Mindfulness has become a household word.
Time magazine's cover of a youthful blond woman peacefully blissing out anchors the feature story, '
Mindful Revolution.' From endorsements by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Goldie Hawn, to monks, neuroscientists, and meditation coaches rubbing shoulders with CEOs at the
World Economic Forum in Davos, it is clear that mindfulness has gone mainstream.
But is the mindfulness boom really a revolution? If it is, what exactly has been overturned or radically transformed to garner such grand status?Wall Street and corporations are still conducting business as usual, special interests and political corruption goes unchallenged, public schools are still suffering from massive underfunding and neglect, the concentration of wealth and inequality has reached record levels, mass incarceration and prison overcrowding has become the new social plague, indiscriminate shooting of Blacks by police and the demonizing of the poor remains commonplace, America's militaristic imperialism continues to spread, and the impending disasters of global warming are already rearing their ugly heads.
To consider only the corporate sector: with over
$300 billion in losses due to stress-related absences, and nearly
$550 billion in losses due to a lack of "employee engagement," it is unsurprising why it has jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon. Such losses in production and efficiency threaten the logic of profit-making. For capitalism to survive, as Nicole Ashoff points out in
The New Prophets of Capital, "people must willingly participate in and reproduce its structures and norms," and in times of crisis, "capitalism must draw upon cultural ideas that exist outside of the circuits of profit-making." Mindfulness is one such new cultural idea serving this purpose.
However, those celebrating the mindfulness boom have avoided any serious consideration of why stress is so pervasive in corporations and society. According to
New York Times business reporter
David Gelles, author of
Mindful Work, "Stress isn't something imposed on us. It's something we impose on ourselves." The
New York Times recently featured an
exposé on the toxic, sociopathic work culture at Amazon. A former employee was quoted as saying that he saw nearly everyone he worked with cry at their desk. Would Gelles offer his advice with a straight face to these employees of Amazon, telling them that they have imposed stress on themselves, that they could have chosen not to cry?
Comment: The full text of the study is available here. Here is the abstract of the paper: