Cautiously optimistic at heart and curiosity-driven, my thoughts and actions have always been driven by my innate desire to understand how we, as a society and individuals, do our best to keep the whole world’s work up and running.
Advancement in technology, I believe, has led to a deterioration in our mental and physical wellbeing, as individuals, and paradoxically in an improvement in our society’s, as a whole, wellbeing. As a society, advancement has led to significant improvement in general aspects such as development of rural areas, more access to clean water and electricity, infrastructure, vaccinations etc. I was especially intrigued by a report on how drones and smartphones were being used to fight malaria in Tanzania. Inspired to understand the back-end system of the drones, I met several individuals, only to discover something more disturbing: the unhappiness within them. I then understood that I have been seeing the world through rose-tinted spectacles, and this led me to discover my purpose: to help myself in order to help others.
Individually, I feel the advancement, especially considering the telecommunication industry (Apple and Samsung are apt examples to display how quickly they themselves are making their own technology redundant), has led to a fast-paced lifestyle for our global society. Markets have unified to create a global market, such that people are having to work from India on different time zones; to keep up to pace.
Mobilization has become much easier, leading to us having to compete on a global scale for jobs. Additional to having specific and unique skill sets, we are having to cut down on our non-working time, such as eating, sleeping, and other essentials to our health. This has led to an increase of sedentary lifestyle diseases such as fibromyalgia and varicose veins. Recently, Jeffry C. Hall and two others, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for isolating a gene responsible for the body’s normal daily biological rhythm.
The study was especially educational to me, as it helped me make sense of the suffering noticeable in the world. People having to work at night and sleep at day, might be working towards a tangible benefit for the society, but are having an equal and opposite (negative) reaction on themselves.
Our circadian rhythms influence our sleep, behaviour, hormone levels, body temperature and metabolism. What good is the work we do, if we ourselves cannot enjoy the benefits of it or that of other’s works. We keep worrying about the future, not realising that the reality of our lives is always now.
At every given moment I believe that I am first responsible for three MEs – my past, present and future me. My past me, hones the decisions my present me takes to ensure that my future me benefits.
However, if we as humans spend most of our time contemplating about the future me, we will not be taking care of ourselves now
and will always be in search of happiness. In the society we live in, I have come to the realisation of how fleeting emotions are. I have noticed how people’s notion of happiness is driven by their materialistic desires. Thankful to my parents, and their insistence on reading as a habit, I was able to hone a thought to understand what happiness is and how I hope I can spread this light. They gave me a book, Waking Up by Sam Harris to read, in which the author very eloquently wrote, “We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain- and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.”
Several philanthropists, and non-profit organisations are working on a good cause towards the sustainability of energy (through solar, wind, hydro etc.) and improvement in the lifestyle of impoverished people; none are focusing on the sustenance of human energy. With the continuing rate at which technology is advancing, and the worries several entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, have voiced on Artificial Intelligence, I believe there is a dearth and necessity to create a platform to nourish and brighten the light within us as humans. After all, are we not the most important super computer that exists?
