The Pearls of Islam

7th March 2011 2 Rabee AThanee 1432 Volume 3 Issue 10 by Bilal Sahib

Reminder Series

Amusing Ourselves To Death

After watching a few episodes of How TV Ruined Your Life on iPlayer I was pushed into a state of introspection. Why is it that revision turns to procrastination in a matter of minutes, and how is it possible that Im able to fall asleep first thing in the morning during lectures but spend hours clicking away on youtube? Being a medic, it was only natural that rationalising this dilemma led me to human physiology. In the mesolimbic dopamine system (the central reward pathway), pleasure-inducing drugs target dopaminergic neurons projecting into the Nucleus Accumbens. In nature, when we do something that is necessary for our survival, these neurons become more active- causing us to associate this sort of behaviour with pleasure. The best drugs not only cause a lot of dopamine to be released, but cause it to be released immediately. This increases the association between the drug (stimulus) and the pleasurable response; this sort of instant gratification then needs to be sustained with more regular doses of the drug (or other stimulus). (Bear with me) This leads me back to How TV Ruined Your Life. In the 21 st century, we have a sense of entitlement installed within us from a young age, and our fast paced lives are intertwined intimately with instant gratification. Because we arent hunter gatherers that need endorphins to reward us when we chase after food, there is a trend to invest out time and resources into finding artificial, material stimuli to give us instantly gratifying dopaminergic hits.

Give out of what We have provided for you, before death comes to one of you and he says, 'My Lord, if You would only reprieve me for a little while, I would give in charity and become on of the righteous Quran, 63:10
Time, like our bodies, are an amanah from Allah. He has entrusted us with these resources so that we may use them wisely. Spending hours glued to the TV, or pathologically avoiding work for YouTube is, on a smaller physiological scale, addiction in the same way as a heroin addict is addicted to their drug. As muslims, we need to take these blessings and use them in the way of Allah- be that in revising for exams so we can get a good degree and make a difference in the world, or in focussing on ibadah rather than Facebook. Our time and our bodies need to be in a constant state of servitude to Allah, rather than being slaves to a small and physically insignificant collection of pleasure neurons in our striatum. Just as theres a weak association between pleasure and a far-away good exam result, its easy to get caught up in the instant gratification of dunya when the akhirah is so far away. I speak to myself before others as I say this- as with any addiction, the transition away from seeking addictive temporal pleasures to seeking the pleasure of Allah takes persistence and patience.

By the declining day, man is [deep] in loss, except for those who believe, do good deeds, urge one another to the truth, and urge one another to steadfastness. -Quran, Al-Asr