Valentine’s Day – Commercial exploitation of urban isolation sets up the heart for disappointment

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
Today, people, the world over, especially in the western world and the westernized world, celebrate Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day has rapidly come to represent the day of romance where young boys and girls try to advance their relationship with each other through expressions of affection. Now, whether there was a Saint Valentine and whether he was actually concerned with the amorous, with the romantic relationship between some couple, this is all lost in the obscurity of history.
But somehow through multiple happenstances, this particular day has come to be associated with the expression of romantic affection. So, before I talk about this from a spiritual perspective, I would like to talk about this from a socio-historical perspective in terms of the increasing isolation and commercialization that is present in society. So, our society is becoming more and more isolated.
The social media has started connecting people, but the depth of that connection is often questionable. And whereas people in the past would live together, not just in families, whether it was in India or elsewhere, people would live together as part of large families. And this would give them a sense of community.
And this would also take the pressure off the male-female relationship substantially. The husband-wife, the male-female relationship, it becomes the practically the only relationship when there is a nuclear family. And the pressure on that relationship, the demand from that relationship often causes that relationship to break down.
So, naturally, the result of moving from a socio-cultural environment where people were a part of a large community, which was largely comprised of family members, relatives, and acquaintances who one had known for a long time, as society became more and more urbanized, as people in 1700-1800, less than 10-15% of the people were living in cities. Even in America, by the 20th century, almost one third of the population was living in cities. And living in cities, now I am not criticizing urbanization at this point.
I am simply observing some historical facts which explain the reason why people feel need for festivals such as the Valentines. So, now, when people started moving away from their joint families and communities, then it became a family of two and then three or four depending on the children. So, the pressure on the male-female, the husband-wife relationship became too much.
And because that would be the primary relationship meant to sustain a person from loneliness in unfamiliar and often competitive, even hostile urban environment. So, the expectations of that relationship started shooting up much more. And, of course, the decision about whom one marries is probably among the most weighty decisions that a person takes.
But in the past, the weight of giving emotional fulfillment to a person was not sustained only by one particular relationship. It was distributed over multiple relationships. But when that was lost, then the hype over this relationship also increased.
Then the pressure on this relationship increased a lot. And parallel with that, the hype on the relationship also increased. And the hype came from the increasing popularity or marketing of romantic literature as the most prominent form of cultural entertainment, whether it be through novels or plays or movies or television.
Certainly throughout history, the male-female dynamics have been at the vortex of much of people’s thoughts and cultural depictions. But the extent to which this was done and the glamorization that was brought into the picture with this made this whole relationship much more hyped and therefore much more complicated. Now, the commercialization of entertainment was just one wave in the tsunami that was actually the commercialization of practically everything in society.
And essentially, commercialization strives on emotions. If we look prior to Sigmund Freud’s advent in 1920s, the advertisements, whatever were there, centered on persuading people to purchase a product by talking about its utility. Oh, purchase this car.
This has this virtue. But Sigmund Freud, who many people consider to be the father of psychotherapy, he proposed that human beings are not governed by their rationality. They are governed primarily by their emotionality.
And their rationality is something akin to a tiny boat atop a stormy river, stormy ocean, with the ocean being their emotionality. So, people can be persuaded much more by activating their emotions than by then persuading their reason. So, his insights and especially insights of some of his followers were tapped by practically all fields.
In politics, the speech writer soon became displaced by the spin doctor, the media manager. Whereas in the past, the politicians would give systematic statements of what they intended to do through their speeches. As the media started focusing more on emotion than on reason, so, short soundbites and appearances became most important.
And now if you look at politics or if you look at some commercial products, there is some role of necessity in it and there is some role of glamor associated, of glamorization of it done, by which now every state needs a government. Whom people will choose as a leader will depend on whom they elect and that will depend on whom they feel attracted to. So, rather than focusing on reason, when emotion was triggered through the media, the result was that the whole culture became more and more emotion-centric.
And one of the aspects that was commercialized was celebrations, festivals, whether it be the Christmas season, which becomes primarily a purchasing season. So, if you see in Christmas, Jesus has been largely displaced by Santa Claus in the public imagination. And that means big business.
So, similarly, a lot of celebrations came up, which basically centered on triggering people’s emotions and using those to sell products. So, the Valentine’s Day celebration is often something that falls in that category. That the sheer cultural hype that is associated with this celebration results in a pressure where young people and sometimes not so young people also, and sometimes some tweens also.
So, young people, those who are in the age where they are looking for spouses and people who are beyond that and people who are below that also, what is called as tweens. Those who are in between childhood and teenage, they are called tweens. They all often get carried away by the hype associated with this.
And it becomes as just to stay cool, one has to have a valentine and give a Valentine’s Day rose, give a Valentine’s Day card and try to be a part of the crowd. Otherwise, one is considered to be oddball. So, now there are two separate aspects to this.
One is the increasing isolation in society, which has made the male-female relationship. So, they carry the central burden of the human need for relationships in the urbanized society. And there is the hyper-commercialization which taps people’s, which taps and we could say even traps people by pulling their, by pressing their emotional buttons.
Now, because of this, often what happens with Valentine’s Day is people take this particular celebration and hype it to a disproportionate degree with with sky-high expectations, which often end in frustrations. So, certainly at the root of it all is the human longing for love. And that longing deserves to be fulfilled.
But whether that longing can be fulfilled or whether any tangible progress towards its fulfillment can be made by hyped-up festivals, which often don’t do much to substantially advance relationships, which often are driven more by outer commercial pressures than by inner emotional expressions, that is questionable. We ultimately have many relationships. So, our relationships can be classified into the vertical and the horizontal.
We have a vertical relationship with God who manifests in His most loving and lovable form as Krishna and we have horizontal relationships with others in the world. And we need to have a balance in these relationships. The ideal human culture is where the vertical relationship strengthens the horizontal relationship and the horizontal relationship strengthens the vertical relationship.
Our relationship with God gives us inner satisfaction, gives us spiritual strength by which we can be more patient, more tolerant, more considerate, more loving in our horizontal relationships. And we have horizontal relationship with people who are also in their lives giving due importance to their vertical relationship. And that way the two relationships can be symbiotic.
Now, when there is excessive hype on horizontal relationship and even on horizontal relationship to one particular relationship within the horizontal relationship, then it creates expectations which often are bound to end in frustration. Ultimately, we have relationships in this world and those relationships are important while we are in the world. But we are all ultimately solo pilgrims.
We come alone in this world and we go out of this world alone. Although no matter how much the movies may glamorize happily ever after, the sad fact of this world is that there is on one side the media hype of happily ever after and often especially the Christian marriages when they take the vow, the vow is till death do us apart. So till death do us apart acknowledges grudgingly the reality, whether grudgingly or not, the reality that there is no lasting solace.
What is called happily ever after, the Bhagavad Gita gives us a dose of reality when it states in 8.14, 8.15 that this world is dukkha leh mashashvatam. So dukkha leh mashashvatam is the exact opposite of happily ever after. And this does not mean that our need for love, our longing for love has to be frustrated.
But it has to be directed properly. So when we redirect our longing for love from the horizontal dimension to the vertical dimension towards God, Krishna, we are eternal and our relationship, and Krishna is eternal and our relationship with him can also be eternal. And when we learn to make that relationship, the center of our emotional life, the primary relationship of our life, then all our other relationships will be best harmonized so that we get lasting emotional fulfillment during our life journey and beyond our life journey.
So the longing for love that has, that underlies the huge popularization of the Valentine’s Day celebration, that longing for love is not to be denied. And sometimes there are people who are moral police, who act like moral police and try to break up Valentine’s Day celebration saying that this is not a part of our culture. But this does not, this does not at all give a proper reflection of what the Indian traditional culture is all about.
It is not about repressing love, but it is about redirecting love so that that redirection leads to lasting satisfaction and does not set one up for frustration. So Krishna is the ultimate Valentine for the hearts of all of us. And learning to love him is what will make a Valentine’s Day celebration as a progression towards lasting satisfaction.
Thank you. Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna.