The Hidden Cost Of Every Scroll
Questioner: Acharya Ji, in the age of cutting-edge technology, with the seamless penetration of the internet, started with so many platforms, particularly social media platforms, somewhere down the line dropping the attention span as well as distorting an age-old habit of reading. So, being a scholar who has to dole himself to books most of the time, I see around me people who have the advantage, unlike a large scale of the audience who could not even go to the bookshop and buy a book.
How can we rebuild that culture of reading again? And one more question, adding to that, how have you been impacted by reading, and in making you whatever you are today, what has been the role of reading? Thank you.
Acharya Prashant: When you're talking of shortening attention spans, do you know what that actually means? That means whatever is coming in front of the eyes of the mind is not something the self is actually looking for. Therefore, you quickly scroll away. What is needed is the dignity to honor your own dissatisfaction. If it is something that you want to so quickly get away from, why return to it again and again?
How do these platforms, for example, count a view for them? “View” is some kind of technical term, right? How is a view counted? If you have spent one second there, that's counted as a view. And do you know that if a short video has a million views, “views” as a technical term, 90% of them would be views amounting to not more than two or four seconds? Fundamentally, that means that most of the people who viewed that clip were dissatisfied with the clip.
You need to have some respect for your own dissatisfaction.
Instead, your dissatisfaction counts as a view. They could have said it would be counted as a view only when the fellow stays on it for at least 15 or 30 seconds. But then you would have most of these videos having 5, 10, 50 views, that's all. A million-view reel would find itself reduced to 500 views. Do you get this?
So, reducing attention spans is not something to implicate the youth with, “Oh, you don't have attention spans.” They don't have attention spans because they are alive, because they don't want to eat garbage. Therefore, they quickly scroll away.
The problem is not that the attention spans are small. The problem, actually, is that the attention spans are still not zero. Zero attention towards garbage would mean zero tolerance towards crap. And that is what is needed, and that's the real meaning of self-esteem. “This is crap. I won't return to it. I won't let hope fool me.”
Just yesterday night, I spent two hours dead-scrolling, and being sharp of intellect, I know those two lost hours will never return. I know I made a fool of myself, but I love and respect myself enough not to return to that platform now. That's what is needed. Or rather, would you want attention spans to rise when the object being attended to is itself unworthy? Please tell me. 99.99% of the objects around are unworthy. Do you want attention spans to rise? Do you want youth to, in fact, dedicate more time to rubbish?
It's good that these things don't get your attention. It's auspicious. What's needed is that you reduce your attention to zero, and that requires self-love. That requires you to honor your life and say, “I won't waste myself here. This is rubbish.” And then there is an open space with the possibility of something higher.
Now you can go to something else. And that something else could be a book as well. Could be a book as well. I respect books a lot. I have a huge personal library of my own. But I also know that even the thing called “book” is just an expression of technology. It is a particular kind of technology. A book, in itself, is not knowledge. What we call the print medium is just one particular way of delivering knowledge. There could be several other ways.
Questioner: How, as a society, can we reclaim that art of reading, not for the sake of scoring marks in the examination or passing examinations, but for the sake of pleasure? Because history tells us that all those people who have been great leaders, irrespective of any field, were avid readers. For example, Swami Vivekananda, whom I have been a great follower of since childhood, or, for that matter, Bhagat Singh, they both were avid, rapid, and voracious readers. In fact, the making of the life of Bhagat Singh was entirely based on the kind of reading he did by himself.
And for any nation-building, or man-building itself, or man-making, rather, there is a need for intellectual capacity, which we are depriving ourselves of with these kinds of flimsy, or rather, I would say, shallow distractions. At the same time, recently I saw a comment made by the Education Secretary of England, which is equivalent to the Education Minister, her name is Bridget Phillipson. She said that not reading is not only a matter of intellectual depravity, but it’s a matter of threat to national security. For some people, it could be an exaggeration, but I personally feel that there is much more to it.
Acharya Prashant: You see, first thing, Swami Vivekananda or Bhagat Singh, or the other luminaries of the past, they didn’t have to face this situation, this ecology, this choice. They never had Instagram.
Questioner: That’s true.
Acharya Prashant: And when you talk of the greats of the past, those ways were not even available to them. Otherwise, it is possible, why discount that possibility, that you might have found that they were using some ways in addition to the book route, if not as a substitute, then as a complement. Let’s say, if audiobooks were available to Swami Vivekananda, why imagine he would discard them totally? Why imagine that he would only prefer to read, as if the optical route has something special?
It’s about what reaches here, right? Whether through the optical route or the oral route, the route doesn’t matter. The print technology is, in itself, nothing sacred. There could be other technologies as well. Are we getting it?
You are already dissatisfied. Now honor yourself. Declare your dissatisfaction. What would you call someone who returns to the same place where he is daily abused? Does this person have any self-respect? Your phone, that screen, is often the place you are daily abused, daily abused as a viewer, as a consumer. And yet you keep returning to it. That’s the problem.
That attention span must now reduce to absolutely zero. And with that zero on one side, there would be the possibility of something great on the other side. These two will complement each other. With your energies divested from nonsense, now you can give yourself, invest yourself, in something worthwhile. Otherwise, you’re just scattered.
I experienced that in a cinema hall, the fellow was watching the movie, and alongside… you can’t even entertain yourself pointedly. And obviously, that is happening in the classroom, if mobile phones are allowed. That’s happening when you are writing your projects. That’s happening at the gym. Is that happening even while swimming? Well, we have water-resistant watches, right? So, you can, like, scroll while swimming. Why scatter yourself and drown in nonsense? Intolerance is needed. What is seen is seen, don’t unsee it. What is realized is realized, don’t unrealize it. Once is enough, because you have one life.
Questioner: During the course of your talk, you said that just because Bhagat Singh and Swami Vivekananda didn’t have the opportunity to go through, let’s say, Facebook or Instagram, for that matter, that’s why they chose books. But what about the thing that they went through? They were having a lot of atrocities being inflicted upon, and they were living in a kind of impression that was in them. But despite that, they chose to reflect…
Acharya Prashant: That environment, for example, much the same for all 35 crore people in India in Vivekananda’s time. It’s not something special or unique that they witnessed or experienced. It’s a choice to respond honestly to it.
Questioner: Can we imagine today’s youth to be in the same shoes?
Acharya Prashant: It’s a choice. It does not depend on your imagination. You can imagine all night, and yet nothing would come out of it. It’s a choice you have to make. Bhagat Singh made a choice. The rest of India didn’t. An Indian hanged him. An Indian cut his body to pieces. And Indians stuffed those pieces in some gunny sack, and an Indian carried those pieces to the riverside and burned them there in secrecy.
Bhagat Singh chose something, the rest of the country didn’t choose that. Similarly, today again, there are great catastrophes unfolding, greater catastrophes than were there in Bhagat Singh’s time. Then, maybe the question was of a nation’s liberation. Today, the matter is of a planet’s salvation.
Then, the enemy was visible right in front of the eyes. The enemy had some honesty. The enemy would say, “Yes, I am here to rule you. I am the oppressor.” Today, the enemy is sitting right inside you. Today, the threat is arguably greater than what those greats faced. But just as only a few people chose to respond to those threats at that time, similarly today, in spite of the presence of these colossal threats, very few people are choosing to be responsible, loving, and therefore responsive. Nobody is responding.
Questioner: Like, IIT Roorkee had a long history of building the infrastructure of India. So, one piece of advice you would like to give to us, to the students of IIT, is how we should build our internal infrastructure, so that we would be able to handle this pressure of the modern era?
Acharya Prashant: It’s almost like a 90° turn. It requires infinite acceleration, and that puts a lot of pressure on the system, doesn’t it? Infinite acceleration, this way, and then something orthogonal comes up. So there is some momentum within you.
Okay, fine. Repeat.
Questioner: So, I wanted to ask you that, please give us one advice so that we could build our internal infrastructure in such a way that we would be able to handle the pressure of this modern world.
Acharya Prashant: No, you don’t need internal infrastructure. You need to demolish the internal infrastructure. The internal place must be clean and empty of all the infrastructure that the colonial masters have built here. And by colonial masters, I do not mean the Brits. A colonizer is someone who enters a place just to exploit it. You don’t even know who has entered this place and is exploiting you. And to exploit you, he has built a lot of structures here, social structures, structures of thought, structures of ideology, corporate structures, they are all sitting within you. The structures of organized religion, all of these things, political structures, they are all sitting here (pointing to oneself).
You don’t need more structures. You need a bulldozer to flatten these structures. You need to reclaim your inner cleanliness. That inner empty space must be yours, clean like the sky.
I know this is not the answer you wanted. But then, this is also not the question I wanted.
What were we talking, what were we engaged in; and then 90°? And you gave up needlessly. And I’m continuously saying: reclaim your space, declare your rights.
Listener: Sir, he’s much junior to me. I was being magnanimous.
Acharya Prashant: Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.
Listener: I was being generous to him.
Acharya Prashant: This is not generosity. This is an abdication of responsibility. It is your responsibility to carry it to the end when so many of them have stakes in this discussion. That’s fine.
