I don’t remember the first video I saw, but I remember his hypnotic blue eyes. The influencer, a former Buddhist monk and now a “positive psychology instructor,” looked at me through my phone in between photos of friends and acquaintances and talked about meditation. I don’t remember what he said, but it was probably something about staying in the moment and why the spiritual practice is hard, but why it’s worth continuing. So even before I watched the video and decided to do the spiritual practice, I had listened to the guidance and taken the advice. I did as I was told. Of all the other videos and images bombarding me, this one seemed more peaceful and worthwhile. It was an Instagram account, but it seemed to offer the polar opposite of Instagram. This version of Buddhism was just waiting for me to embrace it and open my heart to the truth. All I had to do was keep watching.
After watching that video, others followed suit. And although I didn’t seek them out, more people showed up to me because the algorithm recognized that I had once decided to watch a full 30 seconds of a meditation video. A few months later, without any particular effort, I was passively watching videos of a few spiritual leaders in bits and pieces throughout the day, absorbing much more than I had intended. Without intending to, I had a kind of quasi-spiritual practice.
The algorithm created a bespoke yet inconsistent selection. Random spiritual influencers existed in the ether, speaking to me every day with hypnotic gazes and steady, soothing voices. Drawing on insights from a variety of religions and theories – Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Paganism, psychoanalysis – these faces lured me into passive faith. Despite repeated invitations to buy books, documentaries, premium memberships, lecture series, and apps, I never committed to any of them, yet months later, here I was. They told me to live in the moment, to not let distractions erase my life, and that’s exactly what was happening. I was listening to them talk when I could have gone outside and walked, swam, or seen friends. I was living this unfolding moment on my phone. This spiritual journey was leading me not to ashrams or retreats, ayahuasca ceremonies, or churches, but down this seemingly endless rabbit hole of short videos. I was being hypnotized in a very mundane way, but I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
Spiritual gurus are nothing new, but their online presence is, and the impact of social media on an individual’s psyche remains hard to grasp. There are many well-known gurus, including Jay Shetty, Gabriel Bernstein, Wayne Dyer, and Anthony Robbins, all of whom use a similar format to attract new followers. Russell Brand has established himself as a wellness guru on YouTube, offering meetings, classes, and advice on addiction and depression. Spiritual influencers now occupy a strange place in our lives, usually completely unregulated, despite offering an alternative to traditional mental health services. Some of these gurus sell packages that offer daily meditations and classes through a screen, while others organize retreats and expensive workshops that require you to sign an NDA to attend. Watching the occasional video on social media can escalate into an expensive habit. So what exactly is the appeal? Why are people sacrificing so much time, and often money?
One obvious culprit is social media, which uses a system of mimicry that tricks people into liking what their peers like by following certain accounts or “liking” certain videos or images. Accounts can use social engine optimization (SEO) to target specific audiences based on their search history. The same construct that hypnotizes one person into watching self-help or spiritual videos draws others into political extremism, pornography, or gambling. Submission is at the root of these behaviors, and is often effectively enforced by social media for profit.
Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm writes that the desire to submit to others, or to an ideology or group, is rooted in a fear of freedom. Such abdication of personal responsibility can obviously be misused, and he argues that the rise of fascism in particular typifies this behavior. More generally, he makes clear that the sense of complicity and power experienced indirectly through submitting to others comes from placing oneself in the role of follower. In political and religious movements and organizations, as well as in the entertainment and wellness industries, the power relations between leaders and followers maintain unequal power relations that simultaneously comfort and exploit people. It may be human nature to seek all-consuming power, even if it requires self-sacrifice and submission. I think the interesting question is where the blame lies in these scenarios: to what extent are followers exploited, and to what extent are they responsible?
When I think of these spiritual influencers, I recall those comforting moments that mimicked the experience of listening to a friend, therapist, or family member. Even though I knew the voices on the internet were just trying to sell me something, part of me felt foolish to follow them. But at the time, I ignored this, in part because that’s what the video was telling me to do. I was encouraged to just let these thoughts flow and focus on the vision of connection and unity expressed through the avatars of the leaders and teachers. These were such easy, gentle steps to surrender.
While the spiritual gurus whose videos I watched seemed genuinely helpful, or at least harmless, of course there are some whose teachings can be dangerous. Spiritual gurus who speak about issues like depression, addiction, and anxiety are targeted at individuals who are suffering in some way. There is no meaningful way to explain what viewers are taking from these videos or how it is affecting their mental health. For many, turning to spiritual practices is a good way to deal with these issues, but online spiritual gurus rarely meet their followers and therefore cannot be held responsible for how their teachings are received.
While social media may be contributing to a new spiritual turn, these online practices have their own problems. Traditionally, at least in major religions, spiritual practice involves acts of service within a strong moral framework and often some degree of learning and reading. It is not simply a desire for transcendence or escapism. It requires a basis of community that can generate true empathy and actual transformation in life – essentially people helping each other. Yet, despite the rhetoric of unity and peace, the current trend in spiritual leadership is profit-driven and decentralized. The separation and disassociation inherent in social media relationships, spiritual or otherwise, can lead to loneliness. Watching these videos can perpetuate a loop where we seek connection but only find the illusion of connection.
Thus, my unexpected online spiritual journey helped me understand the necessity of service, learning, and physical participation in any spiritual practice, and in life itself. It was not enough to simply desire abundance or peace while detached from physical reality. In that respect, I can only be grateful to the online gurus who, by chance or design, guided me in that direction and therefore kept their promises. In the monotonous and hypnotic online world, they may have eventually pushed me (mostly) offline, away from the false lights and false idols of the screen.
