Corporations Serve Up High-Fructose Mindfulness
Company wellness offerings are bad for your mental health, and the world
“The Comfort Zone is a groundbreaking system of personal meditation, mindfulness, and affirmation based on the incredible power of KFC’s signature pot pie.”
— KFC advertising video, as related in Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness.
Within the subterranean office world of Severance, Ben Stiller’s brilliantly unnerving send-up of corporate culture, the pinnacle of work life is the Waffle Party. The party, which despite the name is for only one employee — the employee of the quarter — features three waffles, a glass of milk, and not quite enough syrup. The event drips with the suspicion that this is a form of manipulation, not celebration.
Many employees get a similarly dystopian vibe from workplace wellness training.
Advertised as the cure for all that ails them, many people find such efforts to be an insidious serving of mind control with a side of victim blaming, all served up in a form that looks appealing from a distance but upon closer examination is missing most of the meat of truly transformational practices such as mindfulness meditation.
