heavily in their self-image of being knowledgeable and helpful. Some get strongly fixated on some belief system or ideology of a sect or religion. Inner hollowness is not easy to handle, and, therefore, people search for identity in one or the other things. Whatever they identify with, they get fixated on the same. That fixation becomes the biggest reason for their mental disorders. The people who get fixated on money and power become stressed and aggressive whenever they feel that they are being transferred out of their preferred posts or there is a likelihood of loss of money. Similarly, people who invest heavily in their self-image become quite shaky when somebody lifts the veil of their pretensions. People fixated on relationships become depressed when the relationships they heavily relied upon come to an end due to death, break-ups, or any other reason. People who get fixated upon ideologies get disturbed when these ideologies are challenged or people they are closely associated with disregard these ideologies.
Probably, we will continue to remain so fragile till we are hollow from the inside. Whatever we try to hold on to in the outer world is just a substitute we are desperately trying to find to feel secure. We fail to realize that until and unless this brain connects to our true self, it will always remain insecure and try to find one or the other anchor to feel secure. We fail to realize that even the biggest of the ships we anchor to is also sinking. When a few like-minded people sit and enquire deeply into life and its different aspects with an open mind, all of them can see their own hollowness. Similarly, when we read books written by authors who have enquired into the deep secrets of life and the human psyche, we get occasions to get a glimpse of our own hollowness. When we meditate and examine our body and thoughts like watching the water sitting on the bank of a river, we get an occasion to see our hollowness. We can also see in these moments that whatever remedies we have tried in the external world to get rid of this hollowness have made our lives more miserable. That gives us clarity and courage to get rid of all these external anchors and connect to the inner truth and once we connect to that inner truth, the sharing is quite deep. Whenever we sit with like-minded people, we share the depths of the truth that each one of us has discovered and that makes life meaningful and fulfilling.
