A 15-year-old boy navigates through the chaotic traffic at crossing in a small city in India. It is loud, noisy, and dusty. The air is thick with vehicular smoke and the cacophony of horns and city sounds. The boy is focused on dodging two-way traffic to get to the other side of the street.
He finds himself in front of a tiny house-like structure made of low-grade metal with a faint coat of dull-white paint and a rectangular cavity in the middle. A man sat inside this tiny roadside shop, surrounded by packets of cigarettes, beetle leaves and a variety of exotic looking snacks and tobacco products. A quintessential paan shop. India’s own smoke shop and deli set up. This one sold tea as well
He buys a packet of cigarettes, telling the shopkeeper what he wanted with an air of confidence. He is clearly too young to smoke but isn’t fazed by this as he attempts to and succeeds in purchasing cigarettes.
He adds a piping hot cutting tea to his order and begins to unwrap the brand-new cigarette packing. His eyes linger, only for a moment, on the large black and white sign on it that reads coldly, Smoking Kills. He lights his cigarette, inhales deeply and lets out a sigh of comfort and relief as he exhales the smoke.
Two hours later, this boy finds himself in his bedroom, sitting at a desktop computer. He clicks the URL bar with purpose and excitement and begins to type out.
www.facebook.com…
As the website loads, he fills with anticipation. His eyes fixate on the first words he sees.
Create a new account. It’s quick and easy.
With the same confidence he showed as he bought cigarettes from the street-side paan shop, he began entering his details and going through the process of setting up his first social media account. He feasted his eyes on information that erstwhile was a thing of speculation for him. He could now see everything that was happening in the world, all the time, from anywhere. What his friends were doing, where they were living, who was famous, what fad everyone was participating in. He could see it all.
A few weeks pass by. The boy is standing against a large banyan true outside the school gate, grinning sheepishly. He could see her appear in the distance amidst the crowd of teenagers exiting the school premises. His eyes twinkled with hope as she drew closer, hoping to meet her gaze. For a moment he thought she had seen him and smiled back, but he soon realized that she had looked right past him to a friend in the distance. He stood crestfallen as he watched her run past him to her friend.
That evening, he’s back at his computer. His fingers approach the keypad with purpose. He logs on to his newly created facebook account, his window into the world. He watches impatiently as the home page loads up. He moves the cursor to the search bar and begins to type her name and finds her profile, visible to everyone. He clicks on her name and gets lost in a rabbit hole with no end. He devours her pictures, her status updates, her check-ins and her comments. He becomes obsessed with her.
He feels his heart break when she posts a picture with her new boyfriend. It hurts even more because it was a close friend of his. His mind is tormented. With no easy outlet he bottles it all up. No one ever taught him how to express himself.
The years go by. She has become a distant memory. He has risen above the heartbreak and reclaimed himself, investing all his energy into his fitness and well-being. He creates an Instagram account and shares pictures of himself and his physical progress. He soaks in the constant validation and attention. He suddenly finds himself with a fan following. As his social media interactions grow, he begins to receive offers for advertisement and sponsorships. His chest swells when he sees himself in the mirror. He feels superior.
He lights a cigarette and looks at the packaging. Smoking Kills.
A decade goes by. He is in his kitchen chopping onions in preparation for dinner, alone. His phone begins to beep. The alarm that reminds him to take his medication every night. He reaches for the medicine cabinet and pulls out his Prozac prescription.
Three capsules. Sixty milligrams. A rather high dosage.
He swallows the capsules and washes them down with water. He then resumes chopping the onion. He looks at his left elbow, his eyes following the scars from when he missed and poked himself awkwardly. His inner arm itched. The scars were still fresh.
He sighs deeply as his head begins to spin and a strong craving overcomes him. He staggers into his disheveled bedroom and lowers himself on to the bed, slowly curling into fetal position. He clutches himself, whimpering as the spins intensify. He finds himself slipping away, passing out as consciousness leaves him.
His weekly recurrence of withdrawal causing him to pass out alone and scared in his bedroom.
In his fading vision, he notices his packet of cigarettes on the bedside table.
Smoking Kills, the sign says.
As I reflect on the journey this 15-year-old boy has been on in my imagination, I can’t help but come back to the statutory warning: Smoking Kills. Everyone in their right mind knows that smoking cigarettes is detrimental to physical health. It is an un-contestable fact. It wasn’t always so, but the discovery of smoking related heart and respiratory diseases, along with the widespread movement against various cancers has resulted in strict rules around awareness. Today, everyone who smokes does it with full knowledge that it could get them very sick, perhaps even worse.
We continue to smoke despite the warnings because all the awareness has spurred a fortified response from the medical fraternity. We have become increasingly competent in battling ailments and cancers, and while we haven’t cured many of them, we are better equipped to handle them. I think that is what reassures all smokers when they casually overlook the writing in black and white.
What irks me to no end is how there is no writing, no warning, nothing at all that made this boy question his actions as he gained access to the social media vortex. In a few swift clicks of a mouse, he was able to open a gateway to a tsunami of content and information no generation before him had seen.
Where was the disclaimer that warned him of the ill effects this could have on his mental health?
Any realist understands that wealth, money, and resources help you control the law, land and its people. One might argue that the mighty technology industry with its league of billionaires fighting tooth and nail against strict laws governing their applications, platforms and use of data, are all but invincible to the forces of public pressure. But the tobacco companies did and continue to have access to a comparable vault of wealth and resources. We were still able to get them to agree to market their own product as potentially lethal. Why aren’t we fighting the technology billionaires in the same way?
It’s because despite all the advancements we have made as a species, our mentality has been left far behind. We fear what we can see and feel, not what is intangible. How ironic is it that we can’t exercise our greatest strength, the ability to imagine the intangible and understand it, to solve one of the greatest transformational crises our species is facing.
Deteriorating mental health.
My mind finds itself spiraling into another day-dream.
A young man, freshly graduated from college with the earnest approach to life that reeked of naivety, finds himself working for a large multi-national company, a fate destined for many like him. A senior executive is addressing a gathering of employees in a large breakout area.
The young man is part of the crowd, listening intently. He is determined to focus and learn something from this leader. We exalt our leaders into divine positions and assume they all have wisdom to impart. Time and experience tell us how untrue that is more often than it is not.
The young man was a troubled individual. He was in his early twenties and had never been with a woman before. His friends around him were in stable relationships. He was increasingly feeling the pressures of growing up, the societal push of looking at what was next. Marriage and family. He struggled to deal with these thoughts and was feeling the toll on his well-being and concentration. To make matters worse, he had no outlet for his frustration.
The senior executive was introducing a stranger to the group of employees. A lanky, clean shaven bespectacled man who was introduced as a “corporate trainer”, a seasoned professional who had worked for so long in the industry that he was now recognized as learned enough to teach people how to succeed at the workplace.
The stranger takes the mic and the audience’s eyes widen. Wisdom is about to be delivered to them.
“You wake up on a Monday morning. You’ve had the weekend to rest, unwind and refresh. You show up to work, determined. Fast forward to Friday and you are drained, tired and craving the weekend. You feel exhausted and fatigued. The cycle always repeats itself. How many of you identify with this?”
Several young faces in the crowd nodded and murmured in agreement.
“Have you ever thought to stop and say, hey, wait a minute!” the corporate trainer continued. “Why do I feel so tired and exhausted all the time?”
The young man looked up expectantly at the visitor. He felt tired and exhausted all the time. The wise corporate trainer was about to answer all his questions.
“Think about it” the corporate trainer continued. “Research suggests that thirty to forty percent of our work days aren’t comprised of actual hours on the job, but rather supporting activities, breaks and non-work related thinking. We aren’t lifting heavy objects and building houses, we’re writing code here! If you just reflect on that for a second and think, why do I feel so tired at the end of the day, so many things will be clear to you! It’s all just a state of mind.”
The audience nods in agreement. Yes, they all agreed. Coders and analysts didn’t lift heavy objects or build houses. It made sense that there was no reason for them to feel so tired and exhausted by their work.
“Its all in your mind, guys” he continued, approaching the conclusion of his monologue. “We need to rise above our defeatist attitudes and suddenly, the world is your oyster!”
The crowd dispersed, content with this new wisdom they had received. They weren’t tired or exhausted, they just had a defeatist attitude. The young man, however, walks away with a troubled expression.
“I’m such a loser” he thinks to himself. “I have no reason to feel so tired and exhausted. I need to be better”.
Of course, a logical person would know that the young man was exhausted because his mind was constantly at work. His mind was constantly distracted, thinking of what a failure he was in society. How he was wasting his youth, letting his family down, moving towards a lonely future. These thoughts had consumed him. These thoughts exercised his brain constantly.
He was depressed and didn’t even know it. But according to this stranger, there was nothing wrong with him. He had no reason to feel tired and exhausted. This stranger was an accomplished man. Clearly, he knew better.
Society has failed the boy and the man, as well as every girl and woman and everyone in between that has suffered through an ailment intangible to us. Crippling mental illness. Depression, anxiety, fear and suspicion.
We ignore the black and white signs that warn us about physical ailments because the drugs and treatments exist. Why do we not have any signs for all that causes us such immense mental harm? Toxic societies, constant social interactions on social media, these are as cancerous as the cigarettes that come with disclaimers.
