The Billion Dollar Meditation Apps
People have been meditating for thousands of years. No one needed to pay for it, until recently some marketing geniuses turned it into a health fad and started charging suckers like me a subscription fee.
We don’t know exactly when and where the practice of meditation originates. But for the most part, we believe it’s been popularized by this nice little religion called Buddhism, where practitioners meditate to achieve spiritual enlightenment, and become buddhas themselves.
One can argue that part of being enlightened is being compassionate, and compassion knows no bounds. So the newly minted buddhas, along with the OGs, would then travel around to teach others how to do the same, and thereby collectively “elevate the world’s consciousness.” Sound familiar?
The great philosopher and story-teller, Verbal Kint, once famously said, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” In the same vein, the greatest trick tech marketers ever pulled was convincing people that peace of mind can be paid for and you can get it anywhere anytime on any device of your choice. So Silicon Valley tech bros started to podcast each other, telling everyone that they faced immense daily stress and that they meditated to improve mental health. “It’s a like a bicep curl for your brain.” They would say, as if the only vernacular they speak is Gym.
A quick search in App Store shows you hundreds of meditation apps. They differ in all sorts of visual aspects, but they all want something from you, be it your data, contribution in content, or outright money. They want you to take courses, follow meditation experts; they want you to not only meditate with them but also with other users. The only thing they don’t want you to do, though, is to meditate on yourself by yourself. Why? Because recurring revenue. Dolla dolla bill, ya’ll.
Just like bros don’t workout to stay healthy, they don’t make meditation apps to sincerely help elevate the world’s consciousness. Sadly for them, meditation happens to be the “business” of truth-seeking, seeing things for what they are. It doesn’t get more hypocritical than tech entrepreneurs, along with some self-proclaimed meditation experts, profiting off of millions of meditators for something that is inherently personal, intimate and free in every sense of the word. Adding social also runs counter to meditation’s personal and private essence. There’s a reason why monks don’t go around competing in meditation tournaments and live stream them on facebook. Hint, it’s not because facebook sucks.
What cracks me up even more is that some of these meditation apps have gone the extra mile to fit meditation into the workout “mold.” They conjured up meditation themes like “better sleep,” “less stress,” “better relationship,” and “more focus,” etc, not realizing that these are the byproducts of years, if not decades, of meditation practice. To be honest, these exercises are fine on their own, but they are not meditation. Those tech entrepreneurs cleverly took advantage of meditation’s nebulous definition and packaged it into something common people can understand, relate to, and desire. That is a textbook marketing lesson for all of us.
Some might argue that people should pay for meditation apps just as they do for workout apps or personal trainers. What’s wrong with that? Three things. First, workout tutorials and trainers can show you techniques you didn’t know, which are based on our physiological understanding of human body. But meditation is an exercise for the mind, which no one but you have insight into. Science, unfortunately, has yet to crack the human mind. People can’t even agree on the best diet or exercise for physical health, let alone mental. The best tools we have in this case are empirical. J. Krishnamurti, an Indian philosopher, speaker and writer, has two famous quotes I’d like to share:
All effort to meditate is the denial of meditation.
Mediation is one of the greatest arts in life — perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody. That is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authorities.
Second, part of paying for a trainer is to help you avoid injuries. Luckily, you don’t get brain damage from meditation, even when you meditate alone, at night, underneath a Bodhi tree. Highly recommended.
Third, meditation is compassionate in nature. Generations of real experts have been teaching it for free for thousands of years; anyone who makes a profit out of this is more likely a charlatan, preying on people’s ever-increasing desire for the peace of mind.
I used to be one of their preys, paying for something that’s inherently personal, private and doesn’t need any aspect of social. And yet, the more I meditate, the more I realized that meditation, at the end of the day, is me spending time with myself in silence — though the real OGs might argue that to meditate is to be innocent of time. Making it any more complicated than that is not meditation.
So I call bullshit.
A meditation app should be profile-less, ad-free, data-free, and free in every sense of the word. Mostly importantly, there shouldn’t be any billion dollar tech company revolving around meditation. That’s simply wrong on so many levels. Millions of meditators out there should just use their smartphone timers, or better yet, don’t track time at all. Read books, go on meditation retreats (they are free, by the way), and practice on your own consistently. Meditation apps that teach or guide you are really getting more out of you than you from them.
People have been meditating for thousands of years without apps, and will be for thousands of years to come. The only payment required is your effort.
You know, you should never meditate in public, or with another, or in a group; you should meditate only in solitude, in the quiet of the night, or in the still, early morning. When you meditate in solitude, it must be solitude. You must be completely alone, not following a system, a method, repeating words, pursuing a thought, or shaping a thought according to your desire. — J. Krishnamurti
