How Mindfulness Morphed from Ancient Spiritual Practice to Big Business
The roots of mindfulness as a spiritual practice go back thousands of years. But today, corporations like Facebook and Google are using it as a technique to extract more productivity and more profits from workers.
A meditation event hosted by Ted Danson and Cigna’s Dr Stuart Lustig encouraging people to create a plan to manage their stress on October 10, 2019 in New York City. (Slaven Vlasic / Getty Images)
“Breathe!” The contemporary white-collar worker is constantly exhorted. Capitalism drives us crazy and makes us sick. But whatever the malady — anxiety, hypertension, or trouble focusing at work — “mindfulness” is touted as the cure.
On November 21, at McNally Jackson’s bookstore in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone talked with Ron Purser, a practicing Buddhist and a professor of management at San Francisco State University, about his new book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, on the present-day neoliberal uses of this ancient practice.
Liza Featherstone
Stress is such a ubiquitous complaint now. But I learned from reading your book that as a feeling, phenomenon, and word, it’s fairly new. Can you historicize stress for us?
Ron Purser
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