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Comment by haploid | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like an excellent use of one's time. I wonder if the health benefits of "meditation" are as significant as those of "hatha yoga", "chiropractic", or any other such Eastern mystic pseudoscientific charlatanism.

Why spend 30 minutes a day volunteering, working, or doing something else to benefit humanity, when you can spend it sitting on a pillow, indulging yourself in an act of inducing the all-powerful placebo effect to convince yourself that all the "stress" of an upper middle class American lifestyle can be magically washed away by breathing and thinking of fat bronze statues and waterfalls?

Hope these amazing changes to your life continue.

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The whole point about meditation is about self-reflection. Yes, you may argue that comparing meditation with volunteering, the former would seem like a complete waste of time with no benefit to society, but its only because you're looking at it in one-dimension.

If the OP is able to turn his life around, become calmer, more understanding and more compassionate, his actions and interactions in the physical world would have an impact to all those around him and create a multiplier effect that is much more effective in the long run than just pure volunteering.

True, volunteering isn't usually very effective (except at creating emotional reward), compared to working and donating effectively.

You're rather judgmental and cynical. Do you have any real experience with meditation? Something tells me you don't. It sure seems like if entire cultures practice it, there must be something to it.

> It sure seems like if entire cultures practice it, there must be something to it.

See also clitoral circumcision, death penalty for apostasy and homosexuality, and other popular cultural practices. There are many things that are widely believed and not true. The claimed benefits of meditation should be available to scientific scrutiny, so we can actually know one way or the other. No need for faith or appeal to common practice.

Google "meditation research"--people have been doing precisely that over the last few years. Also, please don't lump meditation in with those other practices until you've learned more about it.

You don't need to convince me. I was just pointing out the fallacy in the parent's argument from popularity. I can like meditation without liking bad arguments for it.

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