One wonders what is the future of mankind, the future of all those children you see shouting, playing?. What is their future? The future is what we are now. This has been there for many thousands of years-the living and dying, and all the travail of our lives. We don’t seem to pay much attention to the future. You see on television endless entertainment from morning until late in the night. The children are entertained. The commercials all sustain the feeling that you are being entertained. And this is happening practically all over the world. There is the entertainment of sport-thirty, forty thousand people watching a few people in the arena and shouting themselves hoarse. And you also go and watch some ceremony being performed in a great cathedral, some ritual, and that too is a form of entertainment. You call that holy, religious, but it is still an entertainment-a sentimental, romantic experience, a sensation of religiosity.
So you have to consider how the worlds of entertainment and sport are capturing your mind, shaping your life. Where is all this leading to? Or perhaps you are not concerned at all? You probably don’t care about tomorrow. Probably you haven’t given it thought, or, if you have, you may say it is too complex, too frightening, too dangerous to think of the coming years.
When the entertainment industry takes over, when the young people, the students, the children, are constantly instigated to pleasure, to fancy, to romantic sensuality, the words restraint and austerity are pushed away, never even given a thought.. You probably won’t even listen to what the implications of austerity are. When you have been brought up from childhood to amuse yourself and to escape from yourself through entertainment-religious or otherwise-and when most of the psychologists say that you must express everything you feel and that any form of holding back or restraint is detrimental, leading to various forms of neuroticism, you naturally enter more and more into the world of sport, amusement, entertainment, all helping you to escape from what you are.
This article has been written by by Jiddu Krishnamurti.