When the App became the Guru

By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam

There was a time, not too long ago, when I woke up in the morning and decided for myself what kind of day it was going to be. These days, I wake up and my phone decides for me. It tells me my sleep score was 62 percent, which is apparently “fair” but not “restorative” and before my feet have touched the floor I am already feeling like a failure.

Forty-plus years of working with grassroots communities taught me that human beings are remarkably resilient. Nobody told me that resilience would eventually be measured in percentages by an algorithm that has never once walked a village road at dawn.

It began, as these things often do, with the best of intentions. I wanted to meditate more regularly, so I downloaded an app. I wanted to walk more, so I downloaded another. I wanted to breathe properly, which is a strange thing to need an app for, since breathing is one activity human beings managed without assistance for rather a long time, but I downloaded that one too.

One app told me when to drink water. Another told me when to stop looking at the first app. A third, rather ironically, reminded me to be present by interrupting whatever I was presently doing.

Somewhere in this accumulation of digital disciplinarians, the student became the servant. I no longer decide when I am hungry. My eating app decides, based on a fasting window I set for myself in a moment of misplaced enthusiasm and now dare not violate for fear of disappointing a notification.

I no longer decide when I have walked enough. My fitness app decides and if I am short by three hundred steps at eleven at night, I find myself pacing my own hall like a man under house arrest, walking nowhere in particular, purely to please a ring that glows green when satisfied and grey when it is not.

The meditation app is my favourite tragedy. I open it seeking stillness and it greets me with a streak counter, informing me that I have meditated eleven days running and must not break the chain. The practice our sages developed to free the mind from attachment has become another attachment, another scoreboard to defend.

I sit down to seek freedom from restlessness and end up restless about whether I sat for the correct number of minutes. If Adi Shankara had a notification system, I suspect he would have uninstalled it within the week and returned to his cave, where at least the silence needed no subscription.

Then there are the apps that exist purely to save me from the other apps. One kind soul designed a screen time application that tells me, with the solemnity of a disappointed elder, how many hours I spent looking at my phone that day.

I use that app, on my phone, to feel guilty about using my phone. This is rather like hiring a watchman to guard the house and discovering he has quietly moved into the guest room, eating the provisions and reporting on himself.

What troubles me most is not the apps, but what they reveal about us. We built these tools to discipline a wandering mind and in the process outsourced the very faculty we meant to strengthen. Discipline, properly understood, is not obedience to an external timer. It is the quiet strength to choose the harder right over the easier wrong, repeatedly, until it becomes character.

Our forefathers called this tapas, an inner heat generated through sustained self-effort, not through a badge announcing that one has unlocked a seven-day streak. When a notification tells us to breathe mindfully, we have missed the entire point of mindfulness, which was never meant to arrive with a chime.

I recall a Panchayat elder once telling me, long before any of us had heard the word app, that a farmer needs no bell to tell him when to wake, because the fields themselves call him. His discipline came from purpose, not from prompts. There is something in that simple observation that all our engineering has not managed to improve upon.

So how does one climb down from this comfortable cage we have built for ourselves. I suspect, not through some dramatic digital detox announced on social media, since that too would only be performing wellness for an audience of notifications. The way back is quieter than that. It begins with reclaiming small decisions, deciding for oneself when to eat because one is hungry and when to walk because the evening is pleasant and gradually letting the body and mind remember that they were quite capable of running themselves before an app came along and offered to do it for a monthly fee.

I have started leaving my phone in another room while I sit with my morning coffee and I have discovered, rather astonishingly, that it tastes the same without a photograph of it. I still use a few of my apps, but now as instruments rather than instructors, tools that serve a purpose I have already decided upon rather than voices that decide the purpose for me.

The mind that once looked outward for permission is slowly learning to look inward again, which is, when I think about it, precisely where it was meant to look all along.

[Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]