Meditation and mindfulness aren't solutions to everything

Why are meditation and mindfulness the internet’s solution to everything?

If you’ve been following this site for a while you’ll know my history of sleep problems. I’ve bitched about my inability to get a good night’s sleep across multiple articles, and even did an entire article on the bad advice the internet gives for dealing with insomnia. Sleep hygiene is the biggest load of bullshit in the world, and I’m so fucking tired (pun not intended but still funny) of hearing this bullshit being parroted every time someone says they can’t sleep.

But the one that pisses me off the most is meditation.

I wrote about this in the other article, but I went too easy on it. Whenever sleep problems are mentioned, without fail the assholes all come marching in to suggest meditation and its equally retarded twin brother, mindfulness. Like I said before, I’m not completely dismissing meditation and mindfulness. There’s nothing wrong with the practices themselves, and the benefits of doing them have been scientifically proven.

My problem is with the assholes who seem to think that everyone can just do these practices with little to no training, and continually push them as solutions to people facing serious problems. It’s not just limited to insomnia or stress, I’ve seen people go so far as to recommend this shit to people suffering from cancer. I’m not making that up. Nigga are you fucking real. The fuck is meditating going to do for someone suffering from cancer? Should the kid with the parents putting cigarettes out on his forehead also meditate? Should the woman who was gangraped meditate on her trauma? Telling someone to meditate isn’t helpful at all. In fact, it’s actually quite patronizing and condescending. It’s basically saying that your problem isn’t really that serious.

If the internet is anything to go by, anyone can just drop into a state of meditation anytime at any place. Jerk-off manager is in your face shoving you because you called out his nepotism? Just meditate bro. Being tailgated by some dickhead in a pickup truck or Beemer? Just meditate bro. Retards blasting off professional grade fireworks at 1 AM on a Tuesday night? Just meditate bro. I guess it’s easy to meditate under pressure when you’re naive and borderline retarded. For the rest of us normal people, it’s not that easy to just meditate when you’re dealing with serious stress. If it were that easy then everyone would be doing it, though I guess if we’re going by Reddit then everyone is doing it.

Meditation and mindfulness used to be associated with hippie dippy morons, and we knew not to take those people seriously. But now even medical professionals are spewing this nonsense. Back in 2020 I went to the doctor (or rather the nurse practitioner) to see if my sleep problems were medical in nature, and one of the first things she suggested was practicing meditation and mindfulness. After the sleep study came back negative for sleep apnea, her next solution was to prescribe increasingly higher doses of Ambien until I told her no more. She then told me the problem was psychosomatic, again recommended I try meditation and mindfulness, and also attempted to set me up with a psychologist that was an hour away. I told her to get fucked and never went back. Any medical professional who seriously recommends meditation and mindfulness to a patient experiencing chronic insomnia should lose their license to practice.

I’ll accept that the problem is in my head. In fact, I’m 95% sure it’s in my head, because it’s stress-related. I’m not getting enough REM sleep, because I’m usually waking up in the second half of the night. Which is usually when you start entering REM, and also when your body begins producing more cortisol in preparation for waking you up. This is all caused by excessive stress, which I’ve been under in various forms for most of my life. I’m not going to turn this into a therapy session and talk about all the shit in my past, but balancing the stress that comes with running a company, weight training four days a week, high-intensity running three days a week, living in Philadelphia, holding down a relationship, and meeting social obligations is insanely hard over long periods of time. Meditation isn’t going to change any of that, even if I could find the time to meditate.

My problem is essentially a giant circle, stress interferes with my sleep, poor sleep leads to increased stress, which leads to more poor sleep, ad infinitum. The best the doctor can do for me is prescribe Ambien, and if that fails tell me to meditate? What the fuck kind of bullshit is that? We have the ability to use medical science to facilitate gender transition, but our best solution for something like chronic insomnia is meditation? Even Gandhi would say that’s retarded and tell the doctor GTFO.

I’m still not sure what mindfulness is even supposed to mean. I constantly see the word being thrown around on sites like Reddit, but I’ll be damned if I can actually figure out what it is. The best I can get is vague nonsense like “Being aware of the moment”. Google’s stupid AI overview says it means accepting feelings as they come and not trying to resist or suppress them. How exactly does this reduce stress? If anything it’s going to make things worse for me. If someone pisses me off it’s in my best interest to suppress that anger, because if I don’t someone’s getting knocked the fuck out and I’m probably facing assault charges. Mindfulness is basically just an empty buzzword at this point.

Meditation isn’t a bad practice, but people need to stop putting it on a pedestal like it’s some kind of catch-all cure for everything. Stop constantly pushing this patronizing crap in every self-help article. Let’s see you idiots try meditating when my foot is lodged up your ass.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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