from Hacker News

How corporates co-opted mindfulness to make us bear the unbearable (2015)

by nowherecat on 8/11/17, 4:18 PM with 54 comments

• by voidhorse on 8/11/17, 5:14 PM

  If it can be sold and used as a tool for subjugation humans will quickly determine and optimize the ways in which to do so.

  That's the beauty of capitalism--or possibly even economics in general--it acknowledges and respects nothing that falls outside of its own scope. No matter how ancient, sophisticated, sacred, or meaningful a practice may have been--no matter what reverence our ancestral betters may have applied to it, capitalism will find the most effective way to utilize it as a strictly economic material and convert it into profit. For the true capitalist there is no extra or supra-capitalism. Capitalism envelops the world. It swallows and defuses all meaning and translates it into the small subset of meanings it understands. All is reduced to pure economic terms--it is no longer a question of interfacing with the practices of your ancestors, respecting history or engaging in spiritual practice--the meditation is only understood and useful insofar as it has an assignable quantity related to productive increase or related directly to profit.

  I can at least take some comfort in the fact that articles like this still crop up and call the beast into question.

• by maxxxxx on 8/11/17, 4:41 PM

  I used to teach meditation and yoga for a while. One of my teachers said that meditation should make you less resilient to stress and make you realize that need to change your life. So if someone credits their material success to meditation it's best to view this as an abuse or misunderstanding of the practice.

  It took me a while to accept but now I agree with this viewpoint.

• by Boothroid on 8/11/17, 4:46 PM

  'The current translations of ancient mindful practices are also highly gendered. In a culture where women are much more likely to be encouraged to apply acceptance, silence, stillness and the relinquishing of resistance to their problems, the trap of mindfulness can be set to stun for those who may be much more in need of speaking up, resisting and taking space in the workplace.'

  This seems completely back to front to me. Surely it's men that have greater societal expectations of stoicism, toughness etc. than women, and fewer options for social support. I'm sure we all know about higher rates of suicide in men. These are often linked to the types of pressures I mention.

  Apart from that I generally agree that this trend is pretty insidious. One of their latest wheezes is 'resilience', which from my reading boiled down to 'hey there x, what's your major malfunction that you can't cope with the soul destroying drudgery and corporate psychopathy like y? Perhaps you should read our piece about resilience to learn how to become a good drone again. We wouldn't want to have to lose you would we?'.

• by nxsynonym on 8/11/17, 5:29 PM

  > "If we truly become mindful of our existence then our recurrent anxieties become not just a wave we watch pass through our minds, not something to be mastered in order to be a better servant, but a call to take action in order to be more fully alive."

  Agreed. The whole point behind meditation and mindfulness is to create a more well rounded spiritual life/existence. Not to ignore the things that cause you distress or pain, but to identify them clearly and untangle issues to figure out how to get past them.

  My current company offers a whole slew of "wellness programs" - yoga, meditation, running clubs, etc. Great in theory, but they all take place during "lunch break", are limited to 20 mins or so, and charge (albeit, a small fee). None of these, I believe, are to benefit the lives of the employees but to create a sense of "forward thinking" in the company to encourage productivity.

  Want my stress and anxieties to disappear at work and get me to be more productive? Pay more and ask for less working hours.

• by PaulHoule on 8/11/17, 4:29 PM

  Yep, just how antidepressant manufactures co-opted research on social dominance to reverse some of the biochemical changes that happen when you are "ground down like a minion".

• by hosh on 8/11/17, 5:51 PM

  While there is truth to that, mindfulness provides the basis for authentic expression of the natural self. And often times, that will mean GTFO of an abusive situation.

  How you know whether it really is authentic and not simply a story is that it arises naturally, spontaneously, and effortless. It will have a "deep" marker to it. There is an active test you can apply: try to poke at the action. If it resists, comes up with any excuses, rationalizations, or justifications in order to stay attached to it, then it is still a story, albeit, coming from a very deep place inside of it.

  If in poking it, it stays silent and it feels like it is expressed unsupported by any narrative, then that is coming from your authentic self. In other words, it doesn't need your approval or disapproval, or anyone else's, including social norms and corporate policy.[1]

  Note: the Buddhist notions don't have a notion of "true self" (or rather, it moves from "no self" -> "true self" -> "no self"). I'm drawing from classical, transcendental non-dual Shaiva Tantra[2] (which inspired and cross-polinated with tantric Buddhist), and it goes with "true self" -> "no self" -> "true self".

  The point of mindfulness is your freedom and your state of mind. It's fine if you are inspired to practice it because corporations made space for it (or more cynically, make you do it in order to tolerate bad situations). Your mind is your own, whether you want to be happy or miserable. There _are_ people who will mindfully tolerate bad working conditions as expressed from their authentic self ... and there are many others who won't. You won't know until you have cleared enough of your own obscurations to find out.

  [1] The followup is: in tantra, someone's natural, authentic self may be an asshole. If you don't like what your natural, authentic self is, tantra provides the tools for transformation into a different natural, authentic self. However, it is not as simple as changing the narrative, since a change in narrative is merely a change in narrative and not a change in your natural, authentic self.

  [2] Christopher Wallis. Tantra Illuminated

• by nickstefan12 on 8/11/17, 6:55 PM

  Interesting take. I could paraphrase this as a response to this sort of strawman, "It sucks that we have to pay [for xyz necessity], wait [in traffic for abc experience], and accept [toxic influencers on your life], but thats just part of the human experience".

  I think its an acceptable strawman, as often we do need to remind ourselves that, "No one but me is actually forcing me to [live here / work here / see these people ]".

• by squozzer on 8/11/17, 6:51 PM

  I would say that most institutions that exist for moral edification -- religions, Boy Scouts, civic clubs -- do essentially the same thing which is align the attitudes of the weaker to the benefit of the stronger.

• by ninju on 8/11/17, 7:38 PM

  This article is from 2015...shouldn't the HN entry be preceded with a (2015) (what are the rules/guidelines on that ?)