You’re Not Addicted to Your Phone - It’s Something Deeper
Questioner: Good evening sir. My name is Pragnya, third year B. Tech Civil Engineering. So, my question is: how to make effective use of time and what should I do to get less distracted? I spend so much time on my mobile phone and I use social media a lot. If I get a notification sound, I'll immediately pick up my phone and I'll check that. I get distracted very easily. So, could you please throw some light on this? How can I be less distracted?
Acharya Prashant: Mute the notifications. See what's wrong with the mobile phone. If you're doing something important on the mobile phone, it's all right to be glued to the phone. What are you doing on the phone? That's the question.
Questioner: Yeah. I listen to the online classes on the mobile phone but at the same time, when I get a notification, I'll open that.
Acharya Prashant: No. What are those notifications about?
Questioner: They may be WhatsApp messages or Instagram.
Acharya Prashant: Right. So what are those WhatsApp messages about?
Questioner: They are from friends.
Acharya Prashant: What are your friends about? If you want to avoid their messages, maybe your friends are avoidable. Then that's the real problem, not the phone. Your phone is only bringing the reality of your company and contacts and life to you. That's what your phone is bringing to you.
If you have not chosen your friends with care, then they will send you all kinds of crap. Right? And then you will say, I want to avoid the phone. Whereas what you need to avoid is your friends. The phone can bring great things to you, can it not?
Questioner: Yes.
Acharya Prashant: So, there is nothing wrong with technology.
Questioner: So It's we who use it wrongly.
Acharya Prashant: We use it wrongly because we are wrong. Because we are wrong so we have chosen our friends wrongly, and then those friends do what they will do. They keep sending you all kinds of good morning, good afternoon messages and some senseless political crap or some lewd joke and all kinds of things are there. So why are you choosing your friends the way you do?
Questioner: In the beginning, they don't interact very much, but as time passes, we become very close — handles and all.
Acharya Prashant: So when they become close, they show their true colors. Right? It's not that your closeness has degraded them. When they come close, they just remove their veils and show what they are really made of.
So it's not the closeness that is the problem. You have a knack for misidentifying the problem. Firstly, you said the phone is the problem. Now you are saying closeness is the problem. How can closeness be a problem? Closeness is a wonderful thing, but it's important to be careful of what you are coming close to. Most people are acceptable and polite from a distance, are they not?
That's some kind of a social obligation. The imperative is on you to identify people even from a distance. You pick up the wrong people. You let them come close to you. Now they are within striking distance. Somebody is carrying a dagger or somebody has huge claws like that of a tiger. If that fellow is at a distance, you are probably safe. Fortunate. You allow that person to come close. Now what will happen? In goes the dagger.
So you have to be a good reader of people, and that you can do only with self-awareness. When you know yourself, then it becomes easy to read the other person as well because you and the other are fundamentally alike in many ways. We fail to read others because first of all we have failed in reading ourselves. That's why a spiritual orientation is extremely important, especially for young people — and even more important for young women — because the way things are, women have much more at stake and much more to lose if they allow the wrong kind of people to become intimate.
So young women, in fact, need doubly to be spiritual compared to a man. Else that fellow enters your life and starts sending you crap and you are bombarded. What do you do now? You can't even mute the notifications. You are attached. If you mute the notifications, he will probably come and knock on the door. How will you mute the door?
Fall in love with the right things in life. Yours is a great age to fall in love with books. Fall in love with adventure. You are on a good campus. Pick up sports and try to excel. Why not learn to dance? Why not learn a musical instrument? Why not travel the country? And if you have resources, why not travel the world? If you have no resources, at least read. Reading can bring the entire world to you. At least 80% of that.
Why be so desperate for human company?
I'm not asking you to be a loner or an avoider of human company. It's just that things must be given their due place — and their due place depends on their quality. If you do not have good quality people around you, there are many other better options. Why not spend your evenings learning to swim or sing? And there could be so many other things. I mean, you would know better.
Is that not infinitely better than having some random rascals around you sending you hackneyed forwards, and you're also supposed to reply with some stupid emoji? And even one wouldn’t do. If you send one, they will think you are angry. So they'll pester you with a thousand other things. So you have to (end up sending a bunch of emojis). One foolish joke comes to you and you have to reply with at least half a dozen emojis. And then that person's soul is satisfied — "I have succeeded in destroying somebody's 10 minutes at least."
And this is when somebody is sending you personal forwards. Then there is at most just one person to destroy you. God save you if you are part of a group — a group containing 142 people and each of them first of all begins the day by saying, "Good Morning ji," and those roses, and so many animals are there. All our love for animals gets expressed on WhatsApp. That owl, that cow, that rabbit, that horse. But it beats me — how can you not mute the notifications?
Questioner: It's like college. Important information about college also they'll forward in WhatsApp, so I can't.
Acharya Prashant: I'm pretty sure your college does not spam. It would be very interesting if it does. Is it the official college group that keeps spamming?
Questioner: No.
Acharya Prashant: They would be sending things once in a while, right? Once a day or once a week. So, it's not the college thing that you're talking of. Let's be honest.
Questioner: Yeah. But I'm saying that if I mute notification, I will not get it.
Acharya Prashant: You can mute persons as well. That much technology even I know — and you are a generation ahead of me and still you are talking this way. What are you doing? You can even send groups to the archive. You won't even see them. What do you think, I have only spiritual knowledge?
The solution lies in being absorbed in something higher. Bring something good and great and beautiful to life, and all these petty distractions will vanish. You'll have no time.
Questioner: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.
Acharya Prashant: Wonderful.
