What makes you happy cover art

What makes you happy

What makes you happy

Listen for free

View show details

About this listen

 Auto-generated transcript:My brothers and sisters, there is a general feeling, a false feeling, that there is a false feeling in the world that somehow as long as you are happy, all is right with your world. As long as you are happy. So people say, as long as we are happy. People say about their children, for example, that, you know, what are they doing? How are they? Oh, no, no, no. As long as they are happy, it's fine. You know, whatever they are doing. Now, this is, I say this is a fallacy because if you think about it, there are people in the world who are happy doing things which are in themselves ranging from a waste of time to something which, things which are actually evil. The finest example of that is social media. Today, one of the biggest, if not the biggest calamity, the biggest pandemic, the biggest epidemic that is completely, you know, destroying generations, not even one generation. is social media addiction, screen addiction. Imagine we are living in a world where we have managed to turn it upside down. For example, things that we should keep private, things that we kept private, we meaning as human beings, we kept private for centuries, for millennia, generation after generation. Things which we guarded jealously, things which we did not reveal to anyone, many times even to people we should have revealed them to. We didn't share them with anyone except with our very closest, nearest and dearest. People we completely trusted. All that information today, we voluntarily, without being forced to, and without seeking or getting a single cent in compensation, we put it out there for the entire world and his wife to see. On Instagram, on Facebook, on Snapchat and God knows what. Our most private information, starting from something as mundane and apparently, harmless as what you eat, pictures of your food, pictures of your plates, to things which are potentially dangerous, which we should never ever reveal. Everything is out there. And we know very well that those who we are giving this to voluntarily, whether it's these companies who, run these social media, who own the social media, or whether it is people who use information they get from social media, to do other things with it. We know that many of these things, many of these kinds of people, take our information and use it for their purposes. The most benign result of that is that they make humongous amounts of money, while we get nothing. They make a lot of money, while we get nothing. They make humongous amounts of money using our material, our life stories, and we get nothing in return. That's the most benign form of it. Two, some very malevolent and evil things that happen with information that is freely given on the internet. Now, we are happy doing it. And the people who are using this information for their own nefarious, reasons are happy using it. Right? This is the most benign thing and the most common thing. And we get our children addicted to it from, literally from the time they open their eyes. And we have all kinds of excuses, and all kinds of reasons why we do it. Oh, it keeps the child occupied. Otherwise, the child is a nuisance. Otherwise, the child makes a lot of noise. If I didn't do this, what would I do? A simple question is, what did your mother do? What did your grandmother do? Before the social media, they came into the picture. Right? Children were still there. Right? They were still having babies. How did they keep them occupied? Think about this. You know, I remember, and I don't have to go back always into my childhood. I'm saying it right now. If you go into the villages, for example, in India, you will see this anywhere. You have a little kid. All he has is a shoebox, or the equivalent of a shoebox. Something like a shoebox. And he has, he has, he has, he has, he has, he has, some bottle caps, small or big bottle caps. And he has a string. Now this child, first of all, he accesses all of these materials. And then he creates a wheeled vehicle. So he makes axles, he fixes those bottle caps as wheels to that box that he has, the shoe box or its equivalent. He ties the string and then he puts something in it and he drags it around and he calls it his car, he calls it his bus, he calls it his train, he calls it whatever he wants to call it. And in the whole process he is learning to be dexterous, he is learning to use his intelligence, his reasoning powers, he is learning to create something. That thing which he creates is successful part of the time, sometimes it fails. And each time it is successful or fails, he is learning some other lesson. And he is having a hell of a lot of fun. He is having great fun doing all this. And most of the time he is doing this outside. He is getting some sunlight, he is getting some vitamin D, he is breathing fresh air hopefully depending on which place he is living in. All of this is happening. Even in America, I remember seeing exactly this happening in an Amish village in ...
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.