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The dichotomy in the title is false. As the article states: "This observation fits together with studies that show the best way of maintaining mental harmony du
by aaimnr 11y ago
The dichotomy in the title is false. As the article states:
"This observation fits together with studies that show the best way of maintaining mental harmony during mind-wandering is to be able to be aware of the fact that you are doing it."
Which means, precisely, that it's a state of mindful watching a stream of thoughts, without exerting any pressure or expectations of the result.
With mindfulness you can do everything better, including thinking - the fact that you are aware of it doesn't mean that you overly control or restrain it. You can let the thoughts flow freely when it's useful, you can stop them (with some practice) when it starts to be counter-productive.
- throwaway999888 11y agoReally the culture they are tilting against is the go-getter "productivity" culture that puts everything into two buckets: productive, and not-productive. Everything that can be directly measured is productive, while other things are recreational at best. That's according to this 'productivity' culture anyway.
- aaimnr 11y agoThanks, makes sense. It reminds me a story about some companies blindly following Google in introducing mindfulness courses to its employees, in hope of increased productivity. The interesting offshoot was that some of them, having started meditating, realized that the job is crap and they quit the company.