Compare buying a meditation book with a few guided meditation track for 20$, or subscribing to an app with a recurring cost of 70$/year, I don't really see the added value.
Can someone shed light on what I am missing ?
With Calm, there's new content every single day with our Daily Calm meditation. We've got more daily content coming soon too.
In addition to the content people also like us for our tracking features and daily reminders, which people consider valuable.
Each Daily Calm session is available for that day only, so you either listen to it or you don't. If you do come back to the app every day there's something fresh for you if that's what you'd like (you can of course to a regular session too). If you don't use the app on any particular day, no big deal, there's no backlog of content for you to stress about catching up with!
> Each Daily Calm session is available for that day only,
> so you either listen to it or you don't.
"Agh! Better listen quick or it's gone forever!"
I say this as the guy who wakes up in the morning with 500-800 overnight missed tweets, and then patiently reads through them.
I guess it's partly FOMO, partly habit, and partly the slightly positive aspect of following a routine. There are the odd days when I just skip them all, but it does leave me slightly irked.
All in all, it's not the worst thing in the world, although I wouldn't be upset to grow out of the habit.
I still have it, but mostly just use it to contact customer service departments - seems to be the most painless way these days.
2. It depends on how stressed you are. I felt an immediate difference in calmness at the end of each headspace session. This was almost immediately worth it for me to spend $70 on. All I need it to do is give me one extra hours work done from being calmer to make it worthwhile.
3. Also there's laziness of having everything setup for you. I wouldn't keep it up if I had to read my own way through and make my own path. Headspace makes it very easy just to follow a guided path but with some choice. A lot of it is using the same techniques in slightly different ways.
Calm's CTO's comment about having new content each day I don't find very important. I know this is a very long term thing (i.e. decades of learning), so I know each section requires a lot of practice and repetition. I'm happy to repeat sections and practice until I get the full benefit.
However, people pay for stuff sometimes for the psychological effect. For example, we pay to have someone clean our house. But the day before they come to clean, we pre-clean. It keeps us accountable to not letting clutter take control.
I listen to the Kabat-Zinn audio, not so much for the instruction, but that it helps keep me "on the cushion" for a longer duration. Without it, I'm more likely to get distracted and stop early to do something else.
So sometimes that is the actual value, the accountability. It's an intangible value.
You can do this with anything - works great with programming screencasts, for example. If it's the type of service that regularly updates, you can just resubscribe for a month once in a while to grab the new stuff.
Potentially copyright infringement, YMMV. If you only consumed the articles once then a time-shifting Fair Use or Fair Dealing (or similar) case might be made.
The fact that there are people that make enough money, or not care enough about money, to prefer the convenience on just clicking "subscribe" on an app they downloaded and like, over searching for meditations books with meditation tracks on CD, ripping it to your phone, etc.
For more pinching-penny types, they could also expect the app to offer more/different tracks over time too.
Also, best phrase from the article:
the meditation and mindfulness industry
Somehow absurd.