The Blue Whale Challenge and the desperate human need for self-validation

Transcript

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The Blue Whale Challenge and the desperate human need for self-validation. For validation.
The last few weeks, the online game of Blue Whale Challenge has created concern, consternation, and fear, alarm among people, as it has prompted several people, several young boys in India, and also several dozens of people in Russia, where the game is said to have originated, to commit suicide. The Blue Whale Challenge has impelled many young people to commit suicide. This game involves some unknown moderators challenging young boys to do unpleasant and self-injurious tasks.
And they are also asked to reveal some personal information. And as the boys keep revealing the personal information that is held as a blackmail against them, and they are told that if you don’t meet the challenge, then this information will be revealed in public. So out of fear, the children keep doing things such as marking their skin with some knife or doing other things.
Still, the last challenge is that they are asked to commit suicide. Most sane people will wonder, why would anyone accept such a foolhardy challenge to commit suicide? However, such sanity is not always accessible to us when we are in our vulnerable adolescent years, when we are desperately seeking for some identity that helps us feel good about ourselves. We human beings are social creatures and because of our social nature, we need affirmation, validation, approval, recognition from others.
In civilized cultured societies, this need for validation is channeled constructively so that people are encouraged to do good things in order to get validated. So for example, a student who gets good marks in exams, especially as a child is growing up in the early school days, the child can get good marks in the exam and the parents approve, then the child feels validated. As a person grows into adulthood and when the person gets married, now when a married person responsibly takes care of one’s family, then that also brings validation, that brings approval.
And in this way, people are encouraged to act irresponsibly when the basic human need for validation is channeled constructively. The years of adolescence are especially dangerous because that is the time when the area from which we get validation changes. For a child, it is the parent’s validation that is primary.
Child is defined as the son of so-and-so or the daughter of so-and-so. But as the child comes to the adolescence, then the identity changes. The adolescent or the teenager is not yet an adult where they have their own job, their own position in society and that becomes their defining identity.
And yet at the same time, the teenager has grown up enough so that he or she is no longer satisfied identifying oneself simply as the son or daughter of so-and-so. They want to have their own identity. And this is where the peer pressure comes into play.
The social circle in which the teenager lives determines whether, say, the teenager will seek validation through good studies or constructive extracurricular activities or co-curricular activities or through damaging, even destructive indulgences, if they get into a social circle where validation depends on drinking, smoking and indulgence in such activities. In today’s rapidly changing world, where people’s self-esteem and self-worth are determined frequently by figures such as the number of Facebook friends they have or the number of Instagram likes that a photo that they post of themselves gets, where social life is determined largely by social media, there the area, the arena from which the person can seek validation changes drastically. That’s for example, on some social media forum, if somebody can do some good work, say somebody becomes a Wikipedia editor, somebody becomes an answerer of questions on Quora, somebody becomes a reviewer of writings on Scribofil, sometimes some people may do some constructive things and by getting the rankings, so for example, on online discussion forums such as the Apple discussions or Windows discussions, there is a whole hierarchy.
So, people who answer a lot of questions get a lot of answers, get a lot of points for that and that becomes a significant part of their identity and their self-worth. I am a disrank answerer of questions on this site. So, here again, the human need for validation is channeled constructively by encouraging people to do something good, to share one’s knowledge and to help benefit others by one’s knowledge.
But, in times when one does not have any such knowledge to share, especially when in teenage years one has not learned so much that one can share, at that time the same need for validation can become extended in a destructive channel through games such as this Blue Hill Challenge. So, vulnerable kids who want some sense of thrill on one side, the thrill of doing something difficult which often animates, which often makes people say play video games for hours and hours trying to get to a particular score, that need for validation becomes even more intense and sometimes even more isolating because today people are increasingly alone. Hundreds of thousands of people maybe together crowded in the metropolitan cities, but they are together alone because often each one of them is busy clicking away on their devices, connecting with some other people somewhere else.
But, how deep or how meaningful those connections are is open to question. Social media sometimes ends up making people quite asocial, where human beings have two needs, the need for connection and the need for space. The need for connection means we want to feel connected with others, we want to interact with others, but we also have a need for space where we feel, I just want to be alone and I want to do what I want to do and nobody should interfere with me, just leave me alone, sometimes we tell people.
So, social media often offers us the illusion that we can have both, we can have space as well as connection because when we are clicking away on our devices, people are not actually seeing what we are doing, so we are alone, so we feel we are having our space, nobody is intruding into what we are doing, but we also feel that we are connected, we are talking with someone, we are writing to them, they are writing back to us, so we feel we are getting both space and connection. Actually, the reality is that we get neither because we feel we are getting connection but often the connections are quite superficial and we feel we are getting space but actually whatever we do on social media is traceable, is recorded with Google keeping track of our searches, there is practically no privacy, there is only the illusion of privacy. So, amidst such an isolating culture, people want to connect with someone and get validated by someone and teenagers who are desperately in search for identity that makes them feel good about themselves, they sometimes feel that if I can do something difficult, then that implies that I am something worthwhile and traditionally, there have been channels where people often take up dangerous things to try to get the sense of validation.
So, for example, there are dangerous sports in the Greco-Roman empire, there were matador sports where young men would try to fight with wild bulls and they could risk being gouged, getting wounded or even dying but if they could fell the bull, they would be considered heroic. So, that is again because of the human need for validation, see I can do something so difficult which no one can do, at least there people are developing some skills of agility, of speed, of fighting, of using weapons, of dodging enemies and those can be helpful for warriors. But nowadays, the same spirit is seen in living on the edge sports where people sometimes jump down from helicopters, they don’t immediately open their parachutes, people walk on high mountain trails to try to get to the highest peaks of the mountains, people try such things where their life is endangered and not just possibly endangered, sometimes probably injured and they do it because they feel validated by it.
So, amidst such a culture where people seek validation in various ways and social media offers insecure people validation in certain ways, then it is very easy for vulnerable teenagers to get their sense of self-worth by doing something damaging because it is difficult, because it appears to be something which not everybody can do, because it appears to be something which is practically not easy to do, even if it involves them hurting themselves, they get a sense of thrill from it and that sense of thrill makes them do the thing which they would otherwise never have done and thus they end up trapped, they end up feeling bad in order to feel good, they hurt themselves in order to feel good. And in this way, they become deluded. So, we need a healthy channel for self-affirmation, for self-validation.
Spiritual wisdom rooted in the Bhagavad Gita gives us this inner security and self-worth by helping us understand that we are at our core spiritual beings, that no matter what happens, we are never abandoned by our Lord. But if we can somehow move forwards and recognize that life is meant for inner growth, that every one of us can, if we have a circle of spiritually minded people around us, wherein we get validation by deepening our spiritual foundation, by strengthening our inner connection, by finding satisfaction through the growth of our devotion, by understanding more and more that we are souls who are parts of a whole, who always loves us, who always cares for us and who never abandons us, then it becomes much, much easier to resist destructive temptations as and when they arise. Destructive directions for self-validation can be challenged and rejected if we learn to get spiritual affirmation for our need for self-validation.
So, the Bhakti wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita reveals an all-attractive, all-loving, all-merciful, all-powerful, all-wise vision of God who cares for us deeply and especially if all of us and especially our children, if they can through the practices of Bhakti at their level, through devotional music, through devotional art, through devotional dramas, through devotional picnics, through devotional songs, if they can relish the sweetness of Bhakti and they can experience, understand and experience this to be a glimpse of the sweetness of Krishna’s love for them, then they will be able to resist whatever negative channels for validation that the world might present them later. In the Bhakti literatures, God Krishna is revealed to be a bluish black cowherd boy. So, he is the whole and we are his parts.
So, we could say Bhakti wisdom offers us a blue hole challenge, not a blue hill challenge. So, the whole whose parts we are, he inspires us, he challenges us, he invites us to bring out our best to break free from the inner negativities that choke our potential to discover and develop our talents in a mode of devotion and then to express them in a mode of service and contribution by which we can bring out our best and not only do justice to our God-given talents but also make a positive contribution, make our best contribution by which we can get our need for validation channeled constructively and fulfilled deeply both through our internal connection with our source and through the external contribution that we make in a mode of service. So, the Bhagavad Gita in 15th chapter, 7th verse states that that we are all parts of God and unless we learn to live in harmony with him, then we end up actually succumbing to anything and everything that our mind and senses may prop up before us and thereby we struggle and suffer.
So, the blue whale challenge is an extreme example of a utterly destructive and defeating direction in which our mind may drag us in our pursuit of self-worth and self-validation. But though many of us, most of us will not succumb for such a patently self-destructive challenge like this, but in our own smaller ways, as long as we are seeking validation in anything apart from God, then we are actually taking up some kind of a blue whale challenge. We are when we seek validation by becoming workaholics, when we seek money like opium which intoxicates us with a sense of achievement, then again we are seeking external validation.
Of course, in a way that is not so shockingly self-destructive, that is much more accepted and even respected in society, but it still keeps us alienated from the whole where alone we can find enduring fulfillment. Instead, if we turn towards the whole and by understanding our spiritual identity and by practicing bhakti diligently, learn to connect with Him, then we can through the internal connection and the outer contribution find meaningful and enduring fulfillment. Thus, by accepting the blue whole challenge to live in harmony with the whole, the bluish black lord whose parts we are, we can protect ourselves and protect others in our society from succumbing to self-defeating challenges such as the blue whale challenge in its various less or more severe versions.
Thank you.