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Good morning. This week, Facebook paused its plans to release a new platform: Instagram for Kids; saying they needed more time to address the concerns raised by parents, experts and regulators. Speaking for Instagram, Adam Mosseri explained that children under 13 years old could benefit from a more child-friendly version designed for them. However, opponents suggest that Facebook should first fix access and content on the main site and that a kids’ app would simply introduce a younger audience to potential addiction. The plans and the debate will continue. Hinduism’s Bhagavad-gita describes the mind like a pond into which pour the rivers of all the thoughts, impressions and emotions of our daily life. Someone with a clear purpose, it says, can absorb these inputs and retain a steady mind. However, the intensity of social media feeds seems like adding tsunamis and whirlpools into what for most of us are already choppy waters. I’m highly dependent on digital communications and having raised my children in a rural setting, I appreciated their opportunity to enjoy online connection with their friends. Social media platforms can be a tool for social change, helping activists unite and mobilise. But chat and social change are not their actual end goals. Their business model is based on getting us absorbed in personalised feeds and targeted marketing for as much time as possible. There’s nothing new in selling advertising based on circulation and audience figures. The difference with Social Media is the sophistication of the technology. Although their effect on young people should, I think, be carefully regulated, the real danger lies not with the platforms themselves but in the perennial human tendency to fritter away too much of our time without personal fulfilment or benefit to others. In a stark metaphor, the Bhagavat Purana warns that a life without clear direction and purpose may become a journey into what it calls: the Forest of Enjoyment. We enter with a wealth of natural talents and explore this forest in search of pleasure and achievement. But our energy and gifts are stolen by meaningless pursuits luring us ever deeper into the forest. Along the way, snakes, birds and insects, representing envious people, bite, peck and sting us with their cruel words. We encounter false guides who fill us with misinformation causing dissention with our family and neighbours. Eventually, we might find ourselves in a dark cave feeling isolated, frustrated and lamenting the futility of how we’ve used our life. Time is what our lives are made of. Plato regarded the unexamined life as not worth living. What would he have thought of a life spent scrolling down our phones?