Lord, enlighten my darkness!

We are running faster and faster, more and more distracted—not only along the increasingly crowded streets of our cities, but especially along the highways of our minds, as though someone were chasing us. Phones ring, radios accompany us, unless we are absorbed in the world of the little screens on our smartphones, from which we part only at night, when we sleep—and even that sleep is restless.

The frantic pace of work—or, for some, of entertainment—tyrannizes us. It seems to enter our bloodstream, and we can no longer stop to catch our breath. It is becoming harder and harder for us to gather ourselves, and this unhealthy pace has made us lose our peace entirely. But what seems worst of all is that the world has grown accustomed even to this, as though it were simply the natural order of things.

Yet throughout all this, something else seems even more troubling to me. Human existence is moving increasingly into the virtual realm. Step by step, through legislation, a reality is being constructed that is so bureaucratized and so oriented toward the virtual world and artificial intelligence that reality itself is slipping more and more beyond our control. We are told that all of this is meant to make life easier, yet life is actually becoming increasingly complicated. Behind it all, however, lies nothing but the control, identification, and tracking of the human person down to the smallest details of his or her life—the control exercised by systems and entities that are making themselves masters of the world and of people’s destinies. We are becoming easier and easier to control.

Phantom narratives invade our subconscious

But even this would not be quite so serious were it not for the fact that people themselves are “adapting,” so to speak, to the new reality—or rather, conforming to it. The mass media is deeply involved in this process, becoming the true environment in which a critical mass of the population now exists. Through it, viruses circulate freely and settle comfortably in people’s minds and souls. Phantom narratives invade our subconscious and shape the inner lives, behavior, and choices of most people, even though each person believes himself to be free.

I look especially at young people, struggling desperately to preserve appearances, because appearances seem to be all they have left. They undergo all kinds of facial treatments, tattoo themselves, or pierce their skin with all sorts of metal. Yet the faces of many of them are sad when they are alone—bored, exhausted from so much acting, from trying to prove to the world how happy they are, when in reality they are on antidepressants. My heart aches when I see them: faceless crowds moving chaotically toward nowhere.

The world is becoming increasingly like what Dostoevsky foresaw in Raskolnikov’s dream in Crime and Punishment. Infected by microscopic creatures—trichinae in the novel, phantom narratives in our case—people seem to have lost their minds. Each believes in his own truth, implanted by the mass media, a truth that divides people even as it locks them into a pride and selfishness rarely seen in history on such a scale. Truth itself—the Truth that calls us to love and wisdom, to self-restraint and discernment, the Truth in whose image we were created—no longer has any relevance. People have been convinced that they can manage without Him, armed with the wisdom of TikTok and a bank card.

That is why almost nothing works as it once did, from education and the economy to politics and religious life. Every sphere is suffering from this sickness of the human mind, so much so that one may rightly wonder how much longer it will be before everything grinds to a halt, reaching a crisis with no solution—practically a collapse. We no longer need people, we are told. Robots and artificial intelligence will do almost everything within ten years or so. But why do we not understand that we must protect not so much our biological health as our mental health? The human mind is darker than ever before in history. There is a tremendous scattering of thought and attention—into ideas, conflicts, unsatisfied needs, fears, and obsessions. The road that leads to the heart is traveled less and less, as though we no longer knew that there is a road, or even a heart, at the center of our being. That is why people have lost the joy of living, and more and more simply drift from one day to the next in a state of perpetual inertia. Darkness is descending upon the world, where only screens, with their flickering glow, will remain to give any light.

Saint Gregory Palamas prayed to the Mother of God to enlighten his darkness. If one of the Church’s greatest theologians saw his own mind as being in darkness, how much greater is the darkness that oppresses our minds in these times.

We need an ecology of the mind

Virtual reality—the world of media-driven ideas, manipulation, sensations, and purely imaginary realities—is practically the opposite of the inner world of the human heart, where a person can encounter God in the Uncreated Light. Between the two lies everyday life, the world in which human beings have always lived: the so-called normal world, with all its good and evil, where, through the right use of things, one can come to know what is good, and through faith the way toward Truth is opened.

Today, more than ever before in history, we need a certain kind of mental hygiene. We must guard our minds against internet shorts and pointless distractions, seeking more than ever an inner stillness, peace, and greater prayerfulness. Only the grace of God can still keep us afloat, can still save us from the storm of mass media that has swept over the world, from the web of interconnections to which our minds are linked, above all through the smartphone. If we understand this, we will not only preserve our sanity, but we may also rediscover joy, enabling us to live amid the hell of despair and the collapse all around us. Indeed, we may even hope that in our own times we can still be saved.

For the words attributed to Saints Anthony, Ischyrion, and Pambo in the fourth century after Christ are becoming ever clearer:

“Days will come when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will rise up against him, saying: ‘You are mad, because you are not like us.’ And those who are saved in those days will be greater than we and than our Fathers.”

with Virgiliu Gheorghe Vlăescu

Article published in issue 206 (April 2026) of Familia Ortodoxă magazine

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