Does Contemporary "McMindfulness" Reinforce Our Suffering?

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A woman sits in meditation outside. — Jared Rice/Unsplash

What’s the point in modern mindfulness? Popular apps like Calm and Headspace promote a practice that “is nothing more than basic concentration training,” says Ronald Purser, author of “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.”

Part of the book’s argument is that mindfulness has been commodified and co-opted into little more than a pacifier shushing us amidst intolerable, overwhelming conditions, as Purser explains in a Q&A with The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang.

Rather than apply the practice in full – including its demands to “go beyond self-interest” – Western practitioners use mindfulness to remain isolated, disconnected and inwardly focused, he says.

The cover of "McMindfulness" by Ronald E. Purser shows a Buddhist statue with Ronald McDonald-esque hair and clown makeup drawn over it.

“Although derived from Buddhism,” Purser writes, “it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings. What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems. A truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system, but mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.”

That’s not to say that Purser, a Buddhist teacher and professor at San Francisco State University, discourages meditation to resolve personal distress; quite the contrary.

But, he argues that a mindfulness solely focused on the self is only a stopgap fix – a long-term solution to collective suffering within a harmful system that requires collective resistance against it. There’s got to be a change to the actual structure causing our stress in the first place — but it requires a collective awareness of the problem.

“Justice and compassion aren’t just moral duties that we impose from the outside,” Purser says. “They grow out of a revolutionary change in consciousness – a recognition of interbeing, radical interdependence. When you really see that, you act differently. Not because you should, but because you can’t help it.”

Radical interdependence means a return to communal practices. The real need, Purser says, is for people to gather together, engage one another and look back to spiritual, collectivist traditions that reinforce our common humanity. The mindfulness that we need, he argues, is not the profitable, isolated practice we’ll find online.

“You can’t think your way into this,” he says. “You have to live it. But you can’t live it until you ground yourself in it, until you discover and nurture it with other people.”