Jerry Seinfeld, Social Anxiety, and Meditation | Hacker News Reader

Jerry Seinfeld, Social Anxiety, and Meditation

camhashemi.com

27 points1penny42cents25 comments

Recently, I've been able to meditate for 2 hours per day for a month. Before that I maybe meditated for 10 minutes per month for years on end. What I did have going for me is that I had about 600 hours of meditation experience already. So I knew what to do when I hear the words "just meditate".

I knew something had to change, and I knew that I wanted to do 2 hours as I know I need a lot of it. I made a challenge with a friend of mine who felt simirlarly: for each hour that we don't meditate, we pay the other person $100 or we lie and have to face ourselves in the mirror over that. Other than the penultimate day, where I was struggling with severe sleep issues (meditation doesn't solve that right out of the gate), I didn't miss a single session.

Through this challenge I learned what motivates me. I've seen similar things in videos and blog posts but now I found it out through my own experience. So learning that more deeply is an amazing bonus. Also, having a good streak going now, it's easier to keep on going than before (still not easy though!).

What meditation does for me:

- I understand my autonomous nervous system better (it does help indirectly with sleep)

- I crave things less (with mindfulness)

- I feel more joyful inside my body (with mindfulness)

- I can focus better (if I do enough breathing meditation)

- I love people more unconditionally (with loving-kindness meditation)

There are many more things, but that's what I'm seeing for now.

Meditation, for me, is getting into a flow state doing just about anything I want to do. Sometimes I spend hours sim-racing, woodworking, or coding and after being in flow for those several hours, I feel exhausted from the mental and physical exertion, but I am also calm the rest of the day into the evening. It only works if I get into the flow state, but if I just sit there and fuck things up badly and never flow, then it's not useful. Other examples of activities I get into a flow state for, and work similarly to my hobbies, are cleaning, cooking, playing video games, reading, and rarely TV or movies. The more manual the better, I find. Woodworking is the best, especially working with dangerous machines, because I find you absolutely HAVE to focus and flow in order to use something like a table saw properly.

I think you're conflating 'flow state' with just being absorbed into something. Flow state is typically described by elite athletes when exerting at the edge of their skill and performing at a high level. It has little to do with doing routine stuff like cooking or very passive mind numbing activities like watching movies.

They can be the same.

You can get into a flow state when cooking or cleaning. The task just needs to be in a specific Goldilocks zone of demanding and feasibility.

Cooking eggs, to me, might get me in a flow state, but probably not a trained French chef, unless they were pushing themselves to elevate the dish.

Probably not when watching movies though, unless you were constantly analyzing the story… maybe in a mystery flick or something.

I mean, flow is either something special or trivial. If it's trivial as paying attention, why not discuss 'attention', which has a rich literature behind it?

If it's something special, that demands skill and investment and yields better than average results, it's worth figuring out how to trigger it consistently. But then it's harder to argue I can achieve something like it by doing something so easy and trivial as cleaning the house.

So is it trivial and just a well known mechanism by another name and thus just a label that muddles the waters, or is it something special, thus quite apart from just focusing on something, that merits effort, and should not be conflated with trivially achievable states of mind?

You seem to want to make this particular state of mind achievable only by the Gods or something, but being in a flow state isn’t hard, and you’ll know it immediately by the way it feels.

Edit: I might be overstating the ease of getting into flow for neurotypical folks, having just googled it I’ve found a few references to studies showing those with ASD get into a similar state of flow very easily.

no need to put words in my argument... I'm merely saying, if flow state is just 'paying attention' than maybe it's not a special category... and if it's something that takes effort and yields better results than just doing things normally, then it's probably not something you do when 'frying eggs'.

It isn’t just paying attention. It’s a Goldilocks zone of difficulty of task and feasibility of it.

The researcher responsible for the term and idea wrote a book saying as much. https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-...

It’s great that making eggs is easy enough for you that it isn’t engaging, but that isn’t the case for everyone (I need to try to fry eggs over easy. I’m not a good cook) You can also trick your mind into entering this state with a wide variety of tasks.

Look fair enough, I did some research and the whole flow state idea lost a lot of cachet for me because I now realize it's just a piece of pop psychology while I had previously thought it had something to do with high performance athletics.

Two things can be true, but you do you.

Citation needed. Otherwise you’re just gatekeeping the term

Elite athletes don’t own the idea of flow, flow is simply deep, deep focus on an activity that you are doing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Cool. I'll just say here that a flow state like you're talking about is very different from point-focus meditation though. Both are great but the latter is specifically about focus on breathing/a point instead of taking up the mental space with a mindful activity. It's sort of like the difference between "negative space" and "positive space", and the latter (point meditation) can help with the former (flow state).

You can be "in" a flow state" but you "practice" mediation. They are not the same thing.

> but if I just sit there and fuck things up badly and never flow, then it's not useful.

Mediation is always useful.

Thank you, an ex-Theravada Buddhist turned Daoist.

I got into meditation after reading Thomas Metzingers "Ego Tunnel" and it was a real blessing since.

His newest book is on the experience of pure consciousness and is based upon 500 experimental reports by people who meditate. It's an interesting read. He even made it available for free here: https://mpe-project.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Metzinge...

The homepage of the project: https://mpe-project.info/the-mpe-project/

On Metzinger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Metzinger

> For him, sitting down for twenty minutes is a much more consistent tool for maximizing energy - even compared to sleep or coffee.

Firstly, I'm glad JS (and OP) see very positive effects of meditation but I'm highly skeptical meditation is more powerful than coffee (assuming sleep has diminishing returns). I doubt this is generalisable to most of us.

> Even within my new sessions, I can already feel a difference: after ten minutes, I reach a flow state that just feels great.

> Whereas before I’d be prone to fall into vicious spirals of self-consciousness and unease, a streak of meditation would allow me to calmly, warmly, and directly engage with people. If an awkward moment arose, I wouldn’t feed my internal fire with negative self-talk, but rather look outwards with an internal smile, wait for the moment to pass, and find a clever prosocial solution. But again, that explanation understates the magic.

Secondly, again, I'm happy OP found the answer to the greatest wall for new meditation practitioners: "how do I know if meditation is working???". I haven't found it. Brain states stuffs are more art than science, I believe.

For those looking for a completely secular approach to the kind of meditation that JS practices (non-directive meditation) have a look at Acem meditation.

> I see Jerry as a no-nonsense personality, one who’s reached the pinnacle of success in a competitive field

That’s… generous

Seriously this kind of social proof - 'this rich and famous guy said this so I paid attention' - is quite opposite to the major philosophies surrounding meditative practice.

why?

are there any other people that started in stand-up and ended up being worth over a billion dollars?

sure we can rate what pinnacle of success means in comedy -- maybe he's not the funniest -- but generally we rate success in most of the West by pay rate and hoard..

my 2 cents: all the comedians that famously ran out of money entirely during their careers are funnier people. carlin, pryor, lewis , kinnison, rooney, lenny bruce, sinbad, chris tucker.. the list goes on.

... but they didn't end up billionaires.

Is this a general argument then? Should we date teenagers in our late 30s as well?

Or is this just ignoring survivor bias when it's convenient?

@1penny42cents, I think you may not be benefitting fully from your two session. From what I've read and from Jerry's own admission, his afternoon session was meant to re-energize the remainder of his awake hours. Perhaps you should split your wake hours and do an early am one to shed sleepiness and one in the middle to recharge mental battery. Wish you guys would share the mechanics of TM instead of just "referring" people to join TM, that's some borderline cultish practices.

"I see Jerry as a no-nonsense personality, one who’s reached the pinnacle of success in a competitive field. So hearing him emphatically praise meditation perked my ears."

"He focuses on how meditation creates sustained energy throughout the day, which is crucial for his productivity and his daily enjoyment of what you’d otherwise call “a grind”. "

First, on Seinfeld. Are we really taking meditation advice and believe the benefits from billionaire's now? You mean if a poor black woman in the Bronx with two kids and four jobs just say and mediated all their anxieties would go away and they would be more productive?

Now, on Cam. Am I really supposed to believe a vacuum cleaner salesman when he tells he how good his vacuum is? The guy is setting of on a new career as a "personal coach". And this is what they all do, they suddenly realize that "mediation is the answer." They made money off of tech and now they need a new easier way to make money.

https://x.com/camhashemi/status/1834569286028845125

When I was a Theravada Buddhist I meditated for up to two hours a day. The people telling you meditation will make you "calmer and more productive" are selling you snake oil to tempt your ego mind, they are not helping you realize what it is.

+1, strongly. Anybody selling meditation as a silver bullet is deluded or selling something.

So what is it?

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