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The Baffler No. 27 March 2015
Mind Your Own Business
by Barbara Ehrenreich
At about the beginning of this decade, mass-market mindfulness rolled
out of the Bay Area like a brand new app. Very much like an app, in
fact, or a whole swarm of apps. Previous self-improvement trends had
been transmitted via books, inspirational speakers, and CDs; now,
mindfulness could be carried around on a smartphone. There are hundreds
of them, these mindfulness apps, bearing names like Smiling Mind and
Buddhify. A typical example features timed stretches of meditation, as
brief as one minute, accompanied by soothing voices, soporific music,
and images of forests and waterfalls.
This is Buddhism sliced up and commodified, and, in case the connection
to the tech industry is unclear, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist
blurbed a seminal mindfulness manual by calling it “the instruction
manual that should come with our iPhones and BlackBerries.” It’s enough
to make you think that the actual Buddha devoted all his time under the
Bodhi Tree to product testing. In the mindfulness lexicon, the word
“enlightenment” doesn’t have a place.
In California, at least, mindfulness and other conveniently accessible
derivatives of Buddhism flourished well before BlackBerries. I first
heard the word in 1998 from a wealthy landlady in Berkeley, advising me
to be “mindful” of the suffocating Martha Stewart-ish decor of the
apartment I was renting from her, which of course I was doing everything
possible to un-see. A possible connection between her “mindfulness” and
Buddhism emerged only when I had to turn to a tenants’ rights group to
collect my security deposit. She countered with a letter accusing people
like me—leftists, I suppose, or renters—of oppressing Tibetans and
disrespecting the Dalai Lama.
During the same stint in the Bay Area, I learned that rich locals liked
to unwind at Buddhist monasteries in the hills, where, for a few
thousand dollars, they could spend a weekend doing manual labor for the
monks. Buddhism, or some adaptation thereof, was becoming a class
signifier, among a subset of Caucasians anyway, and nowhere was it more
ostentatious than in Silicon Valley, where star player Steve Jobs had
been a Buddhist or perhaps a Hindu—he seems not to have made much of a
distinction—even before it was fashionable for CEOs to claim a spiritual
life. Mindfulness guru and promoter Soren Gordhamer noticed in 2013 that
tech leaders from Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other major tech
companies seemed to be “tapped into an inner dimension that guides their
work.” He called it “wisdom” and named his annual conferences Wisdom
2.0—helpful shorthand, as it happens, for describing the inner smugness
of the Bay Area elite.
full: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/mind-your-business
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