How to deal with social media addiction?

So, nowadays everybody gets distracted by social media, AI, and it’s difficult. How do we help them to be focused? Can we make Krishna Consciousness as attractive as, say, social media is addictive? It’s an ongoing challenge for everyone. I think the question many parents ask, or many people ask, you know, why are people so addicted to their phones? The question you should be asking is the other way around.

When the phones are so addictive, why is everyone 24 hours not addicted to their phones? It’s like, when there are so many things going wrong in everyone’s life, it’s not that why are so many people depressed, why is everyone not depressed? That is the question we should be asking. So actually the fact that despite social media being so attractive, despite AI being so captivating, despite the internet being so addictive, still people are looking for human contact, people are looking for some spiritual wisdom. The degree might be more, the intensity might be less, but the fact that we are looking for it means that there is a part of us that knows that there has to be something more meaningful in life.

That part of us may be buried deep, that part of us might be weak right now, and that part of us may not manifest because we have neglected it for a long time, but it is there within all of us. And it is that part of us that needs to be activated. So if we were going to play the game of stimulation, we are never going to say stimulation or pure material attractiveness, we are never going to match the material world.

But the question is, what is really meaningful in life? So we have to focus on how Krishna Consciousness brings meaning into our life. And people may or may not agree that this is the source of ultimate meaning. That’s okay.

But at least the practical level, when we understand that there is a divine reality, we understand that there are practices by which we can connect with the divine reality and experience the higher reality beyond ourselves, that brings a certain level of security in our life, that brings a certain level of direction in our life, that brings a certain level of purpose in our life. So these are the intangible gifts of Krishna Consciousness, which no amount of technology can offer us. So we cannot compete with technology or material progress on the basis of material attraction.

So one of my university talks is titled as Matters that matter more than matter. So start with, are there some things that matter more than matter? So I think the entire Western world is testament to that. As compared to the second world or third world, there’s far more progress here.

Material things are a lot better. And yet there is a lot of depression, stress, anxiety, addiction. So matter is not all that matters.

So what matters more and how can that be addressed? That is the key question which we need to focus on in our presentation of Krishna Consciousness. So Krishna Consciousness is not an alternative at the same level. It is a higher level alternative.

And that’s why we have to shift from the question of pleasure to the question of need. If pleasure is all that we are looking for, there are many people who are wealthy enough or in many countries there is enough welfare support available that people can just watch Netflix for the rest of their lives. But people don’t do that.

Even if people do on Netflix binge, they get sad because we don’t just want pleasure in our life. We want meaning. Now, it’s quite often when people don’t find anything meaningful to do or when they try to do something meaningful, it doesn’t work out.

Then they may gravitate towards pleasure again. But we don’t just live for pleasure. Yes, we want pleasure, but we want meaning first.

And eventually we want meaningful pleasure in our life.