Meditation and mindfulness have seen a surge in popularity in recent years, driven by the proliferation of apps, programs, coaches, and various related products. There are more than 100 million users who turn to mindfulness apps like Calm or Headspace. In a world of hacks for everything from to-do lists to skincare, why not consciousness, too?

The increasing number of westerners practicing meditation has led to the emergence of a thriving industry, with a focus on presenting mindfulness as an effective stress reduction technique. This simplified and marketable concept has proven to be lucrative, with the broader mindfulness industry reaching a valuation of $97.6 million in 2021 and projected to triple in value by 2031.

Detractors often criticize this trend as "McMindfulness," accusing it of being a capitalist perversion of meditation. They argue that it places too much emphasis on individual internal experiences, such as focusing on one's breath, while neglecting to address the broader social structures responsible for much of the stress in people's lives.

Beyond the commercial aspect, here are some of the more fundamental problems of Modern Mindfulness:

• Mindfulness programs only scratch the surface of meditation, which is WAY MORE than a stress-reduction technique. Attention and emotional regulation is actually a side-effect.
• It’s too self-conscious *“This is all really a case of our own proverb, ‘‘a watched pot never boils.’’ For if you try to watch your mind concentrate, it will not concentrate. And if, when it is concentrated, you begin to watch for the arrival of some insight into reality, you have stopped concentrating.” (*Alan Watts)
• There's no serious evidence suggesting that the current generation of tools works
• Most of it is counter-productive noise, complicated/easy distractions solutions to a simple/hard problem (see here about the two kinds of difficulty).The practice has been around for millennia, and knowledgeable meditators (not TikTok personal dev influencers !) pretty much all agree on this: just sit down and do nothing. what happens happens. you think, go through stuff & sort it out until your mind is silent.

This is why I ordinarily avoid discussion of all the various kinds of Asian meditation techniques, such as Yoga. For I am inclined to feel that for most Westerners, these are not aids but obstacles to concentration. It is not unaffected and natural for us to assume the lotus posture and go through all sorts of spiritual gymnastics. So many Westerners who do this kind of thing are so self-conscious about it, so preoccupied with the idea of doing it that they never really do it at all. For the same reason, I am rather leery of too much Zen—especially when it means importing all the purely incidental apparatus of Zen from Japan, all the strictly technical formalities, and all the endless and pointless discussion about who has or hasn’t attained satori, or about how many koans one has solved, or how many hours a day one sits in zazen, or meditation. This sort of thing is not Zen or Yoga; it is just a fad, just religiosity, and is precisely self-consciousness and affectation rather than unselfconsciousness and naturalness. If you have to import it from Asia, you do not have it at all. Therefore, the important thing is simply to begin—anywhere, wherever you are. If you happen to be sitting, just sit. If you are smoking a pipe, just smoke it. If you are thinking out a problem, just think. But don’t think and reflect unnecessarily, compulsively, from sheer force of nervous habit. In Zen, they call this having a leaky mind—like an old barrel with open seams which cannot contain itself. (Alan Watts)

Now don’t get me wrong here,meditation is undeniably beneficial and has been well-established through numerous studies. It just needs to be transported and dissmenated by less profit-seeking people and organizations, We should view meditation for what it is: SIMPLE, a process of “emptying” and easing the mind, rather than one of adding complexity and confusion. Here’s a great ressource about **How to Start a Meditation Practice.**

Another method I’ve learned is to just sit there and you close your eyes for at least one hour a day. You surrender to whatever happens—don’t make any effort whatsoever. You make no effort for something, and you make no effort against anything. If there are thoughts running through your mind, you let the thoughts run. (Naval Ravikant, source)

More:

• **Mindfulness meditation in America has a capitalism problem (VOX)**
• McMindfulness By Ronald Purser (book)

One should always strive to achieve desired functionality with the minimum amount of code and technical complexity. Code is costly to test and maintain, so if the same work can be accomplished with less code, that is a bonus.

Central idea:

• Code always comes with a cost of ownership, it’s a liability.
• What the code does for you is the asset.

Don’t leave dead code as comments, just remove it. Commented out code becomes outdated and worthless very quickly, so you better delete it sooner rather than later, to reduce the mess. Keep good backups (Git).

You should also minimize the number of technologies, programming languages and frameworks used in your codebase. Introducing a new technology into the ecosystem means adding a software component that requires learning, mastering and maintaining. This imposes a large burden of cognitive load on the engineers, as well as consuming time and resources for setting up, managing and maintaining it. The system also becomes costly and very difficult to debug because of the many tools involved. Nowadays, most software systems have too many tools and technologies for a human to comprehend.

This is where cloud provider APIs are very useful. Using managed/serverless services allow you to outsource the construction and upkeep of some of your app components to some very skilled engineering team focusing on only that. This way, you save time that can be spent on what you excel at.