One person’s struggle with cable news and the search for deeper meaning.
Most mornings I make the same mistake: I turn on cable news. I know. Bad idea. Five stories about how the world is going to hell, then, a moment later, a cheerful anchor tells me the markets are up, as though that’s supposed to lift my spirits. But it doesn’t. I check my retirement account, see my few dollars growing, and still feel a kind of hollowness. If the markets are up, why do I feel so down?
The Bhagavad Gita has a word for this restlessness: kama, a Sanskrit term often translated as desire, but a better definition would be longings born of ego. And that doesn’t just mean greed. I’ve caught myself chasing “good” desires, too: publishing more, teaching more, doing more. Noble pursuits, maybe, but still ego driven. The Gita’s warning is that even these polished desires keep us circling in the same karmic loop.
When Work Became Worship
I grew up hearing that hard work was a virtue. My postwar generation has lived by that creed, but the story is older than us baby-boomers. For centuries, the religious establishment was suspicious of wealth. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven,” the Bible warned. Money was considered dangerous, even corrupting.
Then came the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly wealth looked like divine favor. John D. Rockefeller, who built Standard Oil, called petroleum “the bountiful gift of the great Creator.” He poured his fortune into universities and ministries. Piety became measurable in productivity.
Before long, the God part slipped away—work hard and prosper, whether He exists or not—and it’s a credo that still shapes the way many people measure their days.
The Cage We Live In
The French sociologist Max Weber warned back in 1905 that capitalism’s “iron cage” would trap us all “until the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.” Not a bad prediction, yet more than a century later, consumer culture has us buying as though natural resources were infinite.
Behind the simple math of how much-longer-can-this-go-on lies something darker. I became vegan years ago after seeing what factory farms do to animals: living beings slaughtered and redefined as units of protein, engineered for efficiency. It was a shock to realize how much suffering could be hidden behind consumption and supermarket packaging. That, too, is kama: “progress” so effectively disguised that life itself becomes commodified.
A Different Measure
The Gita doesn’t tell us to walk away from our life. It doesn’t scold us for wanting things. It simply asks: is this desire freeing you or binding you? That’s a question I try to ask myself these days when I’m about to buy, scroll, or react. Am I moving from clarity or from compulsion? In the Gita, the warrior Arjuna still goes to war. Action is inevitable. The difference is that he acts awake, not asleep.
So What Now?
Markets will rise and fall. What matters is whether we rise and fall with them. Here’s a modest exercise you might find useful. Before the next impulse purchase, ask yourself, who is choosing? Is it the real me, or a me fabricated by the consumer culture around me? On a larger scale, we can push for accountability from industries that profit off our desires while depleting the planet. On a more immediate scale, we can push for the same in ourselves.
The Gita’s teaching is quite practical: act but act awake. And maybe turn off the television.
