Once It’s Good, How Good Is It?
LIFE: The Slippery Slope of Medi(t)ation
I once tried to explain how my workday looks like to my parents. At that time I was working as a regional marketing coordinator for a fast growing IT company. A gazillion meetings, even more emails, multiple time zones, continuous delivery. They never had to work like this. During working hours, and often after, the floodgates of work never close.
Their generation had their own sets of problems, this is undeniable, but they really didn’t have to work at this mental pace — which has your brain sweating on a treadmill, endlessly training for an event that never seems to come.
They couldn’t fully relate, but a million other people out there do, and they need help. How else do you explain the rapid rise of apps like Headspace and the sudden boom of meditation as a coping mechanism?
Headspace generated $100 million in revenue throughout 2019 and reached similar figures in 2020. The app has already been downloaded over 65,000,000 times and has an estimated 2,000,000 daily active users. Granted, not all of these people use the app because they have an immediate need of curing something they can’t quite put a finger on, but I’d still argue that this equals a shit ton of modern problems. The pandemic didn’t help things, either.
There was a time when I felt the world closing down on me a little bit, so I too dove into my phone and hoped to find the solution on the app store. And it worked. Headspace and breathing techniques absolutely proved to be a great resource in helping me lead a better, calmer life. It’s a wonderful tool.
Now when some people think about meditation, they think about people living in trees, chill Buddhist monks and people not eating for days. For me, it was just simple guided and solo breathing exercises for about 2 years that helped with my overall sense of calm. Even still…
… any sort of long term meditation rewires your brain.
This is nothing radical, nothing to be afraid of, but important to understand. You slowly change the way you react to stress, reduce your overall anxiety levels, change how you deal with pain, making you a calmer, more appreciative person. All good things, but at a cost.
If you’re like me, you’ll start with meditation later in life. By that time, we’re fully formed individuals that have developed coping mechanisms and reactions that have helped us become the people we are today. Evolutionary, a lot of behavior patters you kept are actually useful. You sometimes don’t know what these are until you lose them. For me, it was anger and spite. I never used anger in a negative way, I used it as fuel — fuel to be an asshole when needed, fuel when I want to prove people wrong, fuel to give that extra effort whenever I’m challenged by things.
While helping my overall well-being, meditation reduced that coping mechanism which meant I was slowly losing one thing that helped me go through life and be fairly successful at it. In certain challenging situations that I used to overcome fueled by anger induced motivation, I was suddenly struggling, to the point that I couldn’t recognize myself. Conflict became something I brushed off easily, something I simply wasn’t engaging in. That also resulted in me not fighting for what I believed in as much — which hurt me at my core. I liked to fight for stuff I believe in. I felt bad.
It was a trade off. I traded a piece of myself for complete inner peace. I signed a contract with the angel on my shoulder and the devil slid down my arm and straight down the toilet. After a while, I found myself questioning that contract, and found myself fishing, trying to save the little red dude. I needed my anger, maybe not all of it, but a lot of it. Growing up, dealing with stuff, it was always there. Now, I was missing it. Needed it back. In the process, I tried to understand what it would take to get the best of both worlds.
Meditation teaches you to recognize emotion, but to not actively engage with it. Oh shut up Headspace Andy, I know it’s more complex than that. And it really isn’t. You can choose to engage, to give in and get that fuel. So, I now have the best of both worlds. I’m not as angry anymore, it doesn’t control my actions as much, but that doesn’t mean I won’t shake anger’s hand from time to time, letting out an inner battle cry — “Let’s fucking go!”
Please note this is not me trying to scare you off meditation. Your brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised. Your mind is your most important resource that deserves at least 5 mins of its own time per day. You likely need to be able to focus more. However, if you’re fairly happy with your life you also need most of the things that got you there. So, before you get into meditation, study its side effects and see how you react after a month of sessions — revise that contract.
MUSIC: Once It’s Good It’s Bad
I’m not a pessimist by nature. What I’m about to say is merely an observation. Pattern recognition, if you will. Almost everything that becomes popular experiences quality reduction because it became popular.
I’m gonna tell you a story about a band. Black Stone Cherry. I was completely floored by their first self-titled album published in 2006. The vocals, the sweet bluesy Southern sound, but with balls. Unique and hard hitting. Turns out that this band, formed in 2001 in Edmonton, Kentucky, lived in such a back water area they had almost no access to modern music growing up. What they got they listened the shit out of. Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne and the local scene.
This unique environment resulted in a very special amalgam of music on their first album. It was just a sound I’ve never heard before. Boy, was I rocking to “Drive” and “Rain Wizard” — all day long. I just found a band I was going to listen to for ages.
My expectations for the second album were off the charts. It was good, but already softer. That seems to bring a lot of critical acclaim and new listeners… On the third album, their sound was wildly overproduced, they put out songs like “White Trash Millionaire” which, like your average selfie, didn’t need to be put out. They even completely revamped their physical image from country kids to something an emo mom would be proud of.
This is just one of a million examples of how something great gets its creative direction sliced by trying to appeal to the masses for quick profit, or um, as the corporate world likes to call it — market fit. Not for music quality, but for a quick return on investment. Produce what sells. Give out candy. And, whenever this world sees an opportunity to produce and sell candy, it almost always does so. And we eat, until diabetes.
Enjoy chewing.
