The founders of the mindfulness movement have grown evangelical, predicting that the discipline has the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance. Mindfulness enthusiasts believe that paying closer attention to the present moment without passing judgement has the power to transform the world. Yet, anything that offers success without trying to change is not revolutionary; it just helps people cope. It could also make things worse.

Mindfulness is problematic

Mindfulness does help reduce stress, chronic anxiety and other disorders. Becoming aware of automatic reactions can make people calmer and potentially kinder. Yet, the problem is how mindfulness has been packaged. Mindfulness is essentially concentration training. It is stripped of the Buddhism teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of detaching from a false sense of self while having compassion for all other things. What remains is a tool of self-discipline disguised as self-help.

Worthy dimensions to mindfulness practice

Instead of setting people free, mindfulness help practitioners adjust to the conditions that caused their problems and reinforce its destructive logic. People are expected to adapt. Stress has been pathologised and privatised, and the burden of managing it is outsourced to individuals, causing the proponents of mindfulness to step in to save the day. But mindfulness can only be effective if they accept that personal stress also has societal causes. Failing to address collective suffering and creating change to remove it reduces mindfulness to something that keeps people focused on themselves.

Overturning a dysfunctional system

Instead of discussing how attention is monetised and manipulated by large corporations such as Google and Facebook, we are told to find the crisis in our minds, saying it is our failure to be mindful and resilient in an unsure economy.  If we are sad about being unemployed and losing our health insurance, the mindfulness revolution meekly accepts the circumstances, ruling out a way to critically engage with causes of suffering. This submissive position is framed as freedom without the genuine freedom found within a cooperative and just society.

Mindfulness advocates unwittingly provide support for the status quo

Proponents of mindfulness believe that the practice is apolitical and that moral inquiry should be avoided. It is assumed that ethical behaviour will happen naturally from practice, through the teacher's example of soft-spoken niceness, or through the chance of self-discovery. But it is flawed. The emphasis on “non-judgmental awareness” can prevent one's moral intelligence. This reduction in stress and increase in personal happiness and wellbeing are much easier to sell than questioning injustices.

The commodification of mindfulness

All that mindfulness promise is "cruel optimism", as cultural theorist Lauren Berlant shows. We are told that if we practise mindfulness and get our individual lives in order, we can be happy and secure. We are promised that stable employment and success will naturally follow. It is implied that we can gain self-mastery and thrive. Yet it is cruel to be promised to have it all if we can sit in silence, watch our breath, and wait. Because we neglect shared vulnerabilities and interdependence, we fail to imagine collective ways we might protect ourselves.

Promises of mindfulness

The long read: It is sold as a force that can help us cope with the ravages of capitalism, but with its inward focus, mindful meditation may be the enemy of activism

Stashed ideas

The mindfulness conspiracy

Her Majesty has more to offer in terms of life advice than any self-appointed wellbeing guru on social media.When I was in rehab, way back when, I heard a piece of advice that has stayed with me ever since. It came from a counsellor, during a session about staying sober in the real world.It focused on dealing with stressful events or people that would usually be a trigger to drink or take drugs. His advice? “Just smile and wave,” he said, himself smiling and waving.

Her Majesty

Smiling and waving has got me through all sorts of situations since – tantrumming children, broken boilers, dead guinea pigs, plummeting oestrogen, et cetera, et cetera. It is the piece of mental-health advice I go to above all others, the thing that keeps me sane when all else is failing. But it is only recently that I have realised who is really responsible for this priceless piece of guidance. Not that counsellor, as dear as he is to me. Not a self-help guru or psychological expert. No. It’s the Queen.

It's the Queen

The Queen is… well, the queen of smiling and waving, isn’t she? I realised this as I watched her at her Platinum Jubilee, standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, despite the obvious discomfort of her 96 years. There is a tendency among younger generations – and I include myself in this – to see the Royal family as symbols of the repressed stiff upper lip that has been such a barrier to good mental health in this country.

Platinum Jubilee

But my mind changed as I watched The Unseen Queen, the incredible BBC documentary narrated by the monarch herself, featuring previously private home footage of Her Majesty as a child and young mother. As I watched her skip through the fields of Balmoral and gulp back a cup of tea almost as big as her 10-year-old head, I realised that the Queen isn’t buttoned up. She’s just – in the parlance of Instagram influencers everywhere – boundaried.

The Unseen Queen

I’ve watched it several times now and, on each occasion, I am struck by a sort of lightning bolt of spiritual enlightenment: the Queen has more to offer us in terms of life advice than any of the self-appointed wellbeing gurus who now litter social media and popular culture. It’s all there in this 76-minute documentary, a veritable treasure trove of guidance for those feeling slightly adrift.

A Spiritual Enlightment

Here she is on raising children: “As with any team, there is strength in combination”; and here she is on the importance of inclusivity, way back in 1947 during her first visit to South Africa, long before any of us understood the concept of “woke”: “We share the same world, but we do not share the same opportunities. A tolerant society actively develops the people that belong to it, and enriches their lives because it values their diversity.”

We Share The Same World

Here is a woman who could have got lost in glitz and glamour, but who instead shares the qualities of all great spiritual leaders, from the Dalai Lama to the Pope: she knows that no one person is better than any other and that she is but a vessel for something far bigger than herself. “We are all visitors to this time, this place,” she says at one point during the film. “We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love. And then we return home.”

Our Purpose Here

The Queen talks of faith in the future and the need to remove fear and in just a few simple words she passes on a message that spiritual teachers such as Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra have dedicated their entire lives to spreading. “I have lived long enough to know that things never remain quite the same for very long.” Queen-speak, that is, for the most Instagrammable quote of all: This too shall pass. I was touched by her sentiments on doing service for others – another concept that is crucial in the treatment of addicts.

Faith In The Future

“We sometimes think the world’s problems are so big that we can do little to help,” she said. "On our own, we cannot end wars or wipe out injustice. The cumulative impact of thousands of small acts of goodness can be bigger than we imagine.”And when she talks of her late husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, she may as well be summing up the key to life: “His sense of service, intellectual curiosity and capacity to squeeze the fun out of any situation were all irrepressible.” I had not thought of the Queen as a mental-health icon before, but now I cannot stop. Long may she smile and wave over us.

A Mental Health Icon

Her Majesty has more to offer in terms of life advice than any self-appointed wellbeing guru on social media

Day by Day

The Queen is my mental health icon

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Anything that's vaguely popular online must be defined or decoded - and ultimately, reduced to a bundle of marketable vibes with a kitschy label.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Trend brain encourages us to simplify everything online into something either buyable, understandable, or moral (and therefore worthy of consumption).</li><li class="ql-align-justify">There is a devout certainty to the speed at which they're cycled through.</li></ul>

Our 'Trend' Brain

<ul><li>Modern consumers are bombarded with a stream of inconsequential trends to take note of - marketing vessels for products that fit into a paradigm devoid of meaning</li><li>Trends, or the illusion of a trend, benefit the fast-fashion companies and direct-to-consumer brands making products that aesthetically align with fleeting fancies</li><li>The effects of trend-induced brain rot have trickled into online discourse</li><li>Topics and figures deemed most important on the internet are based on where they fall along the spectrum of trendiness, depending on the scale of attention they command</li></ul>

Irrelevant and Inconsequential Trends

Recuperation: the process by which subcultural ideas and images become commodified and reincorporated into mainstream societyToday, recuperation is achieved through micro-aesthetics, memes, and online communities they stem fromUnlike the radical subcultures of yore, which had their own visual schema, language, and aesthetics, these digital scenes aren’t exactly subcultural.They often promote a sort of political weakening.

Recuperation

<ul><li>Even a whimsical aesthetic can become a commodified status signal - a way to demonstrate that you're a distinct individual who is in the know.</li><li>With the mass decentralization of culture, even while platforms are becoming increasingly centralized, there's no way for a sane person to keep up, but still we are expected to.</li><li>We're told we must evolve or our digital personas will wither into irrelevance as our style grows stale.</li></ul>

Keeping Up With Trends One After The Other

Coastal grandmother, night luxe, that girl. Anything can be a trend on the internet. Why are we so determined to name them?

Trends are dead

"Goblin mode” is spending the day in bed while scrolling endlessly through social media, pouring chips in your mouth, downing Eggo toaster oven waffles with hot sauce over the sink because you don't care to put them on a plate. Leaving the house in your pyjamas and socks to get a Diet Coke from the bodega. Goblin mode is not an identity, but a frame of mind that can be switched on and off. It's about a lack of aesthetic.

The era of goblin mode

Goblin mode is the opposite of trying to improve yourself. On TikTok, #GoblinMode is fixed to everything from "smoking weed alone and getting scared", to "not taking your meds". The trend is a departure from the hyper-curated "cottagecore" influence of early pandemic days -  a 2020 trend that included pastel colours and showcasing wholesome homemaking skills such as baking and embroidery. But as the pandemic wears on endlessly, people are tired of such goals and is feeling kind of wild.

Reason for the goblin mode

On TikTok, this hashtag has 366,000 views and features videos of users proclaiming to be the opposite of "that girl" - a highly curated aesthetic. The "that girl" trend sets an unrealistic standard for girls to think that if they aren't waking up early to exercise, their lives are not put together.

#goblinmode hashtag

Goblin mode embodies a certain air of harmless mischief. The power of goblin mode is that it takes over. You act crazy and enter a very mythological space where you want to make trouble after years of pandemic induced disappointment.

Healthy goblin mode and destructive goblin mode

The term embraces the comforts of depravity and a direct departure from the ‘cottagecore’ influence of early pandemic days

Slobbing out and giving up: why are so many people going ‘goblin mode’?

<ul><li>The end of passwords. New forms of more secure authentication will replace passwords, such as a link sent via email, push notification, or a biometric scan.</li><li>Proof of stake. It offers a way to verify cryptocurrency transactions and cut energy use by 99.05%.</li><li>Synthetic data for AI. Training AI requires a massive amount of data that is messy or reflects biases. Companies are creating and selling synthetic data to train AI.</li><li>Covid variant tracking. Better surveillance allows scientists to track the spread of the virus.</li></ul>

Breakthrough computer technologies

<ul><li>AI for protein folding. The body uses proteins for nearly everything, The way protein folds determine its activity, yet it can take months to figure out its structure. An AI called AlphaFold2 has figured out how to quickly design drugs for various diseases.</li><li>Malaria vaccine. The new malaria vaccine is the world’s first vaccine for parasitic infection and is approved by the World Health Organisation.</li><li>A pill for covid. Pfizer developed a new drug to provide broad protection against Covid-19 when combined with vaccines.</li></ul>

Breakthrough biological technologies

<ul><li>Long-lasting grid battery. New iron-based batteries are made using cheaper and more abundant material that is more practical for grid storage.</li><li>Practical fusion reactors. A startup plans to deliver limitless, carbon-free electricity to the grid by the early 2030s, using a powerful new magnet to build smaller, less expensive reactors.</li><li>Carbon removal factory. The world’s largest carbon removal factory recently opened in Iceland to mitigate climate change.</li></ul>

Breakthrough physics technologies

This list represents a glimpse into our collective future.

The mindfulness conspiracy

The Queen is my mental health icon

Trends are dead

Slobbing out and giving up: why are so many people going ‘goblin mode’?

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2022

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