by Nasir Hamid Khan
Digital addiction threatens knowledge, family, and mental health. Free will, education, and mindful technology use can counter its dangers. Solutions include reducing screen time, fostering critical thinking, and ensuring childhood remains protected from digital overconsumption.
Our earlier conversations, besides being a learning experience for us, have been well-received in society. We have successfully triggered public debates on various platforms. I was following some of these debates and couldn’t help but sense an element of fatalism— the belief that nothing can be done to reduce the harm, that it is something pre-determined and beyond our control. But as our learned Senior Advocate friend Zaffar Shah so eloquently put it, it is a man-made problem and nothing divine, meaning it can be managed and controlled.
As opposed to fatalism, I continue to be guided by my faith and am a passionate believer in the doctrine of free will—the belief that we possess the capacity to make choices and decisions, and the ability to stand up and look challenges in the eye. All actions committed by man’s free will are to be counted on the Day of Judgement because they are our own and not God’s, and we shall be judged as per our knowledge.
All religions place stress on acquiring knowledge and demand accountability. Iqra—the first word revealed to my beloved Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)—means “to read,” and we have been repeatedly commanded to seek knowledge, to share knowledge, and to use that knowledge for the larger good of humanity. In Hinduism, seeking knowledge is the core principle of Dharma, which is essential for attaining Moksha. In Sikhism, the concept is known as Gian and is fundamental for attaining Mukti through selfless service called Seva.
Today, our mind, which is the only mechanism for seeking, sharing, and using knowledge, is endangered by technology, which has found ways of controlling it from the inside. In the millions of years of the evolution of the human brain, this is an unprecedented challenge. Family and community, two key components of human evolution and supremacy on the planet, are being systematically obliterated by hired geeks of exploitative tech companies who invest and trade in human vulnerabilities.
If we take a closer look at the process of learning, growth, progress, and transformation, we understand that learning is a lifelong process, growth comes from pain, and progress happens when we ask ourselves: “Is this the best we can do?” and transformation happens only when we dare to question the why of what we do and how we do it instead of defending it.
From our previous sessions on this subject, we have come to understand that the use of digital technology is a risky affair. Our children are crumbling under a mountain of mental and physical problems due to the overconsumption of digital stimuli. They feel awkward in social situations and no longer enjoy sports and physical activities. Creativity, meaning, and purpose are visibly missing. They suffer from anxiety and confusion, and there are indications of possible structural alterations not only to their brains but also to their moral beliefs and value systems. We are looking at a sad, angry, and isolated generation. Na shoakhe kamaal raha no khoafay zavaal.
While studying Australia’s proposed social media ban, I came across a response from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that caught my attention. When asked about the reasons for the legislation, he simply replied, “We want our kids to have a childhood.” Though I am not a supporter of banning social media—because I believe, to their young minds, curious and naughty creatures that children are, a ban would only heighten its allure—the agony and distress of Australians is palpable. It reflects the helplessness being felt by us, the senior generation—called Digital Immigrants—at watching our loved ones being wasted by digital stimuli. Childhood is what the young generation is being deprived of today.
We all have our opinions about the purpose of education. If I had to sum it up in one line, I would say it is to develop the best possible version of an individual to reach his full potential. Our objective, then, should be to prepare them to face the challenges of life, in whatever form they may come, not only with fearless confidence but with dazzling brilliance. Ladies and gentlemen, life is beautiful, but at the same time, it can be extremely brutal, and any life worth living is usually a constant problem-solving and decision-making struggle. Exceptional powers of critical thinking and reasoning skills are required to overcome this challenge. We need to provide an enabling environment for firing their imagination. We need to accept the fact that young people, as well as us, will be spending the rest of our lives entangled in a complex digital world. The task of education, therefore, should primarily be to act as a productive space in which students can critically reflect upon and form judgments about that world.
My favourite psychiatrist and Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University, Dr Anna Lembke, who has done commendable work in this field, in her best-selling book Dopamine Nation, says that “it is a worry that we have both over-sanitized and over-pathologized childhood, raising our children in the equivalent of a padded cell, with no way to injure themselves but also no means to ready themselves for the world.” She questions whether, by protecting our children from adversity, we have made them afraid of it. By bolstering their self-esteem with false praise and a lack of real-world consequences, have we made them less tolerant, more entitled, and ignorant of their character defects? Over the past three decades, she says that she has seen growing numbers of patients who appear to have every advantage in life—supportive families, quality education, financial stability, good health—yet they develop debilitating anxiety, depression, and physical pain. Not only are they not functioning to their potential; they are barely able to get out of bed in the morning.
Talking about the importance of resting our mental networks and the subsequent boredom, she says that getting bored forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose, and it is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we are endlessly reacting to stimuli around us rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.
As we continue our search for answers and solutions, there has to be awareness about the costs and consequences. As discussed earlier, dopamine is a vital brain neurotransmitter that helps control movement, mood, and feelings of pleasure. In an experiment, it was found that genetically engineered mice unable to make dopamine would not seek out food and would starve to death even when food was placed inches from their mouths. Yet, if food was put directly into their mouths, they would chew and eat the food and seem to enjoy it. Like the mice, dopamine deficiency caused by digital overconsumption blocks the desire of young minds to engage in meaningful activities.
Our second concern is the mind-altering impact of digital technology. Dr Anna states that in California, a six-year-old boy watching cartoons on his iPad stumbled upon Japanese cartoon pornography. Curious to try out the behaviour he had seen which, to his mind, seemed normal, he sodomised his four-year-old brother. The internet suggests behaviours that may otherwise never occur to us. When we see others behaving in a certain way online, those behaviours seem normal.
I think these two examples pretty much sum up the scary costs and consequences of digital addiction, and I leave you with these thoughts to ponder over. Like Confucius, I believe that words possess the power to inspire actions capable of changing the world.
Five-Question Test to Assess Digital Overuse:
Are you sleeping well?
Are you eating well?
Are you leaving your house to be social?
Is your work going well?
Are you physically active?
If your answer to all is yes, then you will be fine. If not, it may be time to reassess your screen time habits by going into the settings of your smartphone.
I will give two tips today. Experts suggest shifting your social apps to your laptop, which greatly reduces the urge to repeatedly check your smartphone. It has been observed that once we take the bait of an alert or notification and go online, it takes little effort for the algorithms to pull us into a trance where we lose all track of time.
The second tip is to switch off all screens two hours before bedtime. Exposure to blue light and digital stimuli is akin to driving a truck through your mental networks, and it takes hours of input-free time to allow nerves to settle. The importance of a healthy, restful sleep cannot be emphasised enough and is a vital foundation for your focus, concentration, and overall functioning the next day.
“It is He who made for you the night to rest therein.”
(The author is the secretary of Amar Singh Club. The ideas are personal.)
