As a (relatively) young person on the internet, I’ve tried on many fad philosophies. I remember getting into both Buddhism and Stoicism sometime between 2017 and 2018. In this post, I want to talk about why “Buddhism” was popular in the late 2010s. To be clear: I don’t think what was popular was Buddhism per se, but a westernized, white washed Buddhism. Pop Buddhism, if you will.
Why Pop Buddhism is good
Meditation (as it’s popularized) is an amazing and simple form of self-therapy. You just sit in a quiet area, close your eyes, breathe in and out, focus on your breath, and try not to think. When you catch yourself thinking, you switch your focus back on your breath. Over the course of a few minutes, you become calmer, more attentive to your thoughts, and centered in the moment.
Over time, you develop an internal sense of what’s causing you to think and react in a certain way.1 For example, if you’re an angry driver - yelling at other drivers - you become less of an angry driver because you realize the reason why you’re yelling all the time isn’t because of anything other individual driver’s are doing, but because you are impatient and anxious to get to your destination. The problem isn’t them, it’s you, or more specifically, your reaction to a situation.
Why Pop Buddhism Got Popular
People such as myself got into Pop Buddhism during the first Trump administration because, for the first time, it was abundantly clear that social media was destroying people’s minds, causing anxiety, and sewing anger and other negative emotions. Pop Buddhism provided calm to the chronically online, and to the overworked, analytic-minded white collar worker.2
It was branded as a form of secular spirituality. You didn’t have to believe in supernaturalism, per the advocates of Pop Buddhism. You just had to meditate every day and “be mindful” of your thoughts, and the emotions you attached to them and other things.
Why Pop Buddhism Didn’t Turn People Into Actual Buddhists
The reason why westerners such as myself didn’t go farther into actual Buddhism is simple: the religion asserts metaphysical claims that many of us just can’t accept as true, and the daily practice is actually hard.
After you learn how to meditate, and hone a strong sense of meta-cognition, there are diminishing returns from “doing Buddhism.” I remember reading books by Sam Harris and popular meditators at the time and thinking “It would be cool to lose a sense of self after honing my meditation skills, but that doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort.”
What’s more, many left-of-center pundits like Ezra Klein and Richard Wright talked about their positive experiences at meditation retreats. Though those sounded fun, they also sounded expensive and not something I’d want to spend my money and vacation days on.
Losing a sense of self could be life-changing, but it could also be like learning how to juggle or play an instrument at a high level. It’s not worthless, but you’d have to commit to that activity for hours a week for its own sake, like a hobby, not just as a therapy. I was down with doing meditation, but not being a meditator as a core attribute of my identity, if that makes sense.
Against Escapism
I don’t meditate or “do Buddhism” anymore because I don’t believe in the spiritual claims. The Buddhist insight that life is suffering, though true, isn’t helpful if you’re not ready to fully commit to an ascetic lifestyle.
When I hear of a westerner who isn’t a real Buddhist going on week-long meditation retreats, my first thought is that they are being an escapist. I don’t want to sound too judgmental, but many people use Buddhism as a form of escape from daily obstacles.
Far from being the therapy that Pop Buddhism promises or the spiritual practice that real Buddhism stands for, people doing these retreats probably have an unhealthy relationship with stress. If you’re doing them for fun or for necessary therapy, your conception of fun and “necessary therapy” is striping yourself from the context of your life. You’re not confronting what’s making your life stressful and trying to fix it, you’re evading it and desiring an ideal state that is separate from your actual life.
My Post-Pop-Buddhist Approach
I have a better way of framing life’s suffering: Life is full of obstacles and challenges. Our brains are designed to never be at peace and to constantly fixate on what feels wrong about our surroundings. This causes us pain. The remedy of this pain is not to retreat from the world and suffering, but to embrace it. When you’re not actively solving a problem, mindfulness is a great practice, because it puts you in a restful condition.
As Allen Saunders3 said: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” Ancient sages of many traditions, including Buddhism, are correct in pointing out that what makes us unhappy is unreasonably high expectations of happiness and fun. We should all read more ascetic thinkers and learn from ascetic traditions, not because asceticism is good in itself, but because they put in perspective how unreasonably high many of our expectations are.
If you lower your expectations of life’s daily happiness and fun, while embracing the struggles of every day life as normal, you’ll paradoxically find more happiness.
My Current Mindfulness Routine
If you’re still into Buddhism and mindfulness, that’s great. Speaking for myself, I meditated everyday for over three years. My meditations were at least two minutes, but more often five or 10 minutes. One day I randomly stopped, and I don’t feel the need to get back into it.4
On occasion, I’ll turn off all screens and do a light meditation for 10 or 15 minutes, but that’s just about it. I get the most subjective benefit from meditation when doing it for about three minutes. But if I want a deep and sustained feeling of serenity, I’ll write a blog post.
Even if you don’t stick with a mindfulness practice permanently, I highly recommend at least trying it for a few weeks. Developing the skill of metacognition is a secret for being happier. Mine wouldn’t be as honed without my experience of Pop Buddhism.
I believe this is called metacognition.
Perfect for people in the Bay area I guess!
Not John Lennon
I do a nighttime meditation with my fiancé, but it’s more like a “winding down” ritual than my previous meditation ritual.
I tried very basic meditation, from Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn, for maybe a week or two in 2016. I don't remember why exactly, but I was reading some other therapy-type books at the time. I found that I didn't like what it was doing to me -- all too effective. I am often kind of detached and non-reactive, and it was taking me further down that path.
This makes we wonder if there's an opposite to that kind of meditation, that increases attachment and reactivity.