Mindfulness. It’s something we see plastered everywhere on social media: how to be more present, how to visualize yourself being more successful, how to find yourself in the quiet moments. We see it everywhere as some sort of super skill that turns you into the most productive and well-organized person on the planet.
I think the concept of mindfulness has lost the plot in the social media era. You can make the argument that mindfulness lost its purpose under American capitalism. Either way you slice it, we’re being mindful in the wrong way.
According to the Oxford dictionary, mindfulness “is a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.”
On social media we see influencers like fitness and men’s influencer Andrew Tate and business influencer Gary Vaynerchuk promote mindfulness as a practice of blocking out noise. They promote mindfulness and meditation as practices that allow you to tap into something productive, rather than the act of being present. I think that this ruins the act of being present and being mindful.
The point of mindfulness is to accept what you are seeing, feeling and experiencing. The point of it is not to use it for the sake of productivity and results; it’s to learn more about yourself.
It means you need to accept the emotions that come — whether they are bad or good, productive or unproductive, pure or impure — and let them linger. The practice of mindfulness is best carried out by examining and learning from what you see and feel, not pushing away.
By being present and being mindful, you might come away with something better than what you came with before. But, you have to accept that your emotions are going to be raw and unfiltered and that’s alright. As college students, we are so used to numbing ourselves out so we can bang out another assignment or workout, but we need to let our honest emotions be acknowledged so we can be present. If you continue to push things deeper and deeper down, you are only going to burn yourself out.
