The story of the golden goose has endured for centuries because it describes a timeless human weakness. We usually interpret it as a warning against greed: don’t destroy a long-term source of value for short-term gain. Fair enough. But in modern life, we are not killing the goose with a knife. We are killing it with hugs. We are smothering it with excess. We are loving it to death. And the end result is not rage or rebellion but virakti; a quiet state of non-indulgence, emotional withdrawal, and deep apathy.
From experience to addiction
Most human engagements follow a predictable path. Something begins as an experience. The experience becomes a taste. The taste turns into a habit. The habit slowly mutates into dependence. And dependence, with enough time and ease, becomes addiction. This is true for substances, but it is equally true for films, music, sports, shopping, social media, and even relationships. At the start, the experience is voluntary and fresh. There is curiosity, discovery, and emotional charge. Over time, familiarity creeps in. Familiarity becomes expectation. Expectation becomes entitlement. And entitlement quietly becomes boredom.
Psychology already explains this through ideas like ‘hedonic adaptation’ and ‘diminishing returns’, but you don’t need textbooks to understand it. Your own life is proof. The first bite of dessert feels heavenly. The fifth bite feels okay. The tenth bite feels heavy. The twentieth bite makes you swear off sweets for a week. Pleasure has a digestion capacity. Cross that capacity, and pleasure starts producing its opposite.
The poison of instant access
This is where modern life adds a dangerous twist. Earlier, access to pleasure and entertainment required effort. You waited for a movie release. You waited for a match day. You waited for letters, phone calls, and meetings. Waiting itself acted like a natural filter. Today, everything is instant. Infinite content, infinite matches, infinite reels, and infinite opinions. Ease has replaced effort. And ease, ironically, is poison for potency. When everything is available all the time, nothing feels special.
The result is not dramatic rejection. People do not stand up and declare, “I hate films now” or “I hate cricket now.” Instead, they say something far more alarming: “Kuch feel hi nahi hota.” That sentence is virakti in its purest form. No hatred. No passion. Just emotional numbness. The golden goose is still alive, but it has quietly stopped laying golden eggs.
Escalation without sensitivity
To compensate for this numbness, society keeps escalating in intensity. Louder music, faster edits, more violence, more explicit scenes, bigger sixes, flatter pitches, heavier bats, and higher scores. Every generation must shout louder to get the same reaction that a whisper once achieved. It feels like progress, but it is actually withdrawal management. We are not evolving taste; we are chasing lost sensitivity.
Cricket is perhaps a good example of this culture of overindulgence. There was a time when a Test series felt like a festival. A century was a career milestone. Rivalries were sacred. Today, cricket is everywhere: A-team matches, national team matches, domestic tournaments, franchise leagues, women’s cricket, Under-19 cricket — all covered relentlessly across television and social media. The game has turned into background noise. You are vaguely aware of scores, half-watching, half-scrolling. Emotional investment is thin. Ironically, the only consistently engaging drama now is the selection controversy. Who was dropped, who was favoured, and who was wronged? Not cricket itself.
Even batting, once a fine balance of skill, patience, and risk, has drifted towards brute-force entertainment. Flat pitches, tiny boundaries, and rules heavily tilted against bowlers make run-fests routine. Sixes rain so frequently that they no longer feel magical. When everything is a highlight, nothing is. And when nothing is special, interest quietly dies.
Cinema follows the same cycle. Violence keeps getting darker and more graphic because yesterday’s shock is today’s normal. But history shows a predictable backlash. After periods of excess, audiences suddenly crave softness. A simple romantic story, told with restraint, starts feeling revolutionary. Not because romance is new, but because gentleness becomes rare. It has happened before. It will happen again. Pendulum swings are brutal but honest.
Sensitivity as the real golden goose
Interestingly, Osho once narrated an anecdote about a man who loved sweets so much that he kept increasing his sugar intake every day. Eventually, even pure sugar stopped tasting sweet. Osho’s punchline was simple: the tongue had not changed; the man had destroyed his sensitivity. The same logic applies to all kinds of pleasures, entertainment, and activities. When sensitivity dies, we blame the world for becoming tasteless rather than accepting that we have numbed ourselves.
This is why physical space and mental distance are not luxuries; they are necessities. Distance creates anticipation. Anticipation creates excitement. Excitement keeps the experience alive. Without distance, there is no return. Without return, there is no rediscovery.
The golden goose, ultimately, is not cricket, cinema, art, or relationships. The golden goose is our ability to feel deeply. Every time we flood our senses without pause, every time we replace longing with instant access, and every time we choose volume over depth, we weaken that ability.
The solution is not rejection. It is rhythm. Engage, pause, digest, and return. Let silence exist. Let boredom exist. Boredom is not emptiness; it is fertile soil. From that soil, genuine desire grows again.
We do not suffer from a lack of pleasure today. We suffer from overfed pleasure. And overfed pleasure starves meaning. If we want gold again, we must stop strangling the goose with affection.
Sanjeev Kotnala is a brand and marketing consultant, writer, coach, and mentor.
