My dad worked in the oil industry.  So, among the many quirks of my childhood, I knew about the idea of “peak oil” before I was a teenager.  My dad told me that there must be a finite amount of oil inside the earth.  It logically follows that at some point humans will have extracted half the oil reserves hidden underground.  And after that peak, oil production will necessarily decrease.

Peaks

A guy named Marion King Hubbert* first figured out the idea of peak oil way back in 1956 and confidently predicted that global oil production would peak around the year 2000.  He made similar estimates for other fossil fuels like coal and natural gas.  Here’s the graph of peak oil from Hubbert’s original paper.

Peak oil gave birth to the generic concept of peaks elsewhere in our culture.  Peaks became a flourishing meme.  Search the internet for “Have we reached peak” and you’ll find entries on peak smart phone, peak car, peak suburbs, peak travel, peak beer, peak narcissism, peak hipster, peak beard, peak Beyoncé, and even peak peak.  And among the many food peaks, such as peak bacon, personal finance bloggers love peak Avocado Toast.

Peak Mindfulness?

The whole peak meme climbed to the peak of my thoughts, when I saw a Fast Company article by freelance journalist Jared Lindzon entitled, “Stop forcing your mindfulness on me.”

My first reaction was laughter.  Whoever’s “forcing” mindfulness on poor Jared needs to stop it now.  And honestly, my second reaction was anger.  The headline conjures images of rouge Buddhist monks roaming the country side and forcing people to meditate.  It seems purposefully misleading just to get a few more clicks.  Of course, in the main body of the article Lindzon doesn’t present any evidence of mindfulness being forced on people.  Instead, he emphasizes its ubiquity: “‘[M]indfulness’ has taken on an almost cult-like status, becoming nearly inescapable in conversations about mental health and personal well-being, especially within the tech world.”

Lindzon speaks for many people who feel like we’ve reached an irritating level of peak mindfulness.  In fact, the irritation levels are so high that someone actually researched how often mindfulness was mentioned in scientific literature and the media to generate this graph.

The graph implies that we’ve reached peak mindfulness, but we can’t quite see the downward leg of the curve yet.

Mindfulness Myths

Lindzon’s forced-mindfulness article is a good example of some increasingly popular myths about mindfulness.  I gleaned three major “problems” with mindfulness from the article.

It’s Inauthentic – Lindzon points out, “[T]here isn’t a single word in the [Buddhist] text[s] that translates to ‘now’ or ‘present,’ which is central to its modern application.”  The myth here is that the absence of the word “now” in the earliest Buddhist writings somehow invalidates the modern application of mindfulness.

Buddhist texts are full or all sorts of confusing, fantastical, and even contradictory concepts that aren’t particularly helpful to the modern application of mindfulness.  For example, the idea of reincarnation is a central pillar of ancient Buddhism, but no one supposes that you have to believe in reincarnation in order to practice mindfulness today.

Further, most modern-day Buddhists find the concept of “now” entirely consistent with the history of mindfulness and have fully integrated the term into their practice.  Check out videos or text from the teacher and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.  He often uses the term “present moment” and similar variations, and he’s obviously well-versed in ancient Buddhist texts.

It’s Potentially Harmful – Lindzon next claims that mindfulness is harmful by interviewing professor emerita of management at California State University, East Bay, Loretta Breuning.  “[M]indfulness often seeks to silence those nagging thoughts that humans developed to motivate their quest for survival….Often when they do mindfulness practice, they’re not focused on their needs, they’re focused on denying their needs.”**  The idea that mindfulness seeks to silence nagging thoughts or deny our biological needs is exactly the opposite of modern mindfulness practice.

The point of meditation and a focus on the present is to recognize our needs, thoughts, and emotions rather than avoiding them by reminiscing about the past or fantasizing about potential future events.  Meditation teachers commonly instruct us to embrace uncomfortable emotions or negative thoughts and explore them with curiosity.  In retreat settings, teachers often suggest skipping a meal.  This might seem like trying to “deny” our body’s needs.  But in reality, this practice is an opportunity to study the needs, emotions, and suffering that may accompany core biological functions like hunger.  Mindfully studying our thoughts also helps reveal that our internal monologues often magnify the suffering associated with biological needs.  Personally, I see absolutely no harm caused by studying our negative emotions, needs, and suffering from a purposefully calm and balanced view-point.

Other Options – Having mistakenly established that mindfulness is a “harmful escape” from reality, the article argues for better ways to escape stress.  “Rather than meditating away negative emotions, Breuning says there are a lot of other activities that offer the same temporary escape, without attempting to establish a more permanent detachment from the ego.”  Breuning seems to define “detachment from the ego” as the mechanism that denies our needs.  But most mindfulness practitioners will tell you that detachment from our egos helps us better understand and explore our needs, for the reasons I noted above.

The article advises that superior stress relief can come from, “Exercising, listening to music, playing sports, practicing art, or engaging in any activity that helps temporarily shut out the rest of the world…”  These are good examples of pure distraction.  Breuning says, “Whatever it is that you love, find a way to make it convenient to use in those moments of anxiety.”  The advice exposes that Breuning’s mindfulness critique is hollow.  What if someone loves to relieve anxiety by binge eating, drinking in excess, or sitting in front of the television for hours on end?  No one supposes that such distractions are a healthy way to relieve stress.  Breuning and Lindzon simply cherry-pick the more productive-sounding distractions and ignore the unproductive distractions that cause so much harm.

I agree that healthy activities likes sports and art are excellent forms of stress relief.   But it’s exactly their similarities with meditation (concentration, awareness of the present moment, awareness of the body, lack of consumption), rather than their differences (pure distraction versus mindful attention) that make them helpful.

Unfortunately, I find that most complaints in the media about peak mindfulness simply mischaracterize the nature and practice of mindfulness.  The only defensible criticism I see in this article is that the ongoing barrage of mindfulness messages can be annoying.  It can be particularly frustrating for those who’ve tried meditation and found it difficult or seemingly impossible, which is a common hurdle for novice meditators.

Peak Myths

The rise of mindfulness in western culture and the subsequent popular backlash, echos the rise and fall of past psychological fads.  Ever heard of EST therapy or The Secret?  These fads were once widely thought to offer great potential.  But that view slowly morphed into criticism, and then ridicule, until these fads were largely forgotten.

The peak meme is alluring, because it seems logical and is easy to apply to almost anything.  But easy things can also be mostly wrong.  Is the concept of peak mindfulness wrong?

Perhaps recent developments in peak oil, the origin of the peak meme, might tell us whether peak mindfulness is real.  I noted above that Hubbert originally predicted peak oil production around the year 2000.  Given that we’re nearly 20 years past that date, we can compare the prediction to actual oil production data before and after 2000.  This graph of oil production extends through 2015, the latest data I could easily find.  As best I can tell, the y-axis is in millions of barrels per day.

Similar to the mindfulness graph above, oil production has not yet reached a perceptible peak.  It turns out that Hubbert was wrong by at least 15 years, and counting.  You can find more recent predictions of peak oil ranging anywhere from now to after 2100.  In other words, each time peak oil fails to arrive, the researchers push back the predicted date.***

There are many surprising complications with making accurate peak oil predictions.  One of the biggest complications is that exploration and extraction technology keeps improving.  The amount of fossil fuels in the ground are still finite, but we keep finding new pockets that we never dreamed existed before.  And we keep devising better ways to extract ever deeper and more diffuse deposits.  Environmental disasters like Deep Water Horizon and the Alberta Tar Sands are examples of the collateral damage caused by pushing the bounds of oil recovery technology.

The original instance of the alluring peak meme failed to describe reality, which tell us two things.  One, it’s impossible to predict meaningful things about the future with any consistency.  Two, our inability to predict the future is mostly a failure of the imagination.  We simply can’t conjure up all the possible changes in all the variables that may become significant to a future outcome.

Conclusion

At first glance, mindfulness seems like an obvious fad that’s nearing peak popularity.  But like a magic trick, the most obvious events on the stage are often the most misleading.  When properly understood, mindfulness offers something bigger than a fad.  The concepts of mindfulness and breathing meditation have endured for at least 2500 years.  In that time, mindfulness migrated between ancient civilizations and became fully integrated into stunningly different cultures.  Hundreds of millions of people across time have found mindfulness essential to a fulfilling life.  Some have suggested that the Western mindset is uniquely incapable of accepting mindfulness, but that sounds mostly like cultural pride talking.

Hubbert likely never dreamed of anything like Global Warming, which is the newest complication for peak oil predictions.  The oil production debate has evolved in the last two decades from a question of when oil will peak, to how we can best transcend the peak by quickly converting to alternative energy sources.  Our “need” to extract, refine, and burn more crude oil becomes increasingly questionable with each year’s uptick in global average temperatures.  Perhaps we’ll be collectively smart enough to see beyond the peak oil debate and decide to leave the remaining oil deposits moldering deep underground for a few more million years.  In the same vein, perhaps people will realize that mischaracterizing mindfulness as a harmful peak fad is unproductive, both for those who already pursue mindfulness and those who might want to try it in the future.

Change is stressful for most people.  And the rapid pace of technological change in modern society spurs ever-increasing environmental changes, economic changes, and public anxiety about those changes.  Mindfulness may become a nearly universal tool to help heal our anxieties about modern life.  Or it may dwindle into a niche hobby, like building ships in a bottle, that only a few eccentrics find therapeutic.  The folks dwelling on peak mindfulness could eventually be proven right, or they may be as wrong as the peak oil alarmists of the past.  Regardless, labeling mindfulness harmful because it “denies our needs”, is like labeling alternative energy initiatives harmful because they deny our traditional need to burn every drop of oil we can find.  Mindfulness helps show that our perceived “needs” are often just “wants” spawned by our bad habits.

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* Showing a decent sense of self-preservation in the macho oil industry, he wisely went by the more masculine variation of “M. King Hubbert”.

** Note that only the second half of this is an actual quote from Breuning.  My simplified quotation marks here denote any content that I took directly from the article.

*** It reminds of when doomsday cults set a date for the end of the world.  When the world awakes the next day, they inevitably set a new date or give some lame excuse for why nothing happened.