The mind is often its own worst enemy. For all the noise around mindfulness and meditation, I’ve found it to be the hardest thing to practice. Empty your mind, they say. Focus on your breath. But no one tells you what to do when your brain feels like a crowded fish market (geddit)—distractions shouting at you, overflowing with thoughts, and incapable of sitting still. For me, mindfulness hasn’t been a peaceful journey toward clarity; it’s been a tug-of-war against a mind that’s always too full.
People make meditation sound deceptively simple. But I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to do this when your mind is full and it is not easy. I think that the ability to focus on nothing is something that you learn by nurture and I grew up in the wrong era for this. I grew up in a time when distractions were a comforting constant. There was always a book to read or a cartoon to watch (or rewatch). I never had to confront boredom or the unsettling stillness of my thoughts. Over time, those distractions evolved into something more insidious—smartphones, social media, endless scrolling—until I realized I wasn’t just distracted; I was addicted. Addicted to the comforting numbness of not having to think.
While my parents are religious, neither of them seemed to prioritize meditation or mindfulness. If they had mental disciplinary tools, I still don’t know of it. I’d occasionally hear of meditation but it’d be in the context of retreats, mythology or the last 10 minutes of yoga class. I understood it about as well as I understood integral calculus which is to say, not at all.
Even as a child, I struggled to meditate. My mind had nothing to be cleared of, but I still found it difficult to focus on absolutely nothing and instead spent a lot of that time just thinking about what book I’d been reading or sneaking open my eyes to find out if everyone else had given up either.
As a teenager who had more familiarity with the Internet, I still retained the ability to get lost in books for hours at a time - an ability that has been eroded more and more and more by smartphones, video platforms, messaging platforms and social media to the point where my hand reaches for the phone before I can even recognize it as impulse to distract myself. I am no stranger to distracting myself with my phone while distracting myself with my iPad/TV and I too have felt the impulse to scroll Instagram while ON Instagram. Sometimes, the distraction is no longer a distraction and I can recognize the deadness inside myself even as I scroll. It is worrying when you find yourself needing distraction even as you brush your teeth or comb your hair. I got off Instagram but replaced it with YouTube, Threads and Reddit. I have tried using journaling to induce more mindfulness but it’s a post-facto tool and it cannot help mitigate, only analyze.
I am an addict. There’s no two ways about it. I am an addict whose addiction is enjoying the feeling of not having to think. It’s the greatest gift these platforms and businesses can give us because when you don’t have to think, you don’t:
Stop to wonder why everything is now geared around us buying something. As the world “expands”, we’re getting more and more isolated and lonelier. We buy to feel something. We buy into narratives. We do not have the time to discover ourselves so we buy ourselves as well. Note: We cannot go anywhere without an ad in our faces. That Threads is still ad-free is the only reason I’m on it.
Stop to wonder whether you actually need the thing you’re buying or if something you have can do the same job. No, you don’t need a lip mask for the irritated skin above your lips. Use coconut oil and call it a day.
Stop to think about whether their life is the way they want it to be
Stop to wonder what happens to stuff when you throw it away
Stop to wonder what your effect is on the people around you
Stop to wonder why you have to be told to touch grass
Being mindful is bad for business. However, while recognizing that our environment contributes a lot to this feeling of being perpetually “on” and like you can’t wind on is useful, it doesn’t do to remove the onus of responsibility on the individual.
I watched Buy Now on Netflix which attempts to draw attention to the ways businesses pull the wool over people’s eyes so they’ll keep buying. The documentary discusses planned obsolescence, greenwashing, and recycling and doesn’t mince words about it. It’s actually kind of sad that people had to go to court to get the right to repair devices they own without violating warranty but that is indeed the world we live in. You don’t own the ebooks you buy off Amazon and if something happens to your expensive iPhone, just get another one because fixing it is pretty much the same cost as buying another one. While the documentary does an excellent job at highlighting what businesses do to keep people consuming, it was kind to the brain-washed consumer caught in the shopping web. The kind of people watching the documentary are already trying to change their behaviour (But like in The Good Place, often have to make compromises that earn them negative points like wanting to buy something in person to avoid online shopping but realizing the thing you’re trying to procure cannot be found where you live so you have to make the tradeoff between evils of online shopping and the emissions you rack up trying to find a bundt pan) and can watching a documentary really make people change their behaviour when everything in their lives is pushing them to be distracted and overconsume? It’s a hard, uphill climb when the alternative (pretty things and convenience) is so much easier.
Dopamine Nation, a book I read, is a lot harder on the individual and even goes to the extent of calling our inability to resist high-dopamine rewards as an addiction. If you are unable to sit still for a few minutes without feeling the impulse to check your phone, it is an addiction. It’s a socially sanctioned addiction but it still is one.
The book also finally explained meditation/mindfulness in a way that didn’t make me feel like I was always discovering it like a Scooby Doo villain.
Think of mindfulness as the ability to just tolerate boredom or an impulse for a few minutes. You are resisting the urge to eat to make yourself feel better (or something). You are resisting the urge to check YouTube. By inverting it and not asking me to focus on emptying my mind so it’s full of nothing, it feels like a much easier task to accomplish when I’m mindfull.
It’s an uphill battle because the war for your attention is on two levels. I’m still on level one, fighting the battle of overconsumption and ceding the battle for my attention for another day. Sure, I have my defenses like ScreenTime and OneSec and my disapproving partner who says my multitasking skill at texting but also listening is not as great as I claim it to be but diverting my dopamine-demanding brain to reward-rich pathways (like exercise or a creative hobby) is a ballgame all by itself.
In a world where my mind is constantly too full, I am settling for this definition of mindfulness. Mindfulness isn’t about emptying it completely—it’s about making space for the things that truly matter.
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Characters in novels love when it rains but clearly, they didn’t live in modern Indian cities or they must not be mentally all right if they do. When it starts to rain, you know you’re in for random pools of water clogging roads, overflowing sewage, lots of garbage on the roads, power cuts, and just…mud everywhere. Filth, filth everywhere.
Thanks for writing this. I was trying to make sense of how I got bored while sleeping last week because I wasn’t dreaming. 🙃
this blog matters. thank you, aishwarya