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>mindfulness programs for employees are often a way for employers to try and get their staff to be more accepting of crappy conditions

^This. I don't need mindfulness, gyms, free junky snacks, team building events, parking spaces as perks, I need work conditions that don't grind my mind and body so much for me to require therapy afterwards (realistic deadlines, no open office, no rush hour commutes, remote work, comfy monitors, chairs and desks, time off to spend with my family).

Unfortunately due to ever increasing wealth inequality, most of the workforce, even in the west, is stuck in a meatgrinder where the only escape being dangled in front of you is climbing the ladder high enough until you become the one one to turn the handle.

i wish i could upvote more than once. the company i work for recently started surveying people about “return to office”. the company has been really good about work from home during COVID but they really haven’t taken into consideration a permanent distributed workforce. the survey results will speak for themselves. People are less stressed without a daily commute, see their families more and have more balance - oh and get the same amount of work or more.

i think any company that’s not seriously evaluating distributed teams permanently is going to lose talent.

Before the lockdown, my company always provided the option of working from home if needed. Maybe you had childcare, maybe your car was in the garage. But the general default was to be in the office. How we worked reflected this - often we'd try to resolve problems or ask for advice face to face. Some people could get frustrated if others were frequently working from home on short notice.

With hindsight, I haven't felt many blocks to working remotely. Hardware issues, like a laptop charger failing, tend to be the more difficult things to get sorted. It's how things have to be, and people get on with it. What I do miss is the corridor conversations and find that I have a more narrow view of what's going on in the company because I'm simply not exposed to it.

Also, I neglected to invest in my home office setup because it wasn't a common thing to use. If working remotely does because more of a norm, that's where I'd spend some money going forward.

People like the change working from home for a few months. This is not socially sustainable though. People will begin to feel isolated and lonely (which is already an epidemic in itself). Working from home for years on end is something only a handful of people are really cut out for, and the problem is that most people don't realize they're not one of those people until they've been doing it for quite a while.

"This is not socially sustainable though"

Maybe it isn't for some, like you, but for many/most forced WFH I believe the outcome will in fact be lasting and socially fruitful.

(Personally, I've WFH 10+ years so not the best example because it was always my preference and had no cares about missing out on potential social interactions or relationships with co-workers)

But plenty of people I know about have been recently forced to WFH are finding various new hobbies and thus discovering and developing new social circles (Online & IRL) even w/ CV19 circumstances. Not to mention just going outside to do things and meeting others is happening a lot - at least where I live.

Between observing this and thinking through it more...I'm not convinced that coworkers are really the best types of relationships anyways. Indeed they can provide us with some superficial temporary social stimuli and primitive reinforcement, though not sure relationships by default/proximity are not built to last regardless. And they often come with the consummate 'shop talk' and 'office politics' or 'gossip' trade-offs - all childish stuff to be concerned with in or outside of work.

My hunch is that we're all better off getting to know people outside our own little bubbles :)

Right now, so many people's social outlets are work, which seems the bad part. Take that away and either now there's nothing, or norms change and people make more social outlets to meet people outside of work. I'm sure hoping for the latter, which I see as better than the status quo.

I wish I could find/found a sort of engineering collective, owned by the employees and with a focus on work/life balance to alleviate the meat grinder that is modern work. I’d be ok taking a pay cut.

The modern workplace is a sick system [1] designed to push you to your limits holding onto a semblance of a comfortable life as inequality rises.

[1] http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html

Actual mindfulness is not about numbing yourself to annoying conditions or subservience. It is, for me at least, the exact opposite. It makes me more secure and firm in grounding, allowing me to better question authority in my mind, see things for what they are beyond the surface level knee jerk reactions, it gives space to break out of the "fire!!" mentality, see the work in context or what else is also important etc.

Now, of course it depends on what they sell under the label of mindfulness. You can slap that label on any kool-aid cult indoctrination if you want. Not any session where people tell you how to use your mind will be beneficial for sure.

I can't find the exact quote, but George Carlin had a great bit on this. It goes something like:

"Before you start taking powerful psychoactive medication for your depression, anxiety, or other neuroses, do a quick head count of the people around you. You know, take a quick poll before you pop the pills. Make sure that everyone around you isn't just a complete asshole."

> I've seen it suggested in other articles here before that mindfulness programs for employees are often a way for employers to try and get their staff to be more accepting of crappy conditions, or unpleasant, meaningless or unethical work.

I'm not sure I buy this. I suppose it's true that being better able to tolerate unpleasant situations does mean you might put up with them for longer. And while meditating, yes, the goal is to not react to things you're feeling.

But for me, a big benefit of mindfulness is more clarity on where my emotions are coming from. I'd sometimes feel tense, or upset, or nervous, but couldn't even really notice I was feeling that way, let alone why I was feeling that way.

I think clarity there generally helps people change their conditions more than it urges them to just accept them.

> But for me, a big benefit of mindfulness is more clarity on where my emotions are coming from

That's what I'd say about the emotional work I do, so I'm not criticising that kind of work if that is the actual outcome, and if it leads to more authentic perception of one's surroundings and increased ability to make decisions that are best for one's self and the world long-term.

I'm just questioning whether that really is the outcome or indeed the intention for programs branded as "mindfulness" in workplaces, schools, etc.

How would you encourage genuine mindfulness in an organization without opening up this kind of concern/criticism of the potential motivations behind it?

I think in many cases it's a valid criticism - perhaps due to practitioners who don't communicate how to apply mindfulness clearly, or staff who fail to understand the true goals and attempt to use it to suppress complaints and problems.

My understanding is that there is an actual definition and research of mindfulness that can be used to evaluate and I guess even benchmark whether a given program actually is using the methods as intended?

Can you point to any links to details of what you mean?

>I think clarity there generally helps people change their conditions more than it urges them to just accept them.

It can work either way. Any mental approach can be used for clarity and motivation or as an opiate - or something worse (justification for harm, etc.). It depends on what you emphasize. For kids in school, they're probably not going to be able to change their own conditions, particularly at school.

I've experienced both in myself. Meditation, discovery, and self reflection helped me deal with very bad work situations, but it also eventually made it clear where balance was lacking and the motivation to find better balance, which is very difficult in the US (and I'm sure most of the world).

I also think there's a big difference between wanting it for yourself and having it pushed on you. If I didn't seek it out but instead had school or work force it down my throat, I doubt I would have benefited much from it. I'm sure there are kids and adults who were ready for it anyway, so when it was forced on them, they scooped it up and ran, but I doubt that's the typical experience. Balance is different for different people, because we're all off balance in different ways, so I might need to learn a little this way or a lot that way to find balance, and you may need to lean in the opposite directions. Mindfulness is vague enough to give people room to adjust according to their needs, but in an institutional setting, it will be filtered through the balances of whoever is presenting it. Because some of these approaches helped me, I'm inclined to want other people to experience them, but I also understand that different things work for different people and that I shouldn't expect my experiences to translate to everyone else.

I think the intentions of mainstream mindfulness programs are to introduce the very concept of meditation to those who wouldn’t otherwise consider it. If firms reached out with less practical forms of meditation, there would be lower uptake. Compare a weeklong silent meditation retreat vs easy mindfulness training that you can do 10 minutes/day. There’s just going to be more workers taking up the more efficient option.

Through that lens, mainstream mindfulness programs make sense as part of a work/life benefits package.

Life has been horrible for millenia. That's why mindfulness has been practiced for milllenia.