How mindfulness is making us more anxious
A cure for all our stresses or just part of a never-ending cycle of self-improvement?
1 May 2021 • 6:00am
Mindful meditation has become popular in the last ten years but it s not the answer for everyone
Today, being “mindful” has become a synonym for living a superior kind of life. Headspace, the mindfulness app created by Andy Puddicombe, a British former monk, is valued at $250 million (£180 million) and has two million subscribers. With books now published on everything from mindful baking to birdwatching, mindfulness is the key virtue of our times. How did we get here?
Like Everything These Days, Mindfulness Is Being Co-Opted by Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism shapes almost everything about people s lives, even meditation and that’s a problem.
If you’ve paid any attention to politics recently, particularly on Twitter, you’ve heard the word “neoliberalism.” It’s used to describe so many different politicians, ideologies, and policies that it’s hard to define what it means.
But it’s important to define, because neoliberalism shapes almost everything about our lives, even how we practice meditation and that’s a problem.
My favorite definition comes from political scientist Wendy Brown, who says it’s “the expansion of markets understood as competition to every feature of life, including democracy, human social life, education, social services, and so forth.”