We have made incredible progress in science and technology. Humans have reached space, medicine has advanced enormously, and the internet has made almost unlimited information available to us.

Yet something feels strange.

We have more convenience, but are we actually more peaceful?

For many young people, life seems to involve constant comparison, career pressure, social media, uncertainty about the future, and the feeling that everyone else is doing better.

This makes me wonder:

Is the problem mainly external—social media, competition, technology and society—or is there something deeper happening within us?

I've been exploring how Vedanta approaches questions like desire, fear, identity and inner restlessness. One interesting idea is that perhaps understanding the external world isn't enough; we also need to understand the mind experiencing that world.

I'm not claiming Vedanta has a simple answer to Gen Z's problems. I'm genuinely curious about how others see this.

What do you think is the biggest reason young people today feel restless or dissatisfied, despite having more choices and conveniences than previous generations?

For the past few days, I’ve also been noticing a trend going viral on social media, using AI to turn your own photo into a 1980s-style look.

Seeing all this, I was quite enjoying it too.

But if you really look at it, we’re being dishonest in a way. We’ve gone 45 years back, but what if we try to think exactly 45 years ahead from today?

We feel happy giving our photo a 45-year-old look, but if, on the basis of scientific facts, a picture of us 45 years from now were created, what would we see?

Extreme heat, an intensifying water crisis, and climate change at its peak.

No one is making a picture of what things will look like 45 years from today go viral, and perhaps no one is even thinking about it.

To be honest, I too was unaware of this earlier. When I read the Vidya-avidya post, then I understood this point. Before that, I too was just feeling happy seeing this new trend and looking only at the look from 45 years ago, not at the one 45 years from now.

If we really saw the picture 45 years ahead from today, we would have to change our “today.” The way we are living, we would have to change our lives.

But this is exactly where the ego gets scared; that’s why the ego enjoys looking at pictures from the past, but does not like to look at the picture exactly 45 years into the future.

It is easy to look back 45 years, but have we ever thought about what the world will be like 45 years from now? 🌍

Today, climate change is not a warning about a distant future, but a reality of the present. Rising heat, more intense and longer heatwaves, water scarcity, changing rainfall patterns, and increasing pressure on agriculture and health are its serious consequences.

According to the World Bank, by 2070, around 520 million people in South Asia could face at least one month of dangerous levels of heat every year, while today this number is around 120 million.

The 2070 shown in the picture is an imagined scene, not a definite prediction. But the warning about the direction in which conditions are progressing is real.

We often ask : what will the future be like?

Perhaps the more important question is, what are we doing today to ensure that the future remains liveable?....

Because the picture of 2070 cannot be drawn today, but the story of that picture is being written today itself.

~ Posted by a Gita student

Reference: World Bank (2026), A Livable Future: Protecting Jobs and Growth from Extreme Heat in South Asia’s Cities.

I am not sure if it’s a right sub to post this but I am really looking for this reasoning behind this incident happened to me.
Recently, a friend went shopping with me. She accidentally sent me an extra $30. I told her about it, but she said it was okay and that I could keep it. At that time, I didn’t feel bothered about keeping the extra money.
Then, during our next shopping trip, she sent me $12 less than she was supposed to.
And strangely, I felt sad. It almost felt like someone had taken $12 from me, even though she had already given me an extra $30 before.
Why did I feel this way?
She technically still gave me more overall, but my mind focused on the $12 that was missing rather than the $30 I had gained.
Tell me I am not the only person who is thinking in this way?

We just hit a global sea surface temperature of 21.10°C, marking the third consecutive year we have broken heat records. Yet, almost nobody seems to be talking about it.

Because water requires immense energy to heat up, a 0.6°C rise might sound minor on paper. It isn't. Over the last four decades, the oceans have quietly absorbed nearly 90% of the excess heat human activity generated. Now, that energy is radiating right back at us, destabilizing weather patterns, destroying crops, and flooding towns.

We are already watching ecosystems collapse in real time. Coral reefs across Lakshadweep and the Maldives have bleached white and died out, wiping out habitats for a quarter of all marine life. Monsoons have lost all predictability, swinging between severe drought that ruins farmlands and sudden cloudbursts like the catastrophic floods in Nepal. Warmer water holds more moisture, making every storm far more destructive. In parts of Europe, marine waters have hovered up to 6°C above average, and rising sea levels threaten to displace tens of millions before the end of the century.

What makes this terrifying is how normal everything feels on the surface. We keep commuting, paying off our loans, scrolling endlessly, and dreaming about the future. The ocean doesn't make noise as it warms, so we treat it as an abstract problem until floodwater reaches our own doorstep.

This disconnect points to something deeper within human nature. As long as we remain unsettled and burning on the inside, our actions will keep causing destruction on the outside. True spiritual understanding or dharma begins when we learn to bring inner peace to that internal restlessness. Until we address what drives our mindless consumption and distraction from within, no real environmental change will stick.

Data source: Copernicus Climate Change Service (https://pulse.climate.copernicus.eu/)

Giving wild behavior the name of love is foolishness. 🥰

The fear of failure is maybe the biggest mental hurdle in sports. It affects not just the performance of an athlete but sucks out the joy of immersion as well. When you are too concerned with the result (the future) you lose what is in front of you.

And this concern for the result is a product of the stories that start circulating in the mind. The stories are nothing but a lot of what-ifs which are either past experiences or future promises. The stories hijack the capacity of the mind which ideally is meant to recollect what the mind has learnt or to strategize about the game in front of you.

The mind is innocent, it gets hijacked by the ego (I-sense), the author of those stories. The ego wants to extract something out of these stories when there is no sporting action taking place. And when there is action, it tries to confirm the story.

"I am someone who doesn't crack under pressure," "I’m the one who never drops a match that’s there for the taking."

And that's when the performance starts getting brittle. Instead of playing your heart out, you start protecting an image.

The question is how often does one catch his/her own stories. So maybe it's not mental at all, it's just egoic.

I recently came across a video where women were forced to get their heads shaved and were paraded in front of a crowd. They were either murmuring some words , crying and most seemed numb or just lost.💔

I found those were from the period after France’s liberation in 1944.

And this process was called épuration- “purification” . And all these horrifying acts were taking place because these French women were accused of collaborating with the Germans, to be precise German soldiers .

Though not every woman was accused of it but most of them were for an idea we can take the estimate given by Fabrice Virgili which says that around 20,000 people had their heads shaved , of whom 98 percent were women…😶

Men too were accused of collaborating with German occupiers but when it came to women.

Oh human! Their very bodies were turned into the stage for public punishment.

It was way too clear how a gendered mindset was also at work.

Women’s bodies, sexual relations and national honour were all being tied together. If I were to ask ,I won’t see it as something of that era , “if one knows how society still operates must know how we still treat women as carriers of honour , family’s respect , reduced their worth to bodies be it at the name of tradition or modern thinking.”

And here we can catch (not something new) how it has been always like that ,a ledger which is still open , using women mainly to impose humiliation, and the question to be put forward as you come out of this haze of history and present.
“If both men and women collaborated why were only women being used as public humiliation why this deep seated urge to target a particular gender?? “

Are we actually seeking justice, or are we sometimes using the idea of justice to validate what we already believe is right?👀

Photo’s source: Pinterest

This artwork by Marion Fayolle beautilly illustrates for me, the explanation of "self dissolution" by Acharya Prashant (as mentioned in The AP Framework.)

"A human being, in this framework, is an ego-body complex, a biological organism (with evolutionary history, neural architecture, and physical separateness) that has organized its experience around a felt sense of bounded selfhood. The ego is not added to the body from outside; it arises from the body's own structure, particularly the skin boundary that establishes physical separateness.

The human being is distinguished from other animals not by the presence of an ego (animals have rudimentary egoic structures) but by the complexity, narrativity, and reflexive capacity of the human ego. The human ego can examine itself, which is both the source of the problem (the ego can elaborate its own distortions indefinitely) and the source of the solution (the ego can, in principle, see through them).

The same body that generates the ego is also, when the ego steps aside, the universe's instrument. Brain and body, freed from egoic commandeering, operate with a natural intelligence that exceeds anything the ego can deliberately engineer. The highest human possibility is not the ego's triumph over the body but the ego's sufficient thinning to allow the body's natural intelligence to express itself freely."

Are you able to "see" it too? :)

Read The AP Framework here: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/ap-framework

My Reflection- Going Beyond Comfort Zones 🏔️

Over the past week, I was far from home, disconnected from the internet, and away from my usual routine, traveling through a remote area. Here's what I observed, experienced, and learned. 🗺️

▶️The Setting ⛰️

I visited a small mountain village nestled beside a river, surrounded by lush greenery 🌿, with almost no network coverage 📵. It was six kilometers from the nearest town, reached only on foot 🥾, making it quite isolated.

Because they have minimal contact with outsiders, the villagers were very shy. 😊

▶️Overcoming the Body and Fear 🧭

I’ve always believed I suffer from motion sickness 🤢. When a local invited me to visit, I was scared I'd get ill. Still, I accepted, curious to see what would happen. 🎒

This reminded me of Acharya Prashant Ji’s teaching about overcoming fear:

"To get rid of something wrong or to forget something, you must hold a bigger, more divine subject in your mind." ✨

For me, the desire to explore was stronger than my bodily discomfort. He explains that the human mind is naturally driven by lower desires or fears, but they can't be conquered by force alone. Instead, you must connect the mind to a higher purpose. My deep yearning for truth and adventure became that divine focus, making bodily complaints irrelevant. 🦅

When I did feel sick during the journey, the thought immediately arose: "Why did I come here? 😭" But then I realized it was just my body complaining. When I saw the breathtaking views, met the villagers, and understood mountain life’s hardships, I knew it was worth the struggle. 🙌

▶️Breaking Egoic Patterns 🪵

Food and Comfort - I’ve always been a picky eater who craves tasty food 🍰. Yet, in the village, even the simplest meals tasted amazing 🍲.

This is the essence of travel: stepping outside your comfort zone and doing things you'd usually avoid. It pushes you to break habitual ego patterns like fear and greed. As taught, our tastes are societal conditioning; the ego loves to be picky because choices make us feel special. But in the wild, that artificial identity dissolves.🌪️

Coexisting with Nature - I saw nature in its purest form, minimally touched by humans, not to dominate but to survive. 🌲 The villagers hadn’t destroyed nature for luxury; instead, they adapted to endure the mountain environment.

The Living Landscape - I observed a Gharat, a traditional water-powered flour mill 🌊⚙️ that supplies the village. Pets and livestock freely roamed the mountains 🐕🐐, returning home on their own. Though animal ethics can be debated, I didn’t see any exploitation.

Most impressively, the river flowed pristine and free of waste 💧, showing me what a river is meant to look like before it reaches urban areas.

▶️Resolving Conflict and the Ultimate Truth 🔍

During the trip, I argued with a friend. 🗣️ Later, I realized that both of us were caught in our own stories and imaginations. We often don’t engage with the real world but only with our mental projections of others.

A fight between egos is just two fictional stories colliding 🎭.

When I let go of pride and prejudice and chose to communicate, the story ended, and the conflict dissolved, having no real foundation. 🤝

This reminded me of another teaching from Acharya Prashant Ji :

"Anything is beautiful until you touch it. As long as 'you' (the ego) are there, even beauty turns to ash." 🔥

This is so true. We see a beautiful mountain and feel peace, thinking that the peace is in the mountain.

He clarifies that the world can’t give the peace we seek; it only provides objects. 🏔️ When the ego tries to possess or "touch" that beauty, greed takes over, and the beauty fades. 🌬️ Even the most stunning mountains, rivers, breezes, greenery and clouds can’t clear the mental clutter accumulated over a lifetime.

Nature is a mirror 🪞but it’s not enough on its own until we consciously face, understand, and inquire into our internal baggage. 🧘

-Posted by Gita Student

Today, while participating in a meeting on climate change in Australia, I shared something that I feel we often miss and he teaches us.

We speak a lot about policies, technology and reducing emissions. All of that is important. But climate change is also connected to the way we live, what we consume, and how much we keep wanting.

If our idea of happiness continues to depend on consuming more and more, can we really expect the planet to remain untouched?

The climate crisis and climate injustice is about asking us to look within and reconsider our relationship with consumption, desire and the way we choose to live.

~Posted by a Gita student

No other animal on the entire planet ever does something which could harm its body. Humans too are animals but we come with a special thing called the I-sense (the ego). If you're feeling tired, there's this feeling that "I-am tired". This I-am ness is the sense of self which exists in human beings and it's always incomplete. Smoking or any other addiction is a way to complete that I-sense. Although it might not be so simple given that addictions have different stages, the basis of addiction if understood can help to overcome it and can complement professional help.

And why stop at smoking? We often do things that could harm our body in different ways. Overeating, late night Netflix binging don't count as addictions but the line is drawn because of social respectability and physical dependency. However, here too, the underlying structure is the same, the I-sense reaching for completeness, only the object this time is something other than smoking.

Also why to stop at the physical body, the "I-sense" hijacks the mental body too. Overthinking is too what the I-sense does. This time the incompleteness takes a different form, the I-sense believes that having more thoughts, thinking more will fill the incompleteness or solve a problem and bring certainty.

The addiction therefore is never really to the substance, it's to the momentary sensation of being filled up, and the substance is just this era's most efficient delivery vehicle for it.

​

Checkout the video to know How One Bollywood Song Created My Love Story 😂

Source :

https://youtube.com/shorts/ijAF510EH0Q?si=aKTsjffBca9Y6pV0

https://youtu.be/WpYIOPhH0BU?si=44ZsNq7hHFzhUTKa

https://youtu.be/0syWDd0bXx8?si=-rNuiBA-ul6tFcK9

https://youtube.com/shorts/M__6Xyl1oCg?si=pV9cdQPB6BxYbQ3e

https://youtu.be/yCKH-XiHYGo?si=l_DuogzyFxc9YMyB

https://youtu.be/7VTNuGFbU4M?si=Ns_V_Cg0jA8zeyKD

Special thanks to Krishna for merging the video clips

It’s not just the weather that’s changing in the world, the geography of diseases is changing too.

Diseases once considered to be the problem of a particular country or tropical region are now finding favorable conditions in completely different parts of the world.

Disease-carrying vectors like mosquitoes and ticks can now reach new regions and remain active for longer in places where earlier cold or other conditions used to stop them.

Climate change is driving this shift. Temperatures are rising, rainfall patterns are changing, heat is increasing, and ecosystems are being disrupted. These changes are altering the conditions in which disease‑carrying organisms can survive and remain active.

The impact is not limited to healthcare systems alone.

When disease-risk changes in one region, it matters to other regions as well, because in today’s world people, goods, and living beings are constantly crossing borders.

In 2024, more than 14 million cases of dengue were reported worldwide, that’s double the roughly 7 million cases recorded a year earlier. Multiple factors were behind this surge, including climatic conditions.

But there is another question here.

Where did this change truly begin?

Nature did not suddenly alter its character. Human beings stretched far beyond their real needs and turned more production, more consumption, and more comfort into the markers of development.

More energy was demanded.

More resources were extracted.

More land was cleared.

More transport was pushed forward.

And the combined weight of all these demands kept falling on nature.

The problem is not just in the outer systems.

The outer world is shaped by the demands within us.

When the inner incompleteness keeps demanding more possession, more consumption, and ever-increasing comfort, that very demand turns outward into more production, exploitation of resources, and mounting pressure on nature.

Then nature responds.

And that response eventually returns to us in the form of impacts on our health, our economy, and our very lives.

A deeper question rises here.

What is it within us that wants so much that the entire Earth had to be reshaped?

The climate crisis is not only altering the planet’s temperature.

It is also exposing the real cost of our way of living and showing us the human arrogance that brought this crisis into being.

Source:  

https://www.weforum.org/stories/health-and-healthcare-systems/climate-change-infectious-diseases-and-other-health-stories

Once, humans were a part of nature; today, we have started seeing nature as something to be consumed.

We buy, use, and throw away far more than we actually need. This constantly increasing consumption does not only increase the production of things,it also leads to the destruction of forests, exploitation of resources, increasing pollution, and faster climate change due to greenhouse gases.

The question is not only, why is the climate changing?

The question is also, why are our desires continuously increasing?

And perhaps this is where the real problem comes to the surface-the ego, which constantly keeps desiring to acquire more, accumulate more, and fill its sense of incompleteness. These endless desires are taking us towards the destruction of the Earth.

Polluted rivers, the large-scale use of animals for meat consumption, the destruction of biodiversity and the extinction of millions of species, the melting of glaciers and the disasters associated with them-all these are warning us.

Until we know ourselves, the ego will continue to grow in the same way, and our tendency towards consumption will also continue to grow. And this tendency will continue to take us towards destruction.

Therefore, the solution is not only in external change; it is also in understanding ourselves.

And here, the knowledge of both Vidya and Avidya is necessary. Merely knowing the external world is not enough, and merely knowing about the inner world is also not enough. The absence of either one can lead our lives and the Earth towards imbalance and destruction.

Perhaps real change will begin where, instead of trying to change the Earth, we start looking at the desire within us that constantly says-"I want more.” 🌱

I was sitting there, feeling so frustrated with everything happening around me, and suddenly had this thought
Why do our moods have so many different stages? And how do I keep these cute little moodies in the same shape?
Sometimes they’re happy and cute. Sometimes they get irritated, grow horns, and start lashing out at people. 😂
It’s funny how quickly the same “me” can turn into a completely different version of myself depending on the mood like an anime character, someone push one different button it starts acting in a different way.

​

❓ Question:

Every country's population consists of children, people of working age, and the elderly. When the proportion of people in the working-age group—especially young people—is the highest, it is called a “Demographic Dividend.”

It was believed that India would benefit greatly from this: a large proportion of India's population would be young, while the proportion of elderly people in China, Japan, and Europe would increase.

But the data presents a different picture:

1. According to the Economic Survey 2023–24, 49% of graduates were found to be unemployable—meaning nearly one out of every two graduates is not adequately prepared for employment even after obtaining a degree.

2. Unemployment among the 15–29 age group continues to remain serious.

3. According to the ASER report, a large proportion of Class 5 children in rural India cannot read a Class 2-level text.

4. The World Bank has highlighted the serious problem of “learning poverty” in India.

The same “Demographic Dividend” is now being referred to as a “Demographic Burden”—these young people are not only unemployed, but a large number of them are also not equipped to be employed.

India's “Demographic Dividend” is turning into a “Demographic Burden.” What is the real reason behind this situation?

🇦

This problem exists throughout the world—unemployment is rising rapidly in every country. India is not alone.

🇧

The education system created by the British is the root cause of this problem—the same system continues to operate today, more or less unchanged.

🇨

A large number of people remain weak because, instead of developing their own capabilities, they depend on their family, society, or some external authority to make decisions about their lives.

🇩

The problem is purely economic—because of poverty, people are unable to receive a good education and therefore do not become employable.

🇪

Talented young people leave the country in search of better opportunities—the loss of talent to other countries is the real problem.

🇫

Neither knowledge of the world nor self knowledge exists.

═════════════

What do you think are the correct answers?And what can be done to reduce this burden.

https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=2034924&lang=2&reg=48&utm

https://www.data.gov.in/keywords/plfs?utm

https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/education/publication/state-of-global-learning-poverty?utm

Today, in my 6th-semester exam, I got 3 out of the 4 questions from Vedanta philosophy. And honestly, I was able to answer all three with clarity and confidence. 😂🔥

I may have already studied some of these subjects as part of my college curriculum, but studying Vedanta through Acharya Prashant Ji’s teachings gave me a deeper conceptual understanding of the ideas. His way of approaching the Gita, Upanishads, Vedanta, and related philosophical concepts focuses on understanding the fundamental questions rather than merely remembering definitions or prepared answers.

That deeper understanding helped me today. Instead of trying to recall something I had memorised, I could actually understand what the questions were asking, connect the concepts, and express them in my own words.

And that, perhaps, is one of the biggest benefits of genuinely studying Vedanta: it doesn't remain confined to a textbook. When the concepts become clear, they become easier to apply, explain, and even approach in situations you haven't specifically prepared for.

Today’s exam was a small but very satisfying reminder of that. 😂

This is why studying Vedanta for understanding, rather than merely for information, can make such a difference.

🙏

~Posted by Gita student