Pointless pleasures strip life of meaning more than do pointless problems Gita 03.16

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you.
Hare Krishna. Life becomes meaningless not when we tire of life’s problems, but when we tire of life’s pleasures. When we face one problem after another after another, we become disheartened.
And we start, what is the point of it all? And quite often problems can make us feel that life is too much of a trouble. But what we often don’t realize is that life becomes more stripped of meaning, not because there are too many problems, not when the problems tire us, but when the pleasures tire us. That means, suppose we seek pleasure and we indulge in it, and then we indulge more in it, and we indulge more in it, and after some time it just becomes pointless.
I suppose somebody longs and craves to surf on the internet, maybe binge movie watching or binge net surfing, social media, whatever, and they watch one movie, another movie, another movie, another movie, and like that they keep watching and watching and watching, and after some time they get more and more bored, more and more bored, and they do not know what to do, then they start seeing maybe more obscene things, more violent things, somehow to get some stimulation. And over a period of time, they start finding life is meaningless. Their life is already meaningless because they are engaged in mindless entertainment, but eventually even that mindless entertainment stops being stimulating or even distracting.
That applies not just for something as trivial as entertainment, but even when people have cherished ideas of what gives them pleasure. Some people reject all sexual morality and have indiscriminate relationships, and after some time it just becomes one body rubbing against another body, and the sensual pleasure also becomes meaningless, and then people become tired. Quite often, although sensuality is glamorized so much, many surveys have shown that while indulging in sensuality, people are often bored.
So in that very pleasure becomes meaningless, and if life is directed toward that pleasure, then life itself becomes meaningless. So we can never be free from problems in life because that’s just the nature of life. Life is tough, but what we can do is, each one of us can find a meaning and pursue meaning in our lives, and then when we start pursuing meaning, then even if problems come, we can deal with those problems.
If pleasure alone is the purpose of our life, and the pleasure becomes meaningless, then life itself becomes meaningless. But when we are pursuing some purpose higher than pleasure, then pleasure comes as a byproduct when it will come, and when problems come, it is the sense of meaning that we are gaining through the pursuit of that purpose that makes the problems manageable, and that’s what Krishna encourages Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna has the problem of facing the enemies in Kurukshetra, but the Bhagavad Gita offers us a vision that we are souls on a journey of spiritual evolution, and in this journey, each one of us can grow spiritually.
We need to contribute to the whole to which we belong. If we live selfishly, then our life goes in vain. Krishna cautions about this in 3.16 If we don’t live for some cause higher than ourselves, then we make our life miserable.
Then our life becomes stripped of meaning, and that stripping is most bankrupting. So seek not a problem-free life, seek not a pleasureful life, seek a purposeful life, and life will be enriched with meaning. Thank you.