Houston Southard

Sam Lipsyte - Hark

A satirical allegory on corporate wellness's attempt to reconcile capitalism with spirituality. America has molded mindfulness into a self-pacification exercise to lobotomize things you can't change instead of addressing the root issue.

Lipsyte, like any good literary author, reflects back at us the contorted shapes we've let society mold us into. His writing is brilliant and funny to the point no story is actually necessary.

In his latest, Hark, a pan-handling messiah peddling corporate spiritualism to silicon companies cons his clients into a flat faith, the salvation a technique he calls mental archery. Through a combination of yoga and bow and arrow work, workers can become their ideal selves by which they can produce the ideal output for their company's stakeholders.

Society teaches us that negative reactivity to the things around us is an internal issue which should be remedied with self-reflection and emotional control. This trickle-down mindfulness would have us bow to external forces, accepting circumstance in favor of control. A sedative to situations that's really just a cover for the maintenance of power by helping people auto-exploit themselves. A submissive position framed as freedom.

Although corporate mindfulness is marketed as novel, it shares the same goals of earlier management science fads, ones that self-mythologize employees to the indoctrinative language of core values.

Hypocrisy is innate. I spent two years getting a master's in a field I now feverishly criticize. I meditate and hold the contrarian belief that mindfulness is valuable to many. That doesn't change the fact that mindfulness is bastardized and commodified. Or that meditation apps alone constitute over a $1B a year industry. Or that the goal of any corporate superorganism is to reproduce at scale.

I don't think this rant ends with a solution. Just a shout into the wind petitioning us to be aware that whatever side effects mindfulness cures, the corporate-sponsored version's ripple effects create equal mcmindlessness.

For more ironically verbose ramblings on the danger of corporate garbage language, check out my essay "It's Pronounced 'Garbahj'".

Namaste.