Meaningful Returns

There is a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “Competitive about Meditation? Relax, Everyone Else Is, Too,” which reads like satire from The Onion while managing to be too ridiculous for anything other than real life. Here:

In one online group, members regularly check a leader-board to see who has meditated the most days in a row. A habit-tracking website charges the credit cards of meditators if they miss their sessions too often. One company is pitching meditators on a wristband that reminds them to practice and, if they don’t, gives them a mild electric shock.

To sum up:

1. People have turned meditation into competitive virtue signalling, because of course they have.
2. Some companies are getting paid to provide a perverse sort of accountability for the competitive meditators, or rather, they are getting paid when that perverse sort of accountability doesn’t work.
3. Some other companies are resorting to Pavlovian measures (one of the companies is actually called…Pavlok), and sell bracelets for about $200 that give mild shocks to those who somehow manage to lose at…meditating.

I wish I could say that this strange story was endemic to the world of competitive meditators, but of course it is not. Competitive dieters, eaters, exercisers, 0.0ers, readers, social media-ers, church goers–I mean, we’re all doing it, some way, somehow.

And what is, “it,” exactly? It’s turning some process into a proxy for the real thing toward which the process was to lead us. It’s taking a practice, removing the meaning and purpose, and obsessing over the nuts and bolts exclusively. Even Jesus wasn’t immune to this: people took (and continue to take!) his miracles and elevated them as the main thing, rather than as signposts toward a new kind of kingdom.

In the realm of finances, we often elevate practices like saving, investing, and even giving to proxies of the real stuff of life. Rather than seeing saving and investing as a means to responsibly provide for specific and meaningful experiences with people you love even when you’re not working, we can turn it into a mousetrap to be perfected, deriving a sense of worth (or loss!) from an account balance rather than seeing it as nothing more than a tool. Rather than seeing financial giving as a way to intentionally fight against the inequality and poverty that are a product of imperfect economic systems, we can view the act of giving itself with pride, as something that, as I’ve heard in numerous church settings, will actually make us financially wealthier.

I think the key here is that we need to regularly make space in our lives to step back and gain some clarity on the “real stuff.” What really matters? There are only a few answers to that question, thankfully, and by working backwards from there into the processes and practices we engage in to make what matters a priority, we can keep from getting completely backwards in life. We might even throw away the Pavlok bracelet.