Meditation and Technology
MAY 15, 2019
[Humans] have always been prey to distractions, which are the original sin of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system.”
The above quotation comes not from any recent screed about social media but from Aldous Huxley, writing in 1941. Confronted with the dawn of commercial television and mass advertising, Huxley was reacting against what he saw as the growing corruption of human attention, a process he had forewarned of a decade earlier in Brave New World. These concerns led him, over the subsequent decades, toward a deep interest in Eastern spirituality and meditation.
Fast forward to the present and Huxley’s world of “systematized irrelevances” has, by some accounts, reached a fever pitch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a widespread “mindfulness revolution” grown up to meet it, not least in Silicon Valley. A recent Center for Humane Technology event featured not one but two guided meditations with Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman, renowned Buddhist teachers. The popular historian Yuval Noah Harari, a Silicon Valley favorite, closes his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century with a recommendation to meditate, and his bestselling book of techno-prophecy, Homo Deus, is dedicated to the meditation teacher S.N. Goenka. Huxley’s intuition, that the antidote to technological distraction might be found on the meditation cushion, seems to have captured a new generation.
Psychological and neuroscientific research into meditation has also grown rapidly in recent years, with limited but promising early findings. Bolstered in part by this research, numerous apps and wearable companies have sprung up, promising to help quantify and optimize the benefits of the practice. Like much of the science, these tools focus on the instrumental goals of meditation: less stress, better immune function, and improved focus. The practice, and biometric data associated with it, can be tracked, gamified, and improved, not unlike steps or calories.
But the ethos of meditation, whatever its instrumental benefits, is clear awareness and acceptance of one’s present moment experience, and this requires surrendering any goals one may be striving for. Indeed, much of what makes meditation such a compelling antidote to technological distraction is that it allows one to set aside the striving for efficiency that characterizes much of our digital lives. As Adam Alter told us, “[mindfulness] takes every moment and makes it something worth focusing on and thinking about and inhabiting, and that’s anathema to the way we consume tech today and the way we consume screen experiences.”
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t collect data on meditation or make use of mindfulness apps. (Alter himself has a masterclass on the Calm app on mitigating screen addiction.) But it does raise interesting questions about the consequences of viewing ourselves through the lens of the data we generate. As Goodhart’s law warns, and many recent algorithmic misadventures attest, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Mindfulness is based on the premise that there is something to be gleaned about ourselves from the first-person perspective that a third-person metric cannot replace. Whether this will hold up in the face of more data remains to be seen.