At 1 a.m., you tell yourself you’ll watch just one more reel. An hour later, you’re still there, and you didn’t choose a single video in that hour. The app did. Somewhere between the fortieth and the four hundredth swipe, the feeling of picking what to watch quietly turned into something else: a feed picking you. This isn’t a small glitch in modern life. It’s the closest thing we have today to fate, and we built it ourselves.
The ancient Indians did have a word for the invisible force guiding decisions: Karma, the law that binds action to consequence despite our preferences. While today that force is governed by code, rather than cosmic principles, the nerve it operates on is identical. Instagram and YouTube know how long you hesitate, how long your thumb lingers, and shrink the world down until the “for you” page feels like the judgment of an algorithm regarding who exactly you are.
Psychology calls this feeling of ease “the illusion of control”; a concept coined back in 1975 by Ellen Langer to describe our natural inclination to think we have more control over the situation than we do. In 2018, in research regarding social media feeds, it was discovered that simply including the “control” option on a feed gave users the feeling of greater satisfaction, regardless of whether that option had any influence or not. Awareness studies show that the more control people feel over an algorithm, the more willing they are to continue feeding their attention into it.
The Bhagavad Gita saw a version of this problem long before anyone coded a feed. Arjuna finds himself in a similar situation at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita. He stands on the battle field, unable to act because everything he does seems meaningless before the overwhelming forces. The advice Krishna gives in the book’s most quoted line is “Karmanyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācana; Mā karmaphalaheturbhūrmā te saṅgo’stvakarmaṇi” which means “You have the right to perform your duty but never to the fruits of action.” Let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction. Nishkama karma is being active, engaged and disciplined while remaining detached from the outcome. It is not the same as giving up agency: rather, it resembles the flow described by modern psychologists: fully concentrating on the task and ignoring the outcomes.
It thus seems rather odd that the new generation is turning back to this ancient wisdom. Gen Z had visited Rishikesh more than any other generation last year. According to an OMTV poll, 80 percent of young Indians below the age of 30 years have been consuming spirituality-related material via the internet. There is an increase in download rate of kundli apps such as AstroSage and AstroTalk by a generation of WiFi.
But almost none of this is real engagement. Few take out the Gita and seek the wisdom of their elders behind a particular verse. Instead, what they get is a sixty-second reel, a golden-hour aarti set to a trending audio track, and a caption that takes the rich history of philosophy and turns it into a piece of content meant only to generate clout.
The apps that provide this shortcut in the form of a quick and easy spiritual practice are themselves among the biggest sources of this exhaustion. For example, Bhagva, a devotional-tech company that raised a million dollars last year through funding, uses artificial intelligence to compile personalized puja kits based on one’s astrology. Sri Mandir offers a range of features in one single feed-shaped interface like darshan, horoscopes and puja booking service. Thus, we have created an algorithm to be detached from algorithms and called it faith.
It is not nishkama karma. It is the exact opposite of that, covered up in saffron clothes. Real detachment has never been about delegating the task of finding peace to another interface; it always meant that one had to be mentally trained enough to recognize when the process of decision making was subtly hijacked by another force, a process which our philosophy perfected with unmatched accuracy unlike self-help culture. The remedy for this generation is not in any app. It is in getting back to its roots rather than its conclusions.
Utkarsh Rai is a student at National University of Study and Research in Law, Ranchi. Views are personal.
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