[noduerme]

'Mindfulness' is nothing but egotism. I don't want to throw around things like privilege and bored housewife, but it's just a self-help cult that taps into the same basic infrastructure as any other religion, then encourages people to feel proud of themselves for accessing relatively easy-to-access parts of their brains and gives itself credit for helping them overcome the psychological trauma and hurdles to getting there.

To me, the saddest thing about "mindfulness" is that it is to existentialism what the Taliban is to statues of Buddha. A very blunt tool for people without enough time or patience to examine reality or actually ask, "why is this thing here? Might it mean something?" This is pop-cultural garbage taken to cult level to overwhelm fragile peoples' minds, without giving them a chance to understand the historical context of their place and time or what reason they might actually have to be going through the things they're going through.

So mindfulness leading to egoism is a foregone conclusion, because it's a degenerated version of existential or Buddhist thought, intentionally turned into trifling horseshit for people who were born, live, and will die without any notion or care of anything that happened before them. And they were already egoists; and having a problem you can't frame in broader terms than your own ability to pay attention to it for a few minutes is having a pretty pathetic problem indeed.

[acituan]

> Mindfulness' is nothing but egotism

Eh, I think this is reading too much into it. Mindfulness is merely a training in relaxing and finessing of our rigid egoic framing and thus be able to generate more insights. It is egocentric in the sense of being a training on the ego function but the telos is actually breaking out of default egocentricity.

It is the culture of narcissism that turns this into a tool of spiritual bypass and optimizing one’s own detached wellbeing. It uses mindfulness as an emotional regulation tool, not a frame expanding education in preparation to other practices.

Don’t get me wrong, everything you point out as missing is accurate, it is just it was never mindfulness’s burden to bear alone as it’s nothing but a single practice to be done in the context of Buddha, dharma and sangha.

[jazzyjackson]

This is my favorite rant on HN yet

Buddhism was already distilled “Hinduism for Export”, it is foolish to distill it further. IMO the whole fad is a result of Americans mistaking Buddhism for religion, and not pre-western psychology, so in a bid to get the benefits without the baggage, and to be allowed to teach yoga in schools, mindfulness practitioners dropped the spiritual framework and just said “focus on your breath, it’s good for you”

[noduerme]

You said it better than I could have. I'm annoyed about the secondary effects of falsy beliefs, but I think you got more directly to the root of it. Lots of religions are more palatable upon export, is a good point. The Romans would have never picked up Christianity as a fashionable cult unless it had mostly dropped the whole monotheistic thing.

[rozularen]

only when one is feeling nice with itself can share and spread love to others... I think mindfulness might be a great tool to achieve that stability

[andi999]

Looking at the founding story there are some analogies aren't there?

[noduerme]

One thing I like about cold-blooded Camus/Sartrean existentialism is, we're fucked up, broken creatures, so when we do occasionally get the best work out of ourselves, or even experience true empathy, it's a miracle. When you say you feel it too often it stops being true. Extend that to a whole culture where you have to say it all the time, and everyone's just a liar.