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Mindfulness sounds pretty great. Who could be against teaching people to be more present in the moment, to try to worry less about the past and future? But in the Sunday New York Times, Ruth Whippman, author of America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, makes a pretty strong argument against a certain type of mindfulness-evangelizing.
Whippman’s argument centers around the fact that “perhaps the single philosophical consensus of our time is that the key to contentment lies in living fully mentally in the present.” We are told, over and over and over, that if we can just stay present, life will be significantly better. There can be peace, maybe even some magic, just about anywhere: sitting in traffic, arguing with a child over bedtime, tackling the tottering pile of dishes in the sink. This is the message of countless books and articles and blog posts and talk-show segments.
But if it’s true that embracing mindfulness can lead to contentment, then it follows, as Whippman puts it, that “if we are unhappy, we really have only ourselves to blame.”
Overall, it’s great that people are paying more attention to behavioral science than ever before, whether mindfulness or Nudge-style behavioral econ. These tools have serious potential to help the world be a better and happier and healthier place.
But when these tools come to dominate the conversation — when people fail to realize that when you zoom out, there are big, swirling forces that do a far better job explaining whether people flourish than whether or not they have embraced the latest behavioral-science trend, and that we need to be able to have full-throated conversations about these forces, too — problems arise. Psychology isn’t a cure-all.
– Jesse Singal
Read more: Is the Mindfulness Craze Turning Us Into Suckers?
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