by Rebecca Baumgartner
Imagine someone sitting cross-legged on the floor and breathing deeply. Now imagine someone sitting on a couch and playing a video game.
Which of these is mindfulness and which is escapism? What differentiates them? Why does one seem healthier or more virtuous than the other? And what assumptions about human cognition and flourishing does that assignment of virtue rest on?
Mindfulness adherents tell us we can savor the present moment by noticing all our physical sensations in great detail: the textures we feel, the sounds we hear, the sensation of our breathing, and other forms of physical feedback. Our personality and ego take a backseat to simply being present to what’s around us.
My contrarian view is that this hyperfocus on minutiae allows the person sitting on a mat meditating to escape everything in their life that isn’t sitting on a mat meditating. Wanting to escape is not the problematic part; the issue is that we’re deceiving ourselves that it’s not escapism. Meditating and other forms of mindfulness offer a metaphysical escapism that lets you pretend for a while that you are no more than an organism receiving inputs from your immediate surroundings, with no interpretative or meaning-making capabilities. This is why certain types of meditation and other mindful states are described as “no-mind” states.
While meditating, you’re not an adult with responsibilities or a personality or justified reasons to be angry or sad – no, you’re something much simpler and easier to control: a Mars rover or a rat in a Skinner box, simply responding to stimuli and gathering data from your surroundings, making no judgments, having no desires, and keeping emotional reactions in check. If your mind does break the rules and have a thought (and it always will), you are supposed to observe it impersonally, as though it’s a cloud passing high above that has nothing to do with you.
The question is not whether achieving a state similar to a rat’s or a robot’s no-mind functioning is possible – anyone who has spaced out while staring out a car window knows it is. It’s not even about whether that mental state is helpful or not – it almost certainly can be sometimes, in the same way that rebooting a computer every so often keeps things running smoothly. After all, we not only need to space out every once in a while, but actually need to shut down for 8 hours every night, or else we start acting buggy and hallucinating.
If someone needs a break from being a human being and wants to do nothing but focus on their breath or stare off into space for 15 minutes, I completely get that. But let’s not glorify it; let’s not pretend it’s not escapism. Trying to have a mind with no thoughts in it has probably seemed appealing to everyone at one time or another, but that state is not the apotheosis of a self-aware human. When we remove ourselves from the flow of events happening inside and outside of us, we’re not being present. And that’s just fine. Sometimes the here and now is awful.
Constant presence would be a nightmare. This is why you lose yourself in music while your parents argue loudly in the next room. Or read a novel to feel a sense of space and possibility when your country is in lockdown. Or why you play a video game to remember what it’s like to make low-stakes decisions in the midst of cancer treatment. Escapism includes writing in a diary to explore the way your mind works and taking up painting to let your mind solve problems subconsciously. We fantasize and daydream to resist the rigidity of routine and the stagnation of aging, and we listen to something funny to distract us from our pain and illness and fear. All of these are vital to human functioning, and they all involve escaping from the here and now.
Sometimes you’re in a pit that you can’t see your way out of or living through a moment that simply won’t end, and the right book or the right music or the right project can yank you out of it. You have something to look forward to, something that makes getting out of bed or surviving your childhood or staying in your toxic job a little easier. You have a way of understanding your world better by living in someone else’s for a while. You develop empathy and curiosity, because the most engaging types of escapism ask you to see differently. You get to know who you are and what your mental landscape is like. You refresh your stock of willpower to deal with whatever is out there waiting for you.
No amount of non-judgmentally attending to your breath will give you those things. Meditating is a form of escape, but it’s a pretty paltry one when compared to the richer outlets we have at our disposal. The fact is, you don’t need to enter a depersonalized no-mind state in order to center yourself, feel grounded, feel rested, have compassion for yourself, or be self-aware. Paradoxically, stepping outside the here and now may be the very thing that allows you to come back to the here and now in a more inspired, engaged frame of mind.
The gold standard for “good escapism” is the psychological flow state, an experience of effortless attention in which you’re completely engrossed in a fulfilling activity that provides the perfect amount of challenge and in which time seems to fly. Flow states are what mindfulness wishes it could be.
I could play the piano mindfully, noticing the feeling of smooth wood under my fingers, bringing awareness to my shoulders and arms, focusing exquisite attention on the way the lamp lights my page, and so on. But if I could choose between that way of playing or playing in a flow state, in which my complete attention is on the holistic experience of playing and an hour seems to pass in a few minutes, it’s no question which I’d choose. They both have an element of escapism to them; in both cases I’m ignoring everything else I could be doing. But mindfulness feels sterile, a simple cataloging of phenomena. Flow feels more profoundly restorative, like a “melting together of action and consciousness.”
The tricky part is that while you can choose to meditate or mindfully attend to your surroundings, you can’t really choose to enter a flow state, any more than you can force yourself to sneeze or fall asleep. Whereas mindfulness is a task that anyone can do (it’s often touted as “something no one can fail at,” and its instructions are the same for everyone), flow states are much more individualized and uncontrollable. You can sit down and say “I’m going to meditate now,” and even if you meditate poorly, letting your brain hop all over the place, you have still meditated. However, you cannot sit down and say, “I’m going to enter a flow state” and necessarily enter a flow state. You might want to, but it is entirely possible to fail.
Similar to how you can’t see a star if you look directly at it but only if you look just a bit to the side, you can’t usually recognize a flow state while you’re in one; it breaks the spell. Flow states resist our deliberate striving, because they are states of no-striving. I think this is why we don’t hear as much about flow in the cultural conversation. It’s not something where trying harder gets you closer to the goal.
That’s ultimately the core of my issue with mindfulness: it pretends we can have mastery over our minds. Modern psychotherapy tells us the same thing, and it’s not a coincidence that many people from Western traditions learn about mindfulness in this context. The ties between mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), one of the standard treatments for anxiety and depression, are particularly salient. CBT entails invalidating, minimizing, or controlling certain thoughts that are considered distortions.
This might sound obviously good – and for some people, in some situations, it can be. For example, someone having a panic attack might benefit from mindfulness exercises that get them to focus on one thing in their environment at a time and CBT exercises that challenge their thought that they’re dying.
But in general, it’s interesting to note that mindfulness and CBT assume we have a self separate from our thoughts, a self that makes judgments about which thoughts we get to keep and which we should discard. Our thoughts are clouds floating above us that aren’t really us (or so it’s implied). Regardless of whether that’s true or not, it’s definitely a particular theory about how the mind works. But mindfulness presents itself as non-ideological; in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the writers who first introduced modern Western audiences to the practice, mindfulness isn’t “trying to sell you anything, especially not a belief system or ideology.”
But the idea that we can and should distance ourselves from our thoughts is an ideology. The claim that our “true selves” are empty of thought and emotion represents a particular belief system. It’s a pat ideology, in fact, and one that won’t even admit it’s an ideology. As Sahanika Ratnayake writes, “The relationship between individuals and their mental phenomena is a weighty one, encompassing questions of personal responsibility and history. These matters shouldn’t be shunted so easily to one side.”
Meditation sets aside everything you’re grappling with, everything that makes you, you; it tries to convince you that the only context that matters is the one happening right now, and that the most profound way of understanding that context is by focusing on transitory physical phenomenon. And it sells this to you as “presence,” which, with its overtones of philosophical rigor and good behavior, seeks to differentiate itself from mere escapism, which is cast aside as laziness, rather than the life-expanding force it is.
Rather than aiming for this kind of false presence, I think we’d all be better off reading a good book or sitting down to play a few glorious, escapist hours of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.