Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  Many people I have talked to about these ideas have been taken aback or even outraged by my critiques of mindfulness. It is clearly a topic that arouses strong emotions. Nevertheless, while I recognise that mindfulness is valuable and valued by many people, I believe it is crowding out other equally important approaches to carpe diem.

  BEWARE THE MINDFUL SNIPER

  A fascination with living in the present moment has been part of Western culture since at least the 1950s, when the import of Eastern spiritual and religious thought popularised practices such as Zen Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation. One devoted fan was Aldous Huxley, whose 1962 utopian novel Island is set in a jungle paradise where specially trained mynah birds loudly screech out ‘Here and now! Here and now!’ and ‘Attention! Attention!’ at random intervals, as a reminder to its inhabitants to focus on the present. Soon a whole generation was searching for the sacred now, including The Beatles, who spent hours in cross-legged meditation with their Rolls-Royce-loving guru Maharishi Yogi. ‘I think you can reach a certain state of consciousness, a state where you are not aware of anything… you’re just being,’ declared John Lennon in 1968. ‘The happiest people are those who are being more times a week than anybody else.’4 Being not doing had become a mantra of the age. A turning point came in 1975, when Vietnamese Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh brought the concept of ‘mindfulness’ into the public eye through his book The Miracle of Mindfulness, which associated it with sitting meditation, mindful breathing, and bringing awareness to everyday activities like walking or washing the dishes.5

  Although Christianity has its own contemplative traditions going back to the Middle Ages, the mindfulness boom of recent times has more clearly grown out of this post-war familiarity with Eastern meditation practices. The two dominant approaches to mindfulness today – Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) – both draw explicitly on Buddhist meditation approaches (especially from the Vipassana tradition) as the grounding of their methods, particularly the importance of focusing on the breath.6 But as MBSR pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn has repeatedly pointed out, his intention has been to create a scientific and secular version of mindfulness – ‘Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism’, as he puts it – where people are taught ‘present-moment awareness’ and the virtues of ‘non-judgment’ without the trappings of religious doctrines like Karmic cycles and the Four Noble Truths.7 This clinical, scientific approach has helped mindfulness extend its reach to everyone from medical practitioners to corporate bosses. Britain can even boast a Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group of MPs who advocate it as a ‘cost-effective’ route to tackling the country’s mental health crisis.8 Every mindfulness trainer can point to a raft of ‘evidence-based’ scientific studies that reveal, in statistical terms, how an eight-week course in mindfulness can have measurable benefits for psychological and physical health.

  The explosion of mindfulness has also been due to lucky timing. It is the perfect antidote to an historically specific crisis in human wellbeing that has engulfed Europe and North America since the late 1990s: the crisis of distraction.9 For many people – especially amongst the professional middle classes – life feels like it has become an endless torrent of emails, social media updates and digital news, which has left them constantly running to catch up, permanently stressed and too busy to focus attention on the present. They can’t walk down the street or sit on a train for ten minutes without checking their phones. Their minds are constantly flitting from one task to the next, one app to the next, so that being in a state of continuous partial attention has become the norm.

  What does this epidemic of distraction look like? Picture this. A few years ago one of the world’s great concert violinists, Joshua Bell, took his 1713 Stradivarius down to a Washington DC metro station and spent forty-three minutes playing pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and other composers during the morning rush hour. Tickets to hear him play normally cost at least $100. Did crowds gather to hear his virtuoso performance? Was his violin case overflowing with dollars from appreciative passers-by? Quite the opposite. Of the 1,097 people who walked past him, only seven bothered to stop and listen for even a moment.10

  The virtue of mindfulness is that it enables people to stop and listen to the music of their lives. It allows them to be immersed in the moments of their day and be seized by them. To appreciate the benefits of mindfulness myself, I recently went on an MBCT course with a long-experienced teacher at a highly respected UK-based mindfulness centre. The first session, where we were introduced to the idea of sitting, breathing, and letting the flotsam and jetsam of thoughts settle in the mind, was all very familiar, as I had previous experience of attending Buddhist meditation classes, and had long been an admirer of Thich Nhat Hanh.11 It was helpful to be reminded that we spend so much of the day on automatic pilot, running around trying to get things done, and we should sometimes pause and bring more attention to the present, and really notice what we’re thinking, feeling and experiencing.

  But as the weeks went on, and we did our body scans and three-minute breathing spaces, I began to notice something. The instructor’s emphasis was very ‘Me, Me, Me’ – how mindfulness would help me deal with my stress and anxiety, would boost my wellbeing, and enable me to enjoy the pleasures of my life, from the taste of a raisin to the song of a blackbird. The sessions were virtually devoid of the ethical component so prevalent in Buddhist meditation traditions, where the focus is not just on relieving personal suffering, but extending compassion beyond the self to relieve the suffering of others. This was brought home to me in the third week, when one participant commented to the teacher that a Buddhist friend of his had described mindfulness courses as ‘Buddhism without the ethics’. The class tittered a little uneasily but the teacher refused to engage with the critique, glossing over it by asking him if he had managed to bring his attention back to the present after hearing his friend’s opinion. At no point in the tightly scripted course, or any of its handouts, was there any discussion of moral issues and the individualist thrust of mindfulness.

  Maybe, I thought, I was being ungenerous in my interpretation, or had an atypical experience.12 So I decided to ask one of the world’s foremost experts on meditation and mindful awareness, the French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, what he thought about the mindfulness movement. Ricard, who originally trained as a molecular biologist, is renowned not just for his books and TED talks that are known to millions, but for being the subject of brain experiments that led to him being dubbed (much to his annoyance) ‘the happiest man in the world’. I fully expected him to be a keen proponent of mindfulness, having spent years in deep meditation in the foothills of the Himalayas. Yet I was wrong. He said:

  There are a lot of people speaking about mindfulness, but the risk is that it’s taken too literally – to just ‘be mindful’. Well, you could have a very mindful sniper and a mindful psychopath. It’s true! A sniper needs to be so focused, never distracted, very calm, always bringing back his attention to the present moment. And non-judgmental – just kill people and no judgment. That could happen! So I talked a lot with Jon Kabat-Zinn and said, ‘Please, just add six letters and call it Caring Mindfulness’. So simple – you cannot have a caring sniper or a caring psychopath.13

  He then went on to quote a new study by neuroscientist Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig showing that taking a mindfulness course can help you deal with stress but has no discernible impact on pro-social behaviour.14

  Ricard was only half-joking about the sniper. As a growing wave of critics have pointed out, mindfulness courses have become popular in US military training, a somewhat disturbing echo of the mindfulness practices of Kamikaze pilots during World War Two.15 Others have noted its adoption by the corporate world, a ‘McMindfulness’ that helps stressed-out Wall Street traders maintain calm and focus in the midst of market turbulence, or gives them the edge in high-stakes deal-making.16 While the majority of people are not u
sing mindfulness to hone their skills with a Marine Corps M40 sniper rifle or to make a killing in the financial markets, mindfulness is open to the charge of failing to offer adequate guidance to questions like ‘What should I be mindful about?’ and ‘What should I give my attention to?’

  There is now an increasing recognition amongst many Buddhist scholars and other critics that in its drive to secularise Buddhist meditation traditions, and to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, the modern ‘scientific’ approach to mindfulness has ended up creating a morally empty approach to living that risks reinforcing the individualist bias of contemporary self-help culture.17 What’s more, they say, it remains blind to the deep structural problems of society, from child poverty to gender inequality. The central message of mindfulness is to work on the self, not to try changing the world by directly challenging political privilege, power and injustice. As the sociologist Renata Salecl puts it, progressive political change is being held back by a ‘New Age ideology that promotes living in the moment and accepting things as they are’.18 Renowned Buddhist teachers Ronald Purser and Andrew Cooper are even more forthright:

  The rapid mainstreaming of mindfulness has provided a domesticated and tame set of meditation techniques for mainly upper-middle-class and corporate elites so they may become more ‘self-accepting’ of their anxieties, helping them to ‘thrive,’ to have it all – money, power and well-being, continuing business-as-usual more efficiently and, of course, more ‘mindfully’ – while conveniently side-stepping any serious soul searching into the causes of widespread social suffering.19

  Such critics often contrast today’s secular mindfulness with the ‘socially engaged Buddhism’ promoted by people like Thich Nhat Hanh, who has stressed that mindfulness should be combined with taking action on real world problems such as armed conflict and poverty. During the Vietnam War, Nhat Hanh worked unstintingly for reconciliation between North and South Vietnam, engaged in acts of non-violent civil disobedience, and set up relief organisations to rebuild destroyed villages.20 Matthieu Ricard has been similarly involved in establishing education and health care projects in poor communities in India, Nepal and Tibet.21

  The mindfulness movement counters this barrage of attacks with the claim that self-focus does not mean selfishness. Rather, what mindfulness does is raise our levels of self-awareness, which is precisely what we need to open our eyes to a whole range of social problems. Psychologist Daniel Goleman argues that mindful awareness is a prerequisite for empathic action: you are unlikely to stop long enough to notice that someone on the street needs help if you are busily rushing around with your head down texting a friend.22 Jon Kabat-Zinn has, accordingly, described mindfulness as ‘a totally ethical way of being’.23 Yet his approach to moral issues is unashamedly couched in the language of self-help individualism. ‘In the mindful cultivation of generosity, it is not necessary to give everything away, or indeed anything,’ he writes. ‘Above all, generosity is an inward giving… Perhaps most of all, you need to give to yourself first for a while.’24 That’s a pretty generous interpretation of the meaning of generosity. His hope is that being kind to yourself through mindfulness will be a step on the road to giving to others, yet it remains a hope that – at least for now – lacks substantive empirical evidence. A report by Friends of the Earth, for instance, suggests that mindfulness can reduce people’s focus on materialistic values, but does not demonstrate clear causal linkages between taking a mindfulness course and making pro-social and pro-environmental choices. Moreover, it notes that the possible benefits of ‘mindful consumerism’ are limited by the fact that ‘mindfulness training is predominantly in the domain of the white middle classes’ and its impact ‘erodes over time’.25

  In defence of mindfulness, one could argue that it is able to attract more people by being presented and marketed in an apparently ‘neutral’, scientific way that focuses on personal benefits. After all, not everyone feels comfortable meditating in the presence of a saffron-robed Buddhist monk and talking about world compassion. And surely it isn’t a bad thing to encourage people to stop rushing around like mad, switch off automatic pilot, and instead give a bit more attention to the passing moments of their lives? What’s more, mindfulness isn’t (usually) setting out to create a social revolution, so it shouldn’t be accused of failing to do so: it’s just a technique for raising our levels of awareness and capacity to notice life as it streams by us.

  I don’t think the bar should be set so low. It is too easy for mindfulness to hide behind a cloak of benign moral innocence. Matthieu Ricard is right: until mindfulness becomes more explicit in stressing an ethical vision it will serve to sustain our culture of self-interest, or at least fail to mount any serious challenge to it. Buddhism manages to integrate a moral outlook into its teachings, so why not mindfulness courses too? Of course, it is also true that any approach to carpe diem – whether mindful presence or others such as opportunity or hedonism – should take ethics seriously, which is precisely why, later in this book, I will be exploring what a morally robust version of carpe diem might look like. For the moment, however, we need to recognise that mindfulness – as typically taught in its secular, scientific form – does not make the grade.

  There is another challenge for mindfulness to which we must now turn. It concerns nothing less than the ultimate question of the human journey. Can mindfulness satisfy our existential hunger for a life of meaning?

  WHY BEING PRESENT IS NEVER ENOUGH

  A curious feature of mindfulness techniques, whether of the new scientific or the older Buddhist variety, is that they set us a task – focusing on the present – that our brains are not well designed to perform. It’s no surprise that so many people get frustrated when they take up meditation, with their thoughts jumping about like crazy, worrying if they embarrassed themselves at work that day or wondering what to make the kids for dinner. That’s because thinking about the past and future is a natural trait of a healthy human mind: it’s essential for both our sense of identity and how we navigate the world. Just consider what it’s really like to live completely in the present – and I mean all of the time. If you find this scenario difficult to imagine, let me introduce you to Henry Gustav Molaison, one of the most studied individuals in the history of neuroscience research.

  Henry, known in the scientific literature as ‘HM’, was born in Connecticut in 1926. In 1953, aged twenty-seven, he underwent an experimental form of lobotomy to relieve his debilitating epilepsy. But something went wrong. Although the frequency of Henry’s seizures went down, from that day until his death in 2008, he suffered from almost complete amnesia. Henry’s memory lasted around thirty seconds, and after that he forgot nearly everything. At the same time, his botched brain surgery deprived him of the ability to imagine future experiences – he couldn’t plan anything for the next day, month or year. This left Henry in a state of what neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin called ‘permanent present tense’, where he was ‘trapped in the here and now’.26 Corkin ran tests on Henry for forty-six years, but right to the end he still failed to recognise her whenever they met, even if she popped out of the lab for just ten minutes.

  Could Henry function in day to day life? Only just. He could talk, read, do basic arithmetic and play bingo, but that was about it. When he went to a restaurant, he found it hard to order food as he had no idea what he liked. He couldn’t hold down a job because the moment he was taught to do something, he forgot it. He read and re-read the same magazines. He needed round-the-clock carers to remind him to wash himself and make sure he didn’t get lost walking in the local neighbourhood. He was pleasant and mild-mannered but he couldn’t make real friendships as he couldn’t recall anybody’s name or anything about them. He couldn’t remember his own age – and was often out by decades when he guessed. He had some memories of the time before his operation, but these were highly limited. ‘Being unable to establish new memories,’ said Corkin, ‘Henry could not construct an autobiography as his life unfolded’.2
7 Permanent immersion in the now left him with only the vaguest sense of personal identity, and unable to live independently.

  We can read Henry’s story almost as an allegory about how much we need the past in our lives. It’s something we all know from meeting people with dementia, where acute memory loss (first short-term then later long-term) can leave them unable to recognise family members, socially isolated and disoriented. Their unwilled capacity to live in the present is hardly enviable. Who we are cannot be separated from the memories that give us a sense of continuity through time and connection to others.

  Neurological research reveals that the future is just as important to us as the past. Human beings are prediction machines. Our brains are constantly looking to what is about to happen next, and whether some action or event will bring us pleasure or pain. ‘One of the most important goals of any animal,’ writes neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach, ‘is to become sufficiently skilled at predicting the influence of future events on their levels of pleasure and reward’.28 Will I enjoy that third piece of chocolate cake? Should I prepare for tomorrow’s meeting right now, or spend the time playing with my kids? Our lives are permeated by decision-making that requires projecting our minds forward in time and considering the consequences of our actions. Of course, we are good at developing rules of thumb so we don’t have to constantly make calculations on the spot about future outcomes: we know that if we see a tiger in the wild, it’s time to run. In general, however, thinking about the future is a necessary survival mechanism, a compass that helps us navigate the often unpredictable challenges that life throws at us.