Acharya Prashant explains that there is no need for any kind of spirituality if all is well and life is smooth and natural. It is suffering that brings a person towards Truth, which is what spirituality is. Suffering forces a person to acknowledge that there is something wrong with the way they think and operate. However, with the ample means for instant gratification available today, that suffering is not allowed to last. These means provide an easy escape from reality. When you exist wrongly, you suffer, but with instant gratification, that suffering is anesthetized, and you are given an easy escape from reality. The suffering is not allowed to last; it is not allowed to come to the surface. Instead, it gets internalized more and more deeply because you are not allowing it to come to the surface. The experience of suffering is covered under a deceptive layer of pleasure. This reduces the incentive to introspect and change the inner fundamentals. The speaker calls this situation neurosis and states this is why we are seeing a deluge of mental health cases. Mankind was never as terribly diseased mentally as it is today. This is precisely because of the availability of easy means of gratification. Life shows you the mirror, exposing how rotten you are, and you immediately switch on the TV or rush to a shopping mall. We have never needed as much entertainment as we do today because we have never been as mentally sick as we are today. Nothing succeeds in entertaining you, so you want something else very quickly, which is why content is becoming shorter, from one-minute videos to 15-second reels. This is collective madness, which will lead to an explosion and a series of poor decisions at the aggregate level. An entire country might decide it does not want its rivers, or a committee of nations might decide it values economic progress more than the environment. This is what is seen in the climate change deliberations, which fail because the leaders are propped up by a neurotic voter base. When the entire population has gone insane, you have insane leaders making catastrophic decisions. This is why we see role models and corporate poster boys saying, 'Why care for Earth? We can colonize Mars.' This is collective madness, and we are heading towards a mass catastrophe. The entire planet has to pay for our misdeeds.
