> Given that wealthy countries like the US aren’t exactly riding trend lines toward new peaks of mental health (depression rates in American adults are at an all-time high, while young people appear in the grips of a mental health crisis), scalable ways of not just mindfully soothing, but completely re-creating psychological experiences for the better should set off sirens of general, scientific, and funding intrigue.

I was all ready to criticize this, but the article pretty much sums up my feelings:

> Critics call it “McMindfulness,” a capitalist perversion of meditation that deals with stress by focusing inward on the breath, rather than outward on the social structures that cause so much of that stress.

I'm all for finding ways for people to improve their mental health and become more resilient to their suffering. But I can't help but feel the recent societal interest in meditation and psychedelics is wrongheaded in that it's treating a symptom rather than a cause.

There's also a part of me that resists the "capitalization" of these tools for mental introspection. It feels, in some way, to be missing the point. That said, I'm not sure that resistance is correctly targeted. Why shouldn't someone be able to make money by providing people with tools to improve their lives? Is that thought a silly purity spiral, leaving scraps of potential well-being on the table just because the packaging is too slick?

But still, there's something about it that feels off to me, as though there's something that's lost when we package all this ancient, hard-won wisdom into a smartphone app whose notifications to you will sit right next to the latest Elon Musk tweet.