Welcome to Hardenland: Mapping out the terrain to fight the mental health crisis
So, here we are. Half of 2022 has passed. The havoc that the pandemic wrought on the world has taken a back seat in our quest to rearrange our lives. The world has started to feel green and the public squares are teeming with people again. But something feels missing. Did the pandemic take something away from our lives, or it was only waiting to be revealed to our collective conscience?
The dawn of the digital republic
Come 2020, Digital technology came like the colonizers in the lives of a few millennials and most Gen Z. Few questioned this sudden intrusion and everyone else didn’t care. Everybody thought that the new People’s Republic of Internet is good with this “adulting” stuff that everyone gets afraid of. But the incessant cries for help and cluelessness during the pandemic revealed the bitter truth. That we have never felt more helpless and lonely in this socially loud stratosphere. And it has never left since.
I would venture to say that the pandemic only revealed and to some extent accelerated what we’ve been collectively trying to shove under the rugs all this while.
We are feeling a kind of social isolation at a scale we haven’t felt in the lifetime of humanity.
Digital media provided us with props and tools to take our world-building skills from fiction books and apply the same in our real social lives. Coupled with the rise of individualism and our desire to control every aspect of our projection, we have never been more socially atomic than ever.
But this atomization of self in this digital republic came with a side-effect and a bad one indeed. Due to the over-fictionalization of an average life, the standard set of insecurities that we are born with got inflated beyond control. Things like shame, guilt, self-disgust, self-criticism, etc blew up. Things that we were forced to reveal and dilute through real-life connections. When we couldn’t project only “the good parts” of ourselves in the digital arena.
As this invisible wall we created to guard our fictionalized self grew stronger, we automatically grew more isolating. To the point that it has almost become our default behavior. The cultural shift culminated in a gradual but compounding toll on our mental health.
The real pandemic is invisible in words but echos starkly in the deafening silence of inexpressiveness.
The state of mental health
While we don’t need numbers to accept the fact that we are at the onset of a mental health crisis, since now everyone believes in evidence-based conclusions more than their instincts, here are the numbers:
India has 0.75 certified psychiatrists per 1 lakh people and the total number of people suffering from one of the many symptoms of mental health is about 200 million.
But data points don’t help in understanding the causes that are in play fueling this crisis. I’m more concerned about what’s going on on the subjective front. I have this theory about mental health that the more you joke about it online or try to normalize talking about it, the faster it gets worse. Because the cries for help massively outnumber the thoughtful discussions.
You start to think that if everyone is dealing with it, it must a rite of passage of adulthood. This is a fallacy.
What worries me are the ways people are trying to fight against this crisis. As you have probably guessed, through tech-based solutions. The parable of when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail couldn’t be starker. First of all, everyone’s busy treating the symptoms. While that’s increasingly necessary, the problem will only get worse if we don’t drop our egos and accept the fact that it’s not merely a problem, it’s a crisis. And crises don’t ease down until we don’t reach for the root causes. The present crisis is a downwards spiral in nature.
Any potentially harmful force of culture (social media and digital tech in our context) spreads when people are illusioned on a personal level that it’s for the greater good (Zuck, I see you!). Now that we are in its grip, online communication has become our primary mode of communication, which gets really tiring because we are not made to communicate in parallel. The most immediate solution we think of is to mentally isolate ourselves, which is what causes gradual desensitization towards others and the self.
Note that I am concerned with the decline of the general purpose mental well-being of people. Mental health is a broad spectrum and we aren’t trying to treat the symptoms. We are aggressively concerned about reversing the kind of tendencies that are leading us into the decline.
What is even more worrying is how people are dealing with its effects at personal levels. Due to over-the-top aggrandization by the average person on social media, people stop being vulnerable in their relationships, which is an important ingredient of good relationships. They think there are not doing enough in life. Self-isolation seems like an immediate solution to take a back seat and figure out life, but as discussed above, it’s a vicious loop.
The more you isolate yourself, the more you think your problems are unique, the more you doubt and criticize yourself, the more you distract yourself from any little discomfort, and the more you try to hide your perceived incapacity to deal with your life. Until one day you find yourself lurking at the edges of loneliness.
Crushed by reality, devoid of virtues
The internet flattens and distorts our reality in ways that our minds can’t comprehend. It presents the world as a giant open arena where anyone has access to everyone and any opportunity. But with infinite reach comes infinite greed. Just because you can drop anywhere and anytime in this digital arena doesn’t mean you can skip life and experience to access anything. Hierarchies still exist. Experience still matters. But now they are hidden in plain sight, and intentionally so. This is one of the biggest disillusionment people experience after a lot of wasted effort. The people who know their ways through the game want as many people there as they can. That is how they sell. It’s not bad or anything but you have to accept that just because the game is open for everyone doesn’t mean there isn’t a fierce competition.
Nowadays, people aren’t interested in cultivating fundamental virtues. They are more interested in the rules of the free market. It’s like they upgraded the firmware of important virtues with these rules only to find there’s no backup when the new update crashes. But life is not a free market. You can’t skip past the basis of reality. If the rules of the digital market are the only virtues you possess, then your emotional and mental ability depends directly on the whims of fashions and trends. And they change quickly on the Internet. So, if you don’t work on the virtues that ground you in your reality, you are automatically fragile. A recent example is the Crypto meltdown. No one knows how much the mental health of people suffered due to that
Another unfortunate pattern is that people are now approaching relationships with the rules and parameters of the free market. If one relationship doesn’t work out, rather than seeing that as an essential part of growing in life, they see it as a loss, wasted time, and effort.
The market is the new life and life has become a market.
This has a deeper root cause though. Since everyone is stalking everyone on social media, you are not a person anymore, you are a brand. And with branding comes selling and targeting. Ultimately this manifests in all walks of life, especially for those who grow up on the internet. Anything that has the potential for time waste is seen as a worthless pursuit. It weakens your relationships because relationships are not efficiency machines.
At the end of the day, you have to go sleep with the person you are, not the brand you advertise.
The Internet provided an alluring pitch to have total freedom in our lives. But to delegate freedom is to delegate options. And the options are all generic as everything is available for everyone. As a result, everyone looks and acts the same. So, you turn to self-expression and since you have infinite reach, you end up becoming a brand. On the other hand, the internet has infinite subcultures as humans can express themselves in infinite ways. So, you spend a lot of time and effort trying to belong to one of them. But for every subculture that you are an insider in, for every other one, you are an outsider. That’s why if you don’t build your own identity, which comes from being deeply aware of your values and virtues, you keep wandering forever.
In the fight of rejecting all of our conservative cultural values, we ended up rejecting also the good parts of traditions that brought people together. Worse, in the name of control, we handed everything that is supposed to bring people together to companies. And companies don’t care about quality. Quality for companies is a minimum viable product at scale. It’s a generic object, devoid of any personalization and hence, humanity. The fewer the objects of personalization available in culture, the fewer the avenues for people to gather around them.
When repetition becomes the norm, life feels empty.
Where’s the blindspot
A popular saying in the business world is that the best ideas are hidden in plain sight. Nowadays, the biggest cognitive blindspots are hidden right next to our thoughts. Our thoughts have been hacked by ideologies. I would venture to say that they are now intricately woven into the fabric of our thoughts. It’s a complex maze to walk. Unlearning has become more important than ever. All the escapism has roots in the following insight:
The key inversion that has happened to the Internet generation is that they trust tools more than their own thought.
People have stopped trusting intuition and common sense. Just like everything, intuition and common sense take time to develop and become a personalized skill. But the lure of optionality makes us trust information and data more than ourselves. We are too afraid to waste time. Time that is required for clear personalized thinking. We are bombarded with mental models, frameworks, playbooks, strategies, lenses, projections, etc that we can’t even reach to our own intuitions. Intuitions that are required to remain in our own elements. If you care to look, you realize that almost all of it is borrowed knowledge.
It almost has become a disease. When you amass all these psychological tools, you stop thinking, you only project. Anytime your self tries to speak, you shun its voice. Remember when sometimes you are taken aback by a sudden realization that is so out of touch with your world of thoughts that you discard it as something foreign? The denial of self is real and stronger than ever. How can you be correct about yourself when research and data say otherwise? When psychology pundits perpetrate that your own thinking and decision-making skills have biases and fallacies built in. But the real problem is much more subtle.
We now think in public while being alone with ourselves.
We are integrating more with our public persona and disintegrating with our private spirit. We care more about our digital projection than how we feel in the mirror. The walls of your house no more protect you from the penetration of the digital gaze.
Social media flattens different aspects of reality into homogenous experiences. You start with the awareness that your digital identity is separate from your physical identity. But over time, with enough reinforcement, your mind stops distinguishing between the two. Eventually, you reach the point where you are not sure which reality is more real. You stop being your true self in any one of them. Any reality where your true self has the potential to leak is a danger for other realities. Since this happens to everyone, there is no shared reality. And when there is no shared reality, there is an almost crippling lack of empathy towards people you care about. You can only reach them via words but not emotions.
The crisis of meaning
For any meaning to emerge, you have to have your skin in the game, and when skins are involved, people are involved. When the information had not exploded, people used to rely on each other, so they naturally formed communities. Even when they moved cities, they found their tribe one way or the other, otherwise, it was hard to survive. So, they had both your individuality and your social sphere.
When the information exploded, it provided tools for customization and greater control over one’s life. Suddenly, you had access to the whole world to navigate around life. But freedom is a double-edged sword.
When everyone is busy customizing, no one is sharing. And there is no meaning without sharing.
The consumerist culture blinds us into believing that meaning is contained in experiences while it’s always found in sharing existence. You can access anything and reach anywhere, but with time, you become more distanced from people because time doesn’t extend with information. Meaning comes from repeated events of shared existence. Information and stimulations distribute our attention and we keep missing meaning.
As we moved through the Internet generation, communities got overridden by consumerist culture.
Rather than doing together, we spend together.
Chores got replaced with chill scenes. The culture got lifted from the real world and put into companies since we spent our whole time there. People tried to find a home in that but the economies of scale demanded the culture be moved to a one-page document on the company website.
Efficiency leads to atomization and meaning is lost in the process.
So, the current generation finds itself finding meaning in props and trends. Only that these things are fleeting. The only things that are not fleeting are people, shared sufferings, energy exchanges, and witnessing each other grow through hardships and our moments of joy. The lack of meaning could also be attributed to the amount of cognitive overload that we bear today. Our parents didn’t have to decide on every little thing. So, the meaning was never a problem for them. In contrast, the current generation is going through a commitment crisis, in the illusion of optionality. Who got time for comment when you have to do a gazillion things with the plans of retiring early? The meaning has been projected in the future that is as hollow as a tin can when it finally arrives.
So, what’s the solution then?
Welcome to Hardenland
Harden was started as a mission to develop a new philosophy and practice to fight against the crippling nature of digital technology. While I was picking and reknitting the lost threads of my own life, I saw some of my friends, both online and offline, head slowly in the isolating trenches of hopelessness. Isolation that doesn’t express itself in words and media. Isolation that manifests itself in the pursuit of total control in our individual lives. Soon, we find ourselves too much in control and too less in relation to each other. When everyone is involved in the same pursuit, we end up creating an invisible barrier for ourselves that becomes crippling.
I believe that the fundamentals of getting the best out of our lives by doing the right things don’t change. What needs to change is the way we adapt our behaviors to the times. Note that I don’t despise all the technology.
But there are certain elements of our psychology and certain patterns of digital technology that unfortunately align a bit too well to exploit our attention, snatch our agencies, and molds us against each other – rendering ourselves subpar with our innate potential.
Hardenland is the new addition to that mission. To bring people together after we have set the context and a way forward. In all honesty, the community is already out there dispersed along different walks of life. The goal is to bring it to a familiar place to double down on the mission by having skin in the game. This will give the members a new meaning in their lives and a purpose aligned with what they deeply care about.
The philosophies developed so far will direct the mission through the arrow of technology and time. The practices we develop and the lessons we learn along the way will help the members unleash their full potential. I want to create a reinforcing loop that can accommodate as many people as it can.
To my knowledge, I don’t know of anything like this that exists. That makes it more ambitious and exciting.
The terrain of Hardenland
If you have been reading between the lines previous issues, we’re already on our expedition through the various patches of the terrain, whether we knew it or not. But you can’t make a map until you’re intimately aware of the territory. Through this journey, we’ll be setting our camps in the following patches:
Energy - We don’t understand energy at all. We don’t even think about it. We have a lot of terms for it - passion, drive, motivation, inspiration, flow state, etc. but the main undertone for all of it is how well you manage your energy. You gain energy the more you spend it. This simple idea has cascading effects if you truly understand and ingrain it in your mindset. Lots of people spend their whole lives without ever realizing their true energy potential. You don’t have to be.
Food - Food is the only thing that you can control – that directly influences your biology. But our food system is completely fucked up. We have completely lost the intimate relationship we once had with food. We went from bonding over food to spending together on food. We don’t care anymore how it is cooked. We want food that is already aligned to our tastes to which we have been made addicted. We need to fix our relationship with food.
Movement - Nowadays, we need reasons to move. We move in between agendas. We like to believe that we have free will but we just can’t make ourselves move freely. Agenda is a result of standardizing your life. And when you standardize your life, you become a machine. And that sucks your physical health because we don’t have an agenda for every day. Movement is as natural as breathing but the modern world has made it a chore. But all the physical spaces around us are designed in a way to make us move less. Our eyes deserve more real nature than its simulation from the blinding lights of screens. Let’s change that and remove that back pain forever.
Mindsets - Changing times need changing mindsets. Since change starts online now and then manifests itself offline, times are changing a bit too fast. This doesn’t mean principles of life that have been battle-tested over millennia change. But the mindsets need to adapt as required by any system that evolves continuously. Since we live our lives through our work now, the vocabulary seeps into our personal lives, and we start to use the principle of business in our lives. This obviously doesn’t work for long. The mindsets that you inhabit should act as the base layer for everything else in your life. Most people don’t have mindsets these days. They have mental models, frameworks, tips, and hacks – which are fine for competing but not for living.
Meaning - Meaning is absent without skin in the game. We are a generation that tries to maximize rather than commit. We don’t commit to multiple relationships anymore, since we don’t have communities. Our workplaces want to win the game of capitalism and exit in the guise of providing a purpose for ourselves. Individually, we are trying to find meaning in disposable objects and ephemeral trends. We are devoid of the foundations on which the previous generations build their life. But we are still human. The look and feel of foundations can change but their essence doesn’t. Digital technology blinds us of the essence in the pursuit of the material. It’s an impending crisis and we need to keep it at bay.
Resilience - Technology was meant to be a tool and not a crutch. In the world of the Internet, we have two identities. But the objects and spaces are completely different between the physical and the digital world. The way to live in the internet world doesn’t come to us naturally. We mimic and learn through other people’s digital projections. The catch is that we are not naturally wired to draw the line for how much to mimic. Internet is a fairly recent phenomenon and we have survived through a lot of trials and tribulations. But we can’t ignore the fact that a lot of people have failed to find the right balance between these identities, rendering them devoid of a solid sense of self. We need to get it back.
I hope that Hardenland will serve as a place that we never had in the digital sphere – that you can call your home. I’m bullish that by walking this unique terrain that we have carved together, we will find the answers and solutions to the problems of mental health that brought us together in the first place.
So, please come on this next phase of the mission with me and fellow Hardeners to become the best version of yourself.
inspiring ideas Ankit. Thank you for sharing.
Spectacular stuff, really love the sheer depth of the stuff you talk about here. Can't wait to see what you've planned for the future!