I asked a 35-year-old Kadampa the other day how many meditating Millennial friends he has, and how many he thinks might become meditation teachers to take over and keep things going into the future. The answer is some, but not as many as he’d like. Why? “We were the first generation on Smartphones (invented 2007) and it has rotted our brains.” He spent the years between 8 and 13 addicted to video games to the tune of 10 hours a day, and the next 7 years addicted to other things. Then, to his immense relief, he found Dharma; and it has saved his life.
I’m no stranger to the internet, obviously, who is these days. But he was explaining that the online world is not just somewhere you visit (as I generally feel that I do), but part of that generation’s mandala, part of their interior landscape. It is hard to break out of it; it is the air they breathe. There is that insistent voice in their heads that never really goes away: “Check the phone.”
When I was in my twenties at Madhyamaka Centre, we had one (yes, one) landline phone for 40 people – Smartphones were not even a twinkle in IBM’s eye. If Geshe-la needed to talk to someone back then, he would have to take his chances along with everyone else! People would be pleasantly surprised when they picked up the phone. And I don’t feel that old – man, life goes fast.
I was talking to another old fogey the other day about the huge rise in reported anxiety of people in their twenties. Being in one’s twenties doesn’t seem to be as much fun as it used to – but isn’t our twenties the time we’re supposed to be having fun, while we’re still gorgeous, optimistic, and energetic?! Back in the day, he was saying, people that young with anxiety and mental illness were the exception, not the rule. Perhaps I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses, and I know there were still plenty of problems; but I remember it that way too.
Look,
I know I’m generalizing, but you have to admit that something is up, even over and above the relentlessly disturbing daily headlines.
Also, let alone the need to address the anxiety, addiction, and social isolation of everyone under 40, what has to happen for the average Millennial and Gen Z’er to find the wherewithal to put enough hours into meditation? Not to mention the profound and vast Kadam Dharma of modern Buddhism that leads to lasting freedom and enlightenment? I have to admit, this is a question that plays on my mind.
The infinite scroll
This would also appear to be nothing compared to beleagured Gen Z and, fast on their heels, Gen A (quick question, why did we start this naming system at X?!) During a long trafficky drive recently from Manhattan to the Hamptons up the Long Island Expressway, I had a conversation with the mother of a 16-year-old. This girl has often complained, “I wish I hadn’t been born into a world dominated by phones!” but still finds it impossible to put the phone down – her social life would apparently evaporate overnight.
I learned a couple of very sinister things about Snapchat in particular, which I’ll now express dismay over, like the old timer that I am. Snapchat involves a system of social pressure that is hard to escape from without feeling like you are rejecting or being rejected by your peers. First off, the geo-tagging, where you always know where your friends are and vice versa. To turn it off is to snub people, something reserved for break ups. Being unreachable is suspicious or rude, as opposed to just normal. This makes privacy feel like secrecy rather than a basic need.
The other is “streaks”, when you have to send each other pictures at least once every 24 hours, forever, and the more pictures the better, turning friendships into obligations. I asked J how many streaks her daughter has to sustain to stay current with her friend group, and she replied, “around 40”. It’s a full-time job to stay in the game and socially relevant. It is not even done to send one picture to all 40 of them – that is also a snub.
Welcome to the infinite scroll with immediate feedback – every Snap or social media Like gives us a fleeting moment of pleasure that quickly fades, leading to withdrawal and the seeking of another hit. This is the suffering of change sped up.
The suffering of change
We’re in an attention economy where companies’ bottom line depends upon the volume of engagement, meaning they’ve deliberately designed the apps to be frictionless – any pauses are not long enough for us to switch our attention, get up, and do something else. The FOMO keeps us hooked too – if I stop now, can I afford to miss that hilarious cat video on the next screen?! Even if part of us wants to stop, we can’t get up from that sofa. Immersed in social media or binge watching or video games, two, three, four hours can go by in a blur. We can stay up way too late into the night, thus impacting our next day as well – which can be a real problem as a meditator because we need those early mornings for meditation before work. Meanwhile, what have we accomplished or even really enjoyed in that time?
Like slot machines in windowless exit-less casinos where people lose track of time, users everywhere you look are being kept hooked. (I write about that here: Can attachment ever work?) All of a sudden we notice we’ve been scrolling for ages and we’re like, hang on, what have I been doing?! Where am I?! What time is it?!
I don’t know how companies are allowed in particular to do this to young brains, wiring them into addiction, but they seem to be getting away with it. Companies are clearly creating compulsions, rewarding frequent engagement with social validation and punishing unavailability with FOMO. However, it’s not that hard to tap into our attachments – we are, as Buddha said, beings of the desire realm who rarely forget our objects of desire. But you can never switch off in this world. You can never enjoy the privacy of your own thoughts, at least for very long, because the programs demand attention and obeisance. And with every moment documented, shared, and responded to, mental space and solitude become unnatural and hard to come by.
The loneliness epidemic
We call it “social” media, but we are mainly talking to our screens, aren’t we? It’s arguably asocial. And we can keep going indefinitely because there are no interruptions. There is no eye contact. Don’t you find it insidious that we can all be in the same room, seemingly together; but everyone is going down their own rabbit holes, with few social cues for stopping.
And through all the surface chatter and emojis, how do we create meaningful relationships or even have long actual conversations? Snapchat promises connection but delivers superficial transactions. Friendship becomes a daily task rather than a choice – streaks forcing people to interact out of habit rather than genuine interest. Constantly subject to everyone’s updates, it is easy to feel FOMO or insecurity about one’s place in a group. Beyond school, where you still theoretically have to see people IRL, there is less person to person contact – such that younger people are apparently even dating less (wasting all those hormones!) If you are used to instant responses, face to face conversations can feel slow or even awkward. Constant messaging leaves no room for self-reflection or deep thinking – and without self-knowledge, how can we know others?
Is resistance futile?
Bar throwing the phones away or moving to a desert island with no internet connection, what can be done about this? I think we all know that meditation and mindfulness are a powerful antidote to the compulsive nature of social media but, in this climate, how can people get into meditation in the first place? Some ideas coming up in the next article, but please share your own in the comments to help me out.
Is resistance futile? No, of course not. But I think we have to want to cut this attachment by seeing its faults, which is why I am laboring the point. And I am doing it for myself as much as for you. For although I may not be a full on addict (just an addict relative to, say, 20 years ago), I scroll away far more than I want to. And I always love it when I spend eg, a day or even half a day without being online.
I did a 6-day silent retreat at the KMC NY temple in November. Our tech boundary (a modern boundary on top of the 3 traditional boundaries of body, speech, and mind) was to use the phones only once a day for up to an hour for essential stuff. People found the experience unbelievable. The concentration and the joy! The creativity and interesting thoughts. The depth and connection. No amount of miniseries, streaks, or likes could ever begin to compete. It’s a different world.
There’s no point me smugly thinking, “Ah, well, at least I’m not addicted to Snapchat. It’s not so bad.” Any tech addiction is bad when it comes to our ability to meditate and gain realizations. In Portugal in 2009, Geshe Kelsang pleaded with us to overcome our distractions; they are our worst enemy.
For those of you seeking liberation from samsara’s bad dreams, is your phone helping you to wake up and get out of here? For the budding Bodhisattvas amongst you, does your phone help you with your bodhichitta and six perfections? For the wannabe Tantric practitioners amongst you, does your phone help with divine pride, clear appearance, or meditation on the indestructible drop? If the answer is yes, then please keep going.
Life is short, so what are we going to do in our remaining days? My most recent foster cat is a tiny little thing, just a year old, a teenage mom whose four even tinier kittens have just been adopted. Like any cat, she can expect to live no more than around 20 years. And it suddenly struck me that I too only have the remaining lifespan of, give or take, a cat. That is not very long at all to do all the things I want to do, including attaining enlightenment. If I am not prioritizing my study and meditation practice now, when do I expect to get around to it? As Venerable Geshe-la says in Request to the Lord of all Lineages:
Yet my breath is like mist about to vanish
And my life is like a candle flame about to die in the wind.
Since there is no guarantee I will not die today,
Now is the only time to take the real meaning of human life, the attainment of enlightenment.
Some solutions in this next article: Buddhist tips for the digital age. And would love to hear yours.
15 Comments
The phone itself is neutral and very practical in a conventional sense. We all know the personal benefits of cellular technology. A trained mind transcends this mere everyday usefulness and sees a teaching device for non-attachment, loving kindness and helping others.
Unfortunately, I am totally attached and can’t have a calm mind if I realize I left my cell phone at the office and don’t want to go back to get it. As I meditate, on generosity, discipline, patience, concentration effort and wisdom I soon find myself fumbling for the office key in the dark as I am addicted to the distraction of my most prized abilities – unlimited celular data with no reduction in speed!
Cell Phone- in one sense a wishful filling jewel and i another a samsaric
Magnet of sorts.
Remember words of Buddha – Always do good, cease doing harm – turn off your cell phone periodically to test your mindfulness and non- attachment. 😬❤️🙏
🙏 Thank you for sharing – May we all figure out some healthier ways to relate to our devices, so that we can really develop our spiritual life.
I would love to hear some of your ideas if you felt like sharing them here.
To me dealing with my own distractions to digital devices, like this one I am on right now 😉 a big change happened moving from viewing it as a punitive or stigmatizing view (‘Oh I am so bad with all my distractions’). What worked was thinking “I want to curate my mind, like a beautiful garden or world-class museum. What are the beautiful things I can put into my mind?”
And that helps give a sense of standards, like a world-class museum would have for entry. That then lead to a question: “what really makes me feel alive? What brings me deep joy? What makes me get up in the morning with a true sense of thrill? What really PAYS OFF when I put time into it?”
Evaluating most digital distractions, it was clear that these things really don’t pay-off well. But somethings do.. like what many of us love putting into our mind is dharma, or thinking about others good qualities, or thinking about how kind so many people are in the world, or emptiness, or Venerable Geshe-la, and so on.
“I don’t know how companies are allowed in particular to do this to young brains, wiring them into addiction, but they seem to be getting away with it. Companies are clearly creating compulsions, rewarding frequent engagement with social validation and punishing unavailability with FOMO.”
I don’t understand at all why we do this to children. I found it hearbreaking to step into the world as a young person, full of trust and optimism, and to be met with a never ending stream of sexualized and self-obsessed expectations. You really do get punished– sometimes literally– if you try to opt out or even have a conversation about it. Only the purest dharma practitioners seem to even be willing to have the conversation.
I honestly think we just need to trust the dharma medicine and trust that people need it. If we authentically deliver what Geshela teaches us and don’t lose our lineage to the world of technology and compulsiveness, people will see the difference and be drawn to it.
It was very lucky to stumble on this nice sharp detour away from scrolling about current events!! Thank you & well timed! A very wise teacher recently told me I should look away if I can’t control my mind with renunciation, compassion and wisdom. These are really good guideposts for me. Generally I can’t! Or I can catch myself straying from those minds before it’s ‘too late’. A good way to check in before going down that ol rabbit hole.
Recently this feeling of gratitude washed over me reflecting on the absence of all of this in my childhood and young adulthood. I really do mourn for the younger generations missing out on life without smartphones. We are wiring a different species. Onward Modern Buddhism (prayer hands!)
Good article and comments. It’s interesting to think about how this is a manifestation of addiction – and yes it’s frightening that our karma has manifested out of emptiness as evil-tech companies forced by our karma to act as our dealer getting us hooked and leaving us in the gutter. My question is – why do we greenlight other addictions like coffee? Now, I’m probably just out of date with current advice (please update me!), but many years ago Geshe-la directly gave my teacher a flat-out instruction – meditators should not drink coffee – and so my teacher never did. But nowadays we seem to have just given in to that, (perhaps it’s just too much to face?) we have World Peace Cafes serving up Latte’s all day long, getting us wired as we scroll through our phones (or manage real conversations!). But still, there’s part of me that wonders whether we need to really fight harder to create a safe-space against the direction of travel of the collective karma ripening right now. I know from another teacher that it’s also really important to give students what they want, to fulfil their wishes, and not our own personal wishes as teachers, and again this was direct advice from Geshe-la, so I do understand why the Cafe’s exist, serving up lovingly made Latte’s pervaded by bodhichitta, but I also know myself. Given an inch, I’ll take a mile. Coffee becomes the drug that accompanies the endless scrolling, the wired focus keeping me on my phone. Sometimes I wonder if we need to up our own wisdom and realise that Geshe-la is a doctor – different advice for different people at different times. I’m not going to judge anyone who drinks coffee or uses their phone too much, but other than that one teacher who shared the no coffee advice with me (and who did not judge me as I continued to drink coffee), no other Kadampa has ever shared any thought about caffeine with me. Some teachers have actually made me a coffee, and it’s been what I needed in that moment, and it was full of love, and I’m grateful. I think I need both the non-judgment but also a reminder from time to time, so thanks for this article, which kind of reminded me about my complex entanglement with coffee and phones and non-meditation. Time to dust off that precious advice and try and take the medicine that the Guru was offering. I haven’t experienced a single moment of non-caffeinated drug fuelled consciousness since about 1995… I’ve avoided being able to meditate for 30 years as a result. Those winds will not be settling at the heart with caffeine running the show. I guess Geshe-la meant what he said…( go figure) … time to take that precious advice and see what Geshe-la was talking about. Wish me luck. Catch you on the flip side.
Well put, fellow fogey. Seeing the word “sofa” following soon on after “FOMO” in your piece, I was struck that our new version of “couch potato’ is simply SOFA….Stay Online Forever, Amigas.
My heart goes out to the generations now coming ONLINE in this world for whom a phone-in-hand is the absolute norm. A vital piece of the mind (and peace of mind, as you note) is being put to sleep…we might as well say it, put to sleep forever. And there is no time for blame (as deeply as I do wish to start firing the blamethrower); we have to acknowledge this disaster and use it as fuel to do what we, as Buddhist practitioners, were born to do: help others. We don’t get to dictate (except at retreats!) the ingredients of samsara.
On this particular topic I am trying hard to not indulge either my sadness nor my madness (ok, my anger). There just isn’t time. A couple of cat lives at best, as you point out.
I am struck, for the ump-trillionth time, with the wisdom and guidance of the question:”What would Geshela do?” We have our role model. There he is. We know the minds he would employ to address this tragedy. For one thing, he probably wouldn’t call it a tragedy…he would say “Very ordinary.” As we hear so often, and never often enough, samsara will never work.
On with the prayers!
Thank you LK! I have been thinking about this a lot lately too… As a rebellious Gen Xer. It’s kind of like being in the middle of life before the Internet and having been trained to learn new technology as soon as it came out. I remember being so reluctant even to create an email account! Now we can’t live without it, let alone our phones, without which we can’t do a lot of necessary things. Soooooo, as we are faced with this new technology that has never before been experienced, I definitely feel a sense of urgency to use every moment wisely. Whether on my phone or not, I am choosing where to put my attention (like my clicks) and every moment counts just like an algorithm measuring how long I engage with content. To inspire me, I am keeping in mind some lines from the Liberating Prayer by Geshela. Praising Buddha it says, “Through your compassionate intention and my strong wish to rely upon you, may all suffering quickly cease and all happiness and joy be fulfilled.” Sounds to me like all I need to do is have a wish… a mental action… a wish path <3 And keep all my thoughts and intentions aligned with this wish 🙂 Cuz who knows when our last moment or click on this life will be!
Thank you for this Luna! I so appreciate this article. I’m around your age and consider myself to be “less addicted”, but I still need to hear this. It’s a powerful reminder to spend as little time as possible on the internet in general, and social media in particular, and to use what time we do spend on there to generate virtuous minds. Also a reminder to pray for our world, for people in general, and especially for the younger generations coming into this, that their minds be protected from the dangers of social media.
It has been said that AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) was the major miracle of the 20th century. There was no hope for chronic alcoholics and those who treated them in psychiatric hospitals would pass their pessimistic prognosis or prediction on to the family: “suicide, incarceration, insanity, death from accidents or death from alcohol-related illnesses. Then AA manifested and there was hope; alcoholics began to recover all over the world, not from medical or professional intervention but from other recovering alcoholics who encouraged service to other addicts and a spiritual healing, reliance on a ‘higher power’ and prayer and meditation. I believe the miracle of the 21st century will be an organisation called ITAA (Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous). Our society is very sick with this bizarre cyber-addiction which has become the fabric of people’s lives. I was in Malaysia recently and saw people driving motorcycles in a major city with one hand holding and using a smart phone! If anyone is dealing with a friend or family member who appears seriously addicted to Internet and Technology encourage them to contact ITAA https://internetaddictsanonymous.org/online-meetings/ The bizarre thing is that most of their meetings are online. They encourage and support people in developing a healthy non-addictive relationship with technology because we need it to function in our lives. They also follow the same 12 steps that AA used to recover from Alcoholism.
So kind of mara to give us these toys
Thanks you for this post. This is something that has been on my mind for a while as well. It is quite concerning when I see my 14yr old son being on his phone for hours. Or at the dinner table where most of the others are on their phones while also trying to maintain a conversation. I have given up pointing this out as I clearly was then seen as the alien spoilsport. Personally, I have mostly stopped using FB or other “social” media and left Twitter (I used to follow the news cycle for hours a day). What is left is mainly Whatsup groups which is demanding in itself. No idea where this is all going but I have also seen positive signs with my son. He really appreciates longer conversations and last year we went away just the two of us on a trip off grid which he really enjoyed.
Recently I spoke to someone who is active in PR and management training and he sees some positive signs. There might be a new generation who rejects all of this and who will go back to the roots. Not sure whether I share his optimism but it would be nice to see.
Thank you that was wonderful.. I don’t know how you do it but you write about the things that I’m thinking about at the time !..I’m presently doing my prep for a teaching on anxiety at a GP class for Samudra. My teacher is Gen Sangye.
We spoke once at your weekend teaching on emptiness at Manjushri and I asked if you could see my friend Claire.
I have to say it was the best teaching I’ve ever had on Emptiness and it has stayed with me since.
Can I ask when you do a teaching how do you prepare for it?. With love and sincere thanks Dawn xx
2,600 years ago, Buddha Shakamuni said (Dhammapada) that the mind tosses back and forth “like a fish taken out of its home in the water and placed on dry land.” And he added, “It is good to restrain one’s mind, which is uncontrollable, quick-moving and, as it is, follows its own desires.”
These were times without cell phones or social networks, or the Internet, or color television or black and white television, or radio, or cinema, or newspapers, or books, or airplanes, or cars… but the description of the mind is current.
I am 70 years old and I can describe the crazy leaps of my youthful mind that obviously did not follow current technology. Now we are sharing these reflections thanks to technology and I continue to make efforts to bring my fish to calm water. What were the main external distractions 2,600 years ago?