In his book, You Are Here, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes how Buddha taught that the self is made of five elements: our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental formations, and our consciousness.

It is perception that really resonated with me, especially when he talked about false perceptions. Perceptions, the Buddha said, are very often false, which leads to suffering. We see people as threats, we weave fake narratives, we create all kinds of imaginary perils. We internalise our fears, which only compounds them, elevating them to be greater than they are. We see this more and more, especially with 24-hour news coverage, the internet, and social media. Conspiracy theories abound. Fake news takes hold. The narratives become twisted, corrupt, and bent out of shape. Perfectly innocent people are stigmatised, and false accusations thrown at them. Gossip becomes fact. People are hyped up and inflamed by news outlets that dramatise situations to make them as much of a spectacle as possible. Hiding behind their social media facade, people want drama, and they know they can comment with pretty much what they like. They can make comments online that they wouldn’t say out loud, and boy do they say some horrible stuff. It’s a sickness. The symptom of a diseased society. A society that does not practice compassion in the first instance. We need to be able to recognise when our own perceptions are false, and this isn’t easy. We are bombarded with information and messages minute by minute, which leads to sensory overload. We end up worrying about situations in other parts of the world that we can have no control over. We identify with people we will never meet and make enemies of perfectly good people who happen to have a contrary opinion to us. It’s time to switch the news off. It’s time to spend less time on social media and more time in the real world. It’s time to switch notifications off. It’s time to look at the list of people we’ve decided we don’t like and ask yourself how much we actually know about them. It’s time to dismantle our prejudices and take down our hostilities. It’s time to practice compassion. It’s time to look into the deepest parts of ourselves to find out what is false about ourself and the things we believe in. And when we’ve done that, we have to repeat the exercise time and time again. Only then will our false perceptions be cured, our social sickness be healed and we can begin to find internal peace.