McMindfulness: Workplace Balm or Capitalist Spirituality?

05.20.22

On April 6th, 2007, Arianna Huffington pinged off one final email before collapsing across her desk. Her daughter found her lying in a pool of blood and rushed her to the hospital.

“I collapsed from exhaustion,” recalls Huffington, who, just two years into launching The Huffington Post, was working 18-hour days, seven days a week. “I broke my cheekbone and needed four stitches over one eye. By any sane definition, if you find yourself lying in a pool of blood on your office floor, you are not ‘successful.’”

Rather than taking a sabbatical, the experience inspired Huffington to embark on a global tour of the burnout epidemic, churning out two books on the topic (Thrive and The Sleep Revolution), and launching another company, Thrive Global. Now valued at more than $700 million, the wellness startup was well-positioned for the mental health crisis spawned by COVID-19, and today it boasts partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, Accenture, Walmart, JP Morgan Chase, and Blackstone. The company, which offers “small, science-backed Microsteps to improve health and productivity,” is the latest iteration of the deepening romance between wellness and capitalism.

Huffington advertises workplace mindfulness as a competitive advantage for companies. “I do want to talk about maximizing profits and beating expectations,” writes Huffington. “What’s good for us as individuals is also good for corporate America’s bottom line.” Corporate America agrees with her: 35% of midsize and large companies now offer stress reduction programs for their employees. The Global Wellness Institute, a non-profit that aims to unite the health and wellness industries, reports that the wellness economy — which encompasses everything from life coaches to treadmill desks to dark crystals — grew from $3.7 trillion in 2015 to $4.4 trillion in 2021, representing 5.1 per cent of total GDP.

This week, in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, we map the rise of the wellness economy, hailed by some as a welcome balm to soothe the excesses of capitalism and excoriated by others for its magical thinking and entrenchment of the status quo.

Why Mindfulness?

“All the woo-woo mystical stuff, that’s really retrograde. This is about training the brain and stirring up the chemical soup inside.”

Kenneth Folk, meditation teacher, 2013

As recently as the early 2010s, mindfulness was still perceived as a remote Eastern tradition co-opted by granola-crunching hippies. “Meditation suffers from a towering PR problem, largely because its most prominent proponents talk as if they have a perpetual pan flute accompaniment,” wrote former news anchor Dan Harris in 2014. “If you can get past the cultural baggage, though, what you’ll find is that meditation is simply exercise for your brain.”

Chade-Meng Tan, 107th employee of Google, was one of the first individuals to successfully extricate mindfulness from its religious roots and peddle it to the corporate masses. Described by critics as a “celebrity on the mindfulness circuity,” Meng’s genius lay in rebranding mindfulness as a marketable technique for increasing self-optimization. Rather than pitching mindfulness to “people in yoga pants,” Meng pitched mindfulness to hardcore empiricists, aka engineers. He explicitly linked meditation to greater empathy, self-control, and agreeableness, all enviable traits in the modern workplace.

“Everybody knows this EI thing is good for their career,” said Meng after founding the “Search Inside Yourself” campaign at Google, now the company’s most popular personal development course. “And every company knows that if their people have EI, they’re gonna make a shitload of money.” Still, he insists that his original goal — world peace — remains top of mind. “My goal in life is to create the conditions for world peace by making the benefits of mindfulness meditation accessible to humanity,” claims Meng. (Incidentally, access to Google’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute’s two-day workshop comes at $950 a pop.)

Mindfulness was further commercialized by Soren Gordhamer, who started the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, an annual gathering of tech royalty and celebrities sponsored by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Mailchimp. The conference, described by one meditation teacher as “a networking opportunity with a light dressing of Buddhism,” is widely regarded as the mindfulness industry’s version of an annual shareholder meeting.

The annual meeting has not proceeded without controversy. In 2014, the conference was overrun by Heart of the City activists, who took to the stage with banners reading, “Eviction Free San Francisco,” and invited attendees to “consider the truth behind Google and the tech industry’s impact on San Francisco.”

Bill Duane, senior manager of Google’s Wellbeing and Sustainable High Performance Development programs, responded with an off-the-cuff meditation. Urging the audience to “search inside themselves,” he advised the crowd to “check in with your body” and “feel what it’s like to be in conflict with people with heartfelt ideas,” while security escorted the protesters outside.

Since then, the conference has done little to crawl out from the ivory tower. In 2018, attendees were alerted to the presence of homeless people outside the venue. “Not that they are dangerous,” said the moderator, but “to ensure your safety we have security personnel visible in stations both inside and outside the hotel. If you are heading towards Union Square just be mindful of your personal belongings. Should you choose to go into the Tenderloin for theatres, restaurants, or galleries, it does have a quirky, vibrant community — you may want to take a cab, Lyft or Uber back to the hotel.”

Selling McMindfulness

“When I draw attention to the flaws of mindfulness programs at conferences, in articles, or online, I’m usually accused of ‘being negative.’ For example, Ted Meissner, an MBSR teacher who runs The Secular Buddhist podcast, once asked on Facebook: ‘Are you going to do anything other than be a crank?’”

— Ron Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

Today, mindfulness programs have spread to schools, workplaces, prisons, public health facilities, and the military. Mindfulness is so widespread that even KFC employed a mindfulness ad campaign — “Comfort Zone: A Pot Pie-Based Mediation System” — to sell more pot pies. Public advocates, such as Huffington, take this surge in popularity as a sign of meaningful cultural change.

“We’re at an interesting cultural moment, similar to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, where the barbaric daily behaviors that we’ve grown used to are starting to change,” says Huffington.

Others are not so hopeful. Ron Purser, one of mindfulness’s biggest critics, believes the ever-increasing focus on self-preservation and self-advancement makes mindfulness a poor tool for structural change. “It is unlikely that the Pentagon would invest in mindfulness if more mindful soldiers refused en mass to go to war,” writes Purser. “The emphasis on ‘nonjudgmental awareness’ can just as easily disable one’s moral intelligence.”

By neurotically focusing on the present moment and the individual ego, Purser believes that mindfulness discourages critical thinking or the pursuit of radical change in corporate culture. Instead of asking why modern workplaces are such hotbeds of stress, burnout, and apathy, etc., mindfulness privatizes stress and places responsibility for stress management onto the individual. As one mindfulness advocate says, “Stress isn’t something imposed on us. It’s something we impose on ourselves.”

Instead of adapting ourselves to toxic environments or becoming more skilled at the rat race, Purser suggests aiming higher. “If the aim is to effect social change, then methods of pursuing it need to be taught. Calming the mind might help these sink in, but it’s just a preliminary,” urges Purser. “By failing to focus on anything but momentary experience, while spouting utopian prophecies of peace and harmony, modern mindfulness is a messianic con trick. The movement’s underpinnings are deeply conservative and American: a naïve belief in progress, idealism, and rugged individualism, with all of us free to get lost in a romantic hybrid of Whitmanesque wordplay and ersatz Buddhism.”

Pragmatism Reigns

Despite the limitations of mindfulness programs, proponents urge companies not to discount stress relief as a worthy goal in itself. Ten minutes of meditating per day may not change the world, but if it can help make employees’ lives less miserable, why wouldn’t you encourage it?

Jeremy Hunter, founding director of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute at Claremont University, doesn’t buy the claims that mindfulness is just another tool for corporations to induce mass compliance. Most “sophisticated managers,” he argues, are “genuinely interested in the well-being of employees.” And even in scenarios of poor management, the skillset can serve other purposes.

“Most of life is subject to forces well beyond our control,” writes Hunter. “Anyone with chronic illness, screaming children, or an airline frequent flier account could tell you that. Having more tools to bear the unbearable is always a good thing.”

He adds: “I can only speak from my experience, but my clients seek out mindfulness and self-awareness for their teams because they want exactly the opposite of compliant passivity. They WANT people to take greater assertive action in the workplace, to be responsible for the culture they are a part of and co-creating and not to sit around waiting to be told what to do.”

About Colbeck: Colbeck is a strategic lender that partners with companies during periods of transition, providing creative capital solutions to meet their evolving needs. You can reach the team at inquiries@colbeck.com.