I took a staycation at the end of October, and I know that in theory time off is “fun” and “relaxing” for “people,” but this, for me — no. I spent the whole time smooshed under anxiety. I was about to start a new job in the middle of a pandemic, days before the election. Whenever I tried to go to sleep, my heartbeat sounded very loud.
It was basically an Edgar Allen Poe story, except I went to the doctor, and we sorted it out, and I lived!
When I went to the doctor, she recommended, among other things, that I download the Calm app. It’s full of guided meditations, sleep sounds and possibly sexy (?) bedtime stories for adults.
Like this:
Harry, I’ll dream with you anytime >:)
I gave it a shot. The app didn’t totally appeal to me — do we really want startups to turn our feelings into SaaS products? — but I decided not to think too critically and lean into whatever might help me sleep. (I bought weed gummies, too; I’m not an idiot.)
I started with Calm’s intro “class,” which is really a podcast, called How to Meditate. It’s led by Jeff Warren, a man I had never heard of before, but a quick Google revealed that he was a hot, Seattle-flavored white guy who hobnobs with Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes and wrote a book called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. In its subtitle, the book promises to make readers “10% happier,” which, ugh. Feelings as SaaS products; feelings as growth KPIs — this is not the relationship I want with my feelings!
But Warren has a nice voice, so I listened to four days of his podcast-course-thing. Every day, there was a different, 10-minute-ish episode that started with a non-denominational sermon, and then went quiet. But not actually quiet — designer quiet, with little trills of birdsong and strategic leaf-rustles. It sounds like a resort at sunrise.
In this quiet, I was supposed to clear my mind and keep my attention on my breath as much as I could.
Sounds fine, right? At first, it seemed almost radical (and not just because Warren told me explicitly that meditation was “the most radical thing a human can do”). The attention economy — a.k.a. the marketing and entertainment industries — has always operated on the understanding that human attention is a valuable resource. Meanwhile, actual people think of their own attention… not much. Certainly not as something precious; maybe not as a thing at all.
It’s lopsided ecosystem, and Warren’s class felt like a way of evening it out, and encouraging people to cherish their attention and brainspace the same way marketers already do.
That was especially true in his second episode-class, “Homebase.”
“We don’t have to let our minds be unconsciously hijacked by just, whatever comes along,” Warren said. Instead, we can strengthen the “muscle” of concentration, which is really just “the ability to choose what you want to pay attention to.”
Every time you get distracted and pull your attention back to the task at hand, “it’s like a bench press for the mind,” he said.
This spoke to me. It felt like Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, translated (or diluted) into something short and practical and accessible to gymrats. Addictive apps and bingeable shows and attention economy bells and whistles will hoover up all our life force if we let them. We shouldn’t let them! Love it! Call to arms!
But is Calm really leading a meaningful #resistance movement? Hard no, according to Jessa Crispin. She wrote a column critiquing the app in the Guardian, and described its origin story like this:
[W]e needed something to come down from our addiction to doom via a device designed to buzz and purr and intoxicate with an ever-storming feed of terrible things happening that one must pay attention to… We are biochemically addicted to the social media parade of charlatans shrieking about the immorality of the latest movie we liked, or the sexual misdeeds of a person we only learned existed ten minutes ago, or this cat who is the cutest cat in the history of all cats. And then we get another notification, setting our brains alight again, telling us all the plastic we thought we recycled over the last 20 years went into the ocean instead and killed baby dolphins… So of course we need these numbing techniques and Silicon Valley sedatives to recover from that, which we helpfully learned about via an advertising experience tailored to our needs on the same apps driving us crazy.
To me, this feels a little… broad and pseudoscientific. Like, sure, some people feel addicted to their phones, but other people don’t, and we can all customize our push notifications — it’s not our biochemical destiny to stare at them all day.
Phones didn’t invent distraction, either. People were distracted in the 1600s. Definitely smartphones have changed how we live, but I think in the year of our lord 2020, proclaiming that social media drives “us” crazy just makes you sound like you’ve never used it before.
I also question the idea that bedtime stories and 10-minute meditation courses are “numbing techniques and Silicon Valley sedatives.” Bedtime stories and meditation are both old, if not ANCIENT, traditions that predate the internet. Neither is a Silicon Valley invention. (If anything, Calm reveals Silicon Valley isn’t inventing so much as it’s repackaging.) And I don’t think either originated in a desire for numbness. I mean, bedtime stories originated in a desire for… sleep, probably.
At the same time, I think the Calm app’s repackaged version of meditation does have something to do with “numbing.” It was the word that kept coming to mind when I listened to the fourth episode of Warren’s podcast-course, “Inner Smoothness.”
This episode was all about “equanimity,” another “mental muscle” — like concentration— that helps you weather shocks from the external world. Warren gives the example of a loud noise from a motorcycle. Instead of flinching or running away, he says, equanimity is:
…a third option, of being so open and present and smooth inside, smoooooooth [he really says it like this] in our bodies and minds, that all the motorcycle sounds, they just pass right through, and we never flinch, not because we blocked the sounds, but because we learned how to be bigger than them.”
Hmm. Sure. It’s good to have perspective and not live in fear of loud noises. But equanimity is not actually a word Warren, or the mindfulness community, made up (though they seem to wish it was). It’s a real word, and it means, according to the OED (definition #2): “Evenness of mind or temper; the quality or condition of being undisturbed by elation, depression, or agitating emotion; unruffledness.”
It’s a positive way of saying “unfeeling” or “detached.”
And fetishizing equanimity, or stating that as your goal, means not just valuing your attention but hoarding it, imo. When I listened to this episode, I was not struggling with equanimity in face of noises. I was struggling with it in the face of a pandemic and an election that was less about choosing a president and more about choosing whether the U.S. would stay a democracy.
The whole concept of “equanimity” felt inappropriate for the moment. I didn’t want to be unruffled, exactly. I didn’t want “an attitude of accepting the moment just how it is and not making a big deal of it.” Not everything is a big deal — but not everything is a small deal, either!
This, to me, is the issue with “mindfulness guys” like Warren. (I used to volunteer at a yoga studio, and I’ve been on dates, so I have encountered many many many of them.) They would rather feel “equanimity” than “passion” or “civic engagement” or “horror at injustice.” It’s another form of toxic positivity, really — toxic equanimity. Toxic shrug-emoji-ness. Toxic chill.
I don’t aspire to that. I want to be chill enough to sleep, and think clearly, but I want to be unchill enough to notice the difference between electing Joe Biden and Donald Trump. If Biden had lost to Trump — which thankfully he did not — I would want to feel the weight of that, and let it motivate me.
I want to take better care of my attention, but I decided the Calm app was not for me. I deleted it. Then I (mindfully) spent the $69.99 I would have spent on a yearlong Calm subscription on an absolute shit-ton of ice cream.
Happy endings are real :)