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As we move into the New Year, some devotees worry about what 2026 and the years ahead will bring. Over the last decade, Aldous Huxley’s coinage, “brave new world,” has become a familiar slogan as the pace of change around the world ramps up. As we look toward a rapidly changing future, we worry if it may come to us at a hefty price.
Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel describes an established order designed to solve humanity’s perennial problems—poverty, disease, and social conflict. In the course of its making, the utopian vision lost sight of key human values, not least of all, meaning, depth and interior life.
In the decades since, the phrase “brave new world” has come to refer to an inherently dehumanizing realm where the vision of a bright future rooted in material progress has the unintended effect of displacing what makes us fully human. While Huxley’s book is written as science fiction, it highlights a contemporary preoccupation: curating a better future by any means. Yet, too much longing to improve the world almost guarantees mixed results.[1]
In the 21st century we notice the growing fear that large-scale technological innovation—especially automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence—may lead to widespread job loss and cultural dislocation.[2] Unlike earlier waves of mechanization, which mainly replaced physical labour, today’s technologies encroach on work once thought to be immune, namely, professions that are cognitive in nature.[3]The prospect of cognitive work being overtaken by machines lends a marked degree of apprehension among career counsellors advising college students.
And yet, the “jobocalypse”[4]anxiety is not limited to unemployment but raises deeper questions about meaning. Modern society has always linked personal identity, dignity, and social worth to paid employment. If machines begin performing tasks faster, cheaper, and more reliably than humans, how will we understand our place in the world? Indeed, who will we be when the world no longer needs us?
Optimists argue that new technologies will create new kinds of work, as they have done in the past. Others counter that the scale and speed of change may overwhelm the labour market’s ability to adapt, producing permanent under-employment rather than a mere temporary disruption.[5]
The jobocalypse debate raises a burning question, namely, to what extent is human value reducible to economic utility?[6] And can we imagine forms of meaning, contribution, and dignity that do not depend on traditional employment? This discussion leads to something much more concerning and immediate, namely, how expectations about a hugely different human future which may already be unfolding is linked to uncertainty in general and rising rates of anxiety and mental health conditions among youth.
Here the psychological and developmental cost of continuous, accelerating change comes to the fore. Some fear that long before humanity faces AI-driven economic redundancy, it may suffer widespread mental health challenges.
Reports from religious leaders, educators, clinicians, and public health bodies such as the World Health Organization indicate that emotional distress among adolescents and young adults has increased sharply over the past two decades, with the trend accelerating.[7]
The scale, intensity, and early onset of mental health struggles are alarming. Many experience a persistent sense of insecurity about the future, coupled with feelings of inadequacy and isolation—the feeling that the future may not offer stable ground on which to stand.
In the late twentieth century, young people enjoyed a set of givens: education leading to work, work to independence, independence to social belonging and a place in the world.
Today, effort no longer guarantees outcomes, eroding the most basic psychological resource essential for resilience, namely, hope. When such concerns deepen into despair, they can contribute to rising rates of suicide, one of the leading causes of death among young people in certain regions of the world.[8]
When large numbers of young people experience helplessness and hopelessness, it may signal not individual pathology but a collective intuition that something is not okay.
Just as animals can sense environmental danger before it is tangibly observed, youth may be responding to subtle but pervasive cues. Young people fear that the structures meant to receive them may no longer exist in recognizable form. When the imagination cannot picture a liveable future, motivation collapses. From this angle, despair is not irrational. It is an adaptive response to a world whose promises no longer hold true.
Too Much Too Fast
Human nervous systems evolved for environments that changed slowly and locally. Customs, roles, identities, and skills were once transmitted across generations with relative stability. The digital era has ruptured this rhythm. Today, young people must adapt to shifting norms—often before they have found their place in the world. As the demand for adaptation accelerates, it exhausts inner resources—after all, the human nervous system is not built to face constant change.
Too much change too fast erodes what psychologists call predictive stability, namely, the ability to form reliable expectations about the future. Without this, the mind may remain in a state of low-grade alert, which can manifest as chronic anxiety, sleep disruption, difficulty concentrating, emotional dysregulation, confusion, lethargy, and restlessness. When efforts no longer seem to yield intelligible outcomes, depression can set in.
The central challenge of the digital era is not whether humans will be replaced by machines, but whether we can remain psychologically intact amidst relentless transformation. The task ahead may be less about building smarter systems and more about restoring rhythms of continuity—conditions under which human beings can metabolize change without falling apart.
When addressing the mental-health crisis of the twenty-first century, some highlight the contention and division dominating the public sphere as the result of moral failure, i.e. bad choices made by ill-intentioned individuals. In doing so, we mistake symptoms for cause. Polarization, division, social fragmentation and public displays of ill-will are not the origins of the crisis but its visible expressions. Opportunists are sure to take advantage of the collective vulnerability, but beyond that, the collective psyche needs addressing as well, imperilled as it is by rapid, unprecedented technological innovation.
Neurological Balance
Only in recent years has the psychiatric and neuroscientific community begun to appreciate the extent to which digital technologies are reshaping human neurology. One of the more subtle yet far-reaching effects is a growing bias toward left-hemisphere modes of functioning—those associated with analysis, task completion, information processing, and control. These capacities are indispensable yet, when they dominate, other dimensions of human functioning are weakened.
One of the things diminished is the social engagement system: the network of neural and physiological processes that support connection, and emotional regulation through eye contact, facial expression, vocal tone, listening, and responsive presence.[9] When this system is insufficiently exercised, the nervous system tends to drift toward heightened states of alert. Sympathetic “fight-or-flight” responses become more prominent, while parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” functions lose some of their stabilising influence. Over time, this imbalance may affect emotional steadiness, learning, creativity, and the capacity for relational attunement.
What is often experienced subjectively as anxiety, agitation, or mental fatigue may therefore reflect not merely psychological distress but a deeper pattern of physiological dysregulation. This helps explain why many young people feel persistently unsettled even when no immediate external threat is present—their nervous systems are primed for vigilance in an environment that rarely allows them to settle.
Concerns about learning and cognition bring this issue into sharper focus. The cognitive neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath has observed that recent generations, beginning with Gen Z, appear to be the first in modern history to under-perform their parents across a range of cognitive measures, despite spending more time in formal education.[10] Large-scale data suggest that this decline coincides with the widespread adoption of digital technologies in classrooms. Students who rely heavily on screens for learning tend to perform less well than those whose education remains largely non-digital.
Horvath’s explanation is not primarily pedagogical but biological. Human beings evolved to learn in the presence of other human beings. Learning is not simply the transmission of information but unfolds within relational contexts involving shared attention, emotional signalling, and subtle forms of co-regulation. When learning is mediated primarily through screens, many of these supporting conditions are absent. In this light, efforts to reshape education so that it conforms more easily to digital tools risk adapting human development to technology rather than evaluating technology in light of human needs.
From a physiological standpoint, this distinction matters. Digital device use tends to activate sympathetic hyperarousal, keeping the organism in a state of low-grade vigilance. In such a state, the nervous system remains oriented toward monitoring potential threat, while the neural circuits associated with integration, reflection, and creativity are less accessible.
Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, supports what stress researchers describe as social buffering: the calming of physiological arousal through the presence of trusted others.[11]
When the neural circuits that support direct human engagement are underused, stress and anxiety become harder to resolve. Seen this way, the widespread prevalence of anxiety and stress in contemporary life cannot be explained solely in cultural or psychological terms. It may also reflect a more fundamental neurological shift associated with digitally mediated patterns of living.
The importance of social connection for psychological and physiological stability is not a recent discovery. Several landmark studies from the mid-twentieth century illustrate this with particular clarity.
During the Second World War, British authorities evacuated children from London to protect them from bombing raids. The assumption was that physical safety would reduce psychological harm. Yet post-war research by Anna Freud showed that many evacuated children were more traumatised than those who remained in the city. Separation from parents and familiar relationships proved more damaging than exposure to physical danger.[12]
An even more sobering insight came from the work of René Spitz, who studied infants raised in institutional settings. These babies received adequate nutrition, hygiene, and medical care, yet lacked consistent emotional contact. Spitz documented a predictable pattern: initial protest followed by withdrawal, weight loss, listlessness, and developmental delay. Many infants developed what he termed anaclitic depression, and in some institutions nearly forty percent of the infants died. Physical care alone was insufficient, and the absence of responsive human presence proved devastating.[13]
Subsequent work by John Bowlby clarified the mechanisms involved. Bowlby showed that what he called “attachment” is not merely an emotional bond but a biological system essential for survival.[14]
Later researchers, including Bessel van der Kolk and Stephen Porges, provided neurobiological accounts of how unbuffered stress and a chronically activated sympathetic nervous system affects the developing brain. Infants are not equipped to regulate themselves independently but must “borrow” regulation from the face, voice, and touch of another human being. When this co-regulation is absent, physiological stability becomes difficult to maintain, especially for babies born prematurely.[15]
These findings have relevance for the digitally mediated mental health crisis we find ourselves in. What killed those infants is not so different from what is quietly exhausting the nervous systems of digitally isolated youth today. Contemporary youth, though surrounded by stimulation, may nonetheless be deprived of sustained, embodied relational contact. Research in stress physiology links social disconnection with disrupted cortisol rhythms, sleep disturbance, and increased vulnerability to mental-health disorders.[16] Sleep disruption, in turn, is increasingly recognised as a contributing factor in psychiatric conditions, even among the most severe.[17]
Seen in this light, the challenge before us is not simply technological but relational. If three-dimensional, face-to-face sociality has been partially displaced by two-dimensional, screen-mediated interaction, the cost may be paid in diminished learning, rising anxiety, lack of depth, and a thinning of spiritual coherence. Restoring conditions that support healthy nervous system balance—through presence, continuity, and relational depth—may therefore be essential not only for mental health, but for the wider human hope of seeking wholeness.
Bhagavan’s Devotees
Ramana devotees whose children are suffering anxiety, stress or other mental health challenges may misconstrue their children’s hardship as a failure to adequately embrace the teaching. But a historically unprecedented mental health climate is the true culprit.
If we point to modernisation and rapid urbanisation as significant factors, this would not be out of place. But what seems to tilt the scale is the digitally dominated social sphere.
Our collective psychic space has narrowed, and the emerging digital culture has become increasingly stimulus-driven, strategic, and self-referential, because we have quietly forfeited a basic human virtue: relationality. Time once given to family, neighbours, community, and the ordinary obligations of society is now diverted into virtual pastimes.
The trade-offs are seductive. Devices liberate us from the delicate demands of face-to-face encounter—tone, timing, restraint, and etiquette. They are compliant companions: always available, rarely contradicting us, and quick to supply affirmation. But the bargain is costly. When the adhesive bonds of human belonging are neglected, we drift into the vastness of online space—untethered and oddly alone. The appropriate response draws on the first principles of sadhana: admitting our powerlessness before habit and compulsion, and then practising restraint—again and again—until balance is reclaimed.
At first glance, the monk in the cave seems to refute all this. Is he not withdrawn from social life? Yet authentic renunciation is not a rejection of relationship so much as a refinement of it. Contemplation and meditation redirects connection inward, and in doing so it can strengthen the very capacities that make human co-regulation possible. This speaks to Bhagavan Ramana’s own life. In meditation, the monk is, in effect, engaging the parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” response, restoring balance to the autonomic nervous system.
Solitude emptied of inwardness, however, is something else entirely. A monk scrolling endlessly on a phone in his cave would be no better off than the rest of us. Solitude is not the same as isolation. Inwardness and inquiry cultivate resilience and integration; digital isolation entrenches reactivity, vigilance, and threat-orientation. Renunciation, properly understood, is not the absence of relationship, but the discovery of a deeper, more stabilizing form of connection—one that modern distraction steadily erodes.[18]
Surrender and Inquiry
The problem is not resistance to truth, but psychic exhaustion. From the point of view of the autonomic nervous system, coming free of the sense of threat is the most pressing need we have. Faith in the teaching cannot fully function when the psyche is under siege. Bhagavan points out that inquiry may not always be the appropriate next response:
D.: How can the rebellious mind be controlled?
M.: Seek its source or surrender it.
D.: But it slips away from our control.
M.: Let it be. When you recollect yourself, bring it back and turn it inward. That is enough. Perseverance alone will bring success.[19]
Bhagavan’s surrender means releasing everything—including concern for the future. But youth today are being asked to make leaps in faith that only wise elders could do in former generations. And yet, how else will today’s youth greet the enormous challenges facing them?
The most effective intervention for parents is not instruction but presence. To reach the heart, one must first be willing to stand inside the child’s suffering, not above it. The child does not need answers; he or she needs empathy, i.e. to be truly seen and accepted. The job of surrendering is ours. Bhagavan gives suggestions as to how we optimise our chances of being useful to them:
If one surrenders oneself there will be no one to ask questions or to be thought of. Either the thoughts are eliminated by holding on to the root-thought ‘I’ or one surrenders oneself unconditionally to a Higher Power. These are the only two ways for Realisation.[20]
Deep listening may be the only form our surrender can take—not the child’s surrender to the teaching, but the parent’s surrender of the impulse to control outcomes. What makes these interventions difficult is that parents are trying to offer something they themselves have been progressively deprived of. The digital environment has not only affected children. It has reshaped adult consciousness as well.
To come to their children’s aid, parents may sense that something deeper is being called for. Yet their own nervous systems—shaped by speed, distraction, and constant cognitive demand—struggle to access the slower, receptive states from which genuine attunement flows. Right-hemisphere listening requires patience and emotional tolerance. This cannot be engineered but hinges on a deeper encounter with the Ramana path. The task of inquiry is to discover that which does not rise and fall or come and go. Bhagavan gives us direction:
Why worry about the future? Take care of the present, and the future will take care of itself. [21]
On the Bright Side
One of the positive features of the current crisis is seeing how Bhagvan’s devotees are overcoming the stigma surrounding mental health issues. They are now better able to speak about what is going on in their families. This is new. When we openly express the difficulties that our families are facing, relatives and fellow devotees alike can enter in as support, and those suffering begin to see that what they are going through need not be concealed but is worthy of collective concern.
What is mentionable is manageable, goes a saying. By contrast, what we fear to speak about will be hard to get at. Concealing our suffering invariably results in pushing it deeper into the recesses of the heart, beyond the reach of our sadhana. Such concealment disallows any remedial measure, and in effect makes the condition seem constant and immutable.
Born of the fear that our wounding is an expression of some firm ill-begotten entity within, we imagine the ego as destiny, unchanging, condemning ourselves to an inner prison of the egoic status quo. If we are living out a self-fulfilling prophecy rooted in a misunderstanding about the nature of destiny, fate and our karmic inheritance, it is because we truly believe that the ego is real and that it is permanent. Bhagavan comes to our rescue:
Fate can be conquered. Fate is the result of past actions. By association with the wise the bad tendencies are conquered. One’s experiences are then viewed from a proper perspective.[22]
Our refusal to inquire into karmic fragments is no doubt born of the pain they cause us. Such refusal may also be rooted in not wanting to upset the egoic agenda, after all, ego’s trickery knows no bounds. But Bhagavan wants us to inquire all the way down, leaving no stone unturned. If karmic “stones” sometimes conceal terrifying monsters, this work can be hair-raising. Yet, opting for short-term comfort only yields long-term misery. When we discover that samsara is tied to the illusory notions of ego as solid and karma as fixed, we come to see that the inner work is not optional. Bhagavan illuminates this point:
If the agent upon whom karma depends—namely, the ego which has come into existence between the body and the Self—merges in its source and loses its form, how can the karma upon which it depends ever survive? When there’s no ‘I’, there’s no karma.[23]
Conclusion
It is hard to know with certainty what is going on in the “brave new world”. While the digital revolution has given us unprecedented access to information and the ability to connect across vast distances, the sheer quantity of digital connectivity often comes at the cost of depth and quality.
We must be honest about our compulsion toward device use and attend to the overstimulated nervous system it produces. This is no small task: for the first time in history humanity has become collectively habituated to a single, pervasive activity. As a result, it may fall to a quiet minority—not least of all, sadhakas and devotees of Bhagavan—to exercise restraint without depending on support from the surrounding culture.
Spiritual communities worldwide are inundated with seekers, while the psychiatric profession is stretched thin, struggling to keep pace with rapidly escalating mental health challenges. From the standpoint of sadhana, however, the task may be simpler. By turning to Bhagavan’s vichara, we uncover what lies buried within—including our vulnerability to addictive patterns—and gradually loosen the grip of ego through awareness and surrender. Emerson reminds us:
We are never tired so long as we can see far enough.[24]
Seeing far enough means moderating our immersion in screens. This could take shape by limiting the overall hours we spend digitally engaged or taking time off for regular digital fasts. The main point is to acknowledge our near inability to be free of device use for extended periods and to work compassionately with such compulsions.
If earlier generations were spiritual beings attending to material needs, in the digital era we have become material beings at pains to attend to spiritual needs.[25]
If we cannot cross the threshold into the Heart for our own sake, let us do it for the sake of our children, after all, they are being asked to carry burdens that previous generations failed to address.
Serving youth today may require reclaiming our own relational capacities. By stepping back from excessive device use, we re-enter a mode of human connection that modern life has steadily eroded.
But then, realistically, how do we meet the mental health crisis of the digital era? By becoming more human, by aiming for the Heart, by calling forth what lies within as our deepest truest nature.
Bhagavan has given us the means—a wider lens through which to view every crisis. Our task is to make use of it. Only from that ground can our empathy become credible, our listening become healing, and the shared field of trust slowly be restored. —
Footnotes and References for Further Reading
[1]Bhagavan warns against too much wanting in favour of letting things be in their own way.
[2] Ex-Google AI Expert Tristan Harris, in a YouTube interview:
<https://tinyurl.com/2ahhp3ks>
[3] Emad Mostaque, in Oct 2025: <https://tinyurl.com/mwvu68sm>
[4] Jobocalypse: The End of Human Jobs and How Robots Will Replace Them, by Ben Way.
[5] “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?”, Frey, Carl Benedikt & Osborne, Michael (2017) in Technological Forecasting & Social Change, adapted from pp. 114, 254–280.
[6] Emad Mostaque referring to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) which warned that societies organized purely around labour and production risk losing deeper sources of meaning and dignity (see above-mentioned October 2025 interview).
[7] World Health Organization Fact Sheet (2021), Adolescent Mental Health: “Depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents globally.”
[8] WHO reports that worldwide, “suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among 15–29-year-olds.”
[9] In polyvagal theory, an evolved, myelinated vagal system linking the heart, lungs, and muscles of the face and head promote calm and co-regulation. Previously, such functions were described under related concepts such as the attachment system (Bowlby), affiliative or social bonding systems (ethology), social buffering (stress physiology), and vagal tone (psychophysiology). Unifying these strands into a single evolutionary and neural framework has great theoretical and therapeutic ramifications.
[10] His US Senate testimony:<https://shorturl.at/gSqSj>. Students using computers for learning around two hours a day score over two-thirds of a standard deviation lower than peers who rarely use classroom technology. It is worth noting that in Denmark, a country that led the ed-tech revolution, devices are now being banned in public schools. See the following:
<https://youtu.be/aKoCZKtpS3Q?si=2llTFE9KWlmiA96l>.
[11] Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us, ch. 5: “Connectedness and Co-Regulation: A Biological Imperative”, Stephen W. Porges and Seth Porges.
[12] How Trauma Stays in the Body and How to Remove It with Bessel van der Kolk: <https://tinyurl.com/de4f7953>.See also van der Kolk’s ground-breaking best-seller, The Body Keeps the Score.
[13] The First Year of Life, René Spitz (1965).
[14] “Maternal Care and Mental Health”, World Health Organization, Monograph Series No. 2, 1951. See also: Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment, Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.)
[15] Stephen Porges in various places describes how his work began with the discovery that premature infants are vulnerable to sudden death because myelinated vagal pathways cannot yet inhibit the dorsal vagal shutdown response.
[16] See Hostinar, C. E., Johnson, A. E., & Gunnar, M. R., 2015, “Early social deprivation and the social buffering of cortisol stress responses in late childhood.” Development and Psychopathology.
[17] Freeman, D. et al., 2020, “Sleep disturbance and psychiatric disorders”. The Lancet Psychiatry; see also Bagautdinova, J. et al., 2023, “Sleep Abnormalities in Different Clinical Stages of Psychosis” in JAMA Psychiatry.
[18] Porges explains that the social engagement system is an evolved branch of the parasympathetic nervous system, mediated by the vagus nerve. It supports facial expression, voice, and heart regulation, enabling co-regulation, distinct from older parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” and sympathetic fight-or-flight responses.
[19] Adapted from Talks, 398, 14th April 1937.
[20] Talks, 321, 7th January 1937.
[21] Talks, 238, 20th July 1936.
[22] Talks, 209, 19th June 1936. See also Talks, 193: Free-will and destiny are ever-existent. Destiny is the result of past action; it concerns the body. Why do you pay attention to it? Free-will and destiny last [only] as long as the body lasts. But wisdom transcends both.
[23] “Spiritual Instructions” from Collected Works, p. 68.
[24] Quoted in Pico Iyer’s Aflame: Learning from Silence, part 2.
[25] Ibid., part 4, from R. H. Tawney.
