The Virtue of Not Looking For Meaning

The question of how to interpret our experiences is one of the most basic questions in life. But it depends on an even bigger question: should we interpret a particular experience at all? Should we bother to look for sense, for substance, for content in something we see, hear, or feel – should we treat that thing as meaningful, should we try to understand it, or should we ignore it and forget it?

It’s often said that when we endure a hardship, we can heal by searching for positive meaning in what we’ve been through. If we find insight, strength, or some kind of “lesson” in our pain, not only does that pain seem less arbitrary and pointless, but we feel empowered by our ability to grow in response to it, and we feel better prepared for what life brings next. But as much as it can be a virtue to look for meaning in an experience, painful or otherwise, there are times when it’s a greater virtue to not look for meaning, to know when to refrain from that search, to know when to move on, even to do so abruptly, without endeavoring to learn, grow, or gain any insight whatsoever. In some situations, perhaps there’s no meaning to be found? Perhaps the search for meaning would exhaust us unduly? Or perhaps there’s meaning we could find, but we don’t need that meaning – not right now, or maybe not ever – we’d have no use for it – we wouldn’t be helped by it.

An analogy between the world of experience and the world of physical objects is informative. When we choose not to look for “meaning” in an object, not to seek further use from it, the most decisive way we can codify this choice is to call the object “garbage.” It’s a critical life skill to be able to use the word “garbage,” to be able to call some things garbage and to treat them as such.

What if we weren’t able to call anything garbage? What if we weren’t able to relinquish a physical object that no longer served us? Some people hold onto every piece of mail, every plastic container, every cardboard box, amassing so much stuff in their living space that hallways become impassable, entire parts of the home become unreachable. Hoarding is a dangerous condition. 

Most of us who don’t suffer from hoarding take it for granted that we can manage our trash – we can choose what to put in the waste bin and we can empty that bin when it’s full. 

Physical garbage shows us that the decision to not search for meaning or further use in an object can be the right decision to make, the best decision to make, even when there is meaning or further use that could be found.

When we fill a bag of garbage, tie it up, and bring it outside to the trash receptacle, we’re intending to forget about the bag’s contents as soon as possible, but someone who opened the bag might find an aluminum can that we’d neglected to recycle, worth five cents at the bottle exchange. With sewing skills, the holes in an old unmatched sock – rescued from the bag – could be mended, and that one sock could be paired with another one of like size and material, from somewhere else. The pages of the magazine that we’ve tossed still contain sentences that could be understood – ideas that might be informative or even enlightening to the right reader. This doesn’t stop us from discarding the bag.

Indeed a sleuth, presented with our bag of garbage, or another bag from some arbitrary place and time, might find it stuffed with information in a way that’s positively thrilling. An expiration date on a discarded snack wrapper might reveal the timeframe when the bag was disposed; the lettering might reveal the bag’s country; and the choice of snack might reveal the dietary habits of the person who filled the bag. An empty medication bottle, even missing the patient’s name, might suggest the age, the gender, and the particular ailments of the household member to whom it was prescribed. If a crime happened, the DNA in an eyelash stuck to the adhesive on an old envelope might identify the perpetrator, or the victim. If this were occurring in an espionage thriller, the person who discarded the bag might have been a spy, and perhaps they intended to convey a state secret to the garbage man – also a spy – in their choice of whether to throw out a coffee-stained napkin or a tea-stained one. The plot might hinge on that one napkin.

None of this stops us from discarding our trash. It’s essential to our wellbeing that we’re not concerned about the meaning or significance or potential use of that trash. Society is wasteful, that’s true, and we throw too much away, that’s true. We should recycle more and reuse more, that’s true. Garbage pollutes our land and water, killing plants, wildlife, and even us. Still, it’s necessary that we’re able to call some things garbage, discard that garbage, and also to see other people’s garbage – perhaps many bags of it, left on the street each day – and pass that garbage without a second glance, not considering those bags as clue-packed or value-packed treasures. When our gaze lands on a couple of black plastic sacks, knotted shut, waiting on the street to be thrown into a truck that will carry them to the trash heap or the incinerator, it’s good for us that we don’t feel an overwhelming temptation to tear them open and mine them for evidence or utility. When we throw out our own garbage, we’re fortunate that we can bid it goodbye with haste, waiting for its substance to be gone from our lives for good – no matter that this substance is rich in data about us, rich in potentially useful material, even rich in that thing we call “meaning.”

Meaning is everywhere – especially in garbage – but we don’t look for it everywhere, and we shouldn’t. The same is true of sound. When we choose not to look for meaning in sound we call it “noise.” But if we stopped to listen to the random noise on a city street anywhere in the world, we’d find it full of clues, signifiers, patterns, and suggestions. The noise tells us how close the cars are to where we stand, and what direction they’re going, and where the other pedestrians are, and how fast they’re walking. A Walk or Don’t Walk sign makes noises that signify instructions to us. Are there animals to be heard? A portion of a seagull’s chirp might sound like a portion of a human cry, or it might resemble a siren; the seagull’s presence reveals the city is near the ocean. What time of day is it? Church bells or the “adhan” from a mosque might tell us that. How many airplanes are flying overhead? How many jackhammers are working? The answers to a million questions live in that noise.

But no matter that information is writhing in the noise, seething in the noise, dripping from the noise, the noise is still noise. If we approached this noise with the conviction that it had been “composed” by say, an avant-garde sound artist, we might coax ourselves into perceiving an artistic “intent” or message in say, a minute worth of it. Perhaps as we listened again and again to a short recorded sample, memorizing the details, we might begin to hear a narrative that bears the hallmark – we’re sure – of intentional design.

But if we listened to hours of this noise, trying to interpret it as art, we’d become increasingly frustrated in our efforts to find a coherent narrative there, or else we’d have to invent increasingly fantastical theories about what that narrative might be. We could drive ourselves mad trying to perform an exegesis of this noise, without changing the fact that the noise has no author. There’s no composer home.

If we were trying to carry out a conversation with a friend standing beside us on this city street, then the noise would pose a nuisance to overcome — our challenge would be to tune it out. Perhaps there are a dozen conversations going on around us – and each one, if we heard it in isolation, might reveal a fascinating story. In those conversations, there could be a spontaneous marriage proposal, a million dollar business agreement sealed with “Yeah, we’re on,” and the seed of a crime. But to the extent that we falter in our labeling of that sound as “noise” – to the extent that we start hearing language in the noise – allowing words and phrases to reach us and catch our attention – we won’t be able to follow the person we’re speaking with. Other people’s meaning is our noise – and it must be so if we are to communicate with one specific person in this busy crowd. Stray meaning, overheard bits of conversation, are obstacles to our intended conversation, and we must treat them as such.

As we go through life, some acts of discernment are easier than others. We might not struggle to discern what physical objects are “garbage” and what sounds are “noise” but it’s more challenging to make these decisions about things that happen to us – events and experiences that transpire in our lives – including the thoughts that course through our own mind. Which experiences are “noise” and which are “signals”?

When we choose not to look for meaning in an experience, we might call it “insignificant,” “trivial,” or even “meaningless.” When we choose not to look for meaning in an argument or a story or a thought, we might call it “nonsense” or “gibberish.” No matter their derogatory inflection, these are some of the most useful words in our vocabulary – but when should we use them?

As we’re walking on a city sidewalk, if someone steps in front of us and blocks our path, is this act of rudeness a reminder that we’re living in the wrong place? Is it a signal that we should move somewhere with a slower pace, where the people around us would be less rushed and more thoughtful? Or have we simply experienced a random, meaningless instance of one stranger’s obliviousness, which tells us nothing important because, for the most part, we’re happy with our home and we’re fully capable of ignoring minor annoyances?

If we had a frustrating day at work – an argument with our boss – is this a meaningful indicator that our life is on the wrong track, that we’ve traveled down the wrong career path, that our work relationships aren’t value-aligned? Or have we just experienced an insignificant, near-meaningless happenstance, based on two people’s bad moods coinciding? Would we be better off if we moved past it quickly so that the satisfaction we do find in our work can remain in the foreground?

When we have a dream about falling or being chased, if we take it to a psychoanalyst or a counselor who believes in dream interpretation, they might probe it for hours. Being chased in a dream could mean we’re avoiding something – if we believe in such symbolism. Falling could indicate there are major life choices we need to rethink. But maybe our nightmare was caused by nothing more than a “dumb” choice to have a cup of coffee before bed. Is the “meaning” of the dream simply that we should avoid caffeine at night? Does the dream have no meaning at all?

The fact is: our minds generate a lot of noise, all the time. And a lot of our agony comes from the habit of taking the noise in our minds ever so seriously – being unwilling to label it as noise but instead looking for significance in every blip and pop, every little thought that enters our conscious awareness, in much the same way newscasters feverishly hang on each little motion of the stock market: “It’s up today — here’s what that means. It’s down today — what can we blame that on? It’s up again today, no wait, it’s back down — what does this suggest about the future?” Nothing, perhaps — maybe what we’re witnessing is randomness at work?

Ideas, images, assumptions, guesses, free associations are being manufactured in our consciousness all the time we’re awake, and when we’re dreaming too, and some of these products of our imaginative capacity are pure junk. Yes, our own precious, beautiful, powerful minds can churn out garbage. And we’re generating this garbage all the time. A steady stream of it. Ignoring it, relinquishing it, labeling it as garbage is an essential skill.

But we don’t want to do that. An anxious thought enters our mind and we begin unpacking it or ruminating over it – what does it mean? If it’s a fear, is it true? Why would I be thinking that? What does it say about me? What does it suggest about the future?

Especially when we embark on a path of personal growth, we try to “tune in” to ourselves, to listen to the dreams and hopes and fears that we’ve been ignoring, to give more attention to the subtler, quieter thoughts that pass through our mind often unseen.

To label the contents of our mind as “junk” or “noise” seems unkind to the self. And the challenge is that as with physical garbage or real, audible noise, there is meaning to be found inside it: the more we look, the more we discover. So the argument that any particular bit of noise in our mind is meaningful always comes with evidence in its favor.

But it may be precisely the labeling of our mental junk as junk, it may be precisely a decision to not over-interpret what enters our mind, that could free us from the labor of fruitless divination and offer some relief from self-imposed stress, as though we had committed ourselves to a career as a professional tasseographer and then we realized one day that we could quit. “What a relief – I don’t have to find meaning in tea leaves or coffee grounds anymore!

To give an example, I was sitting this morning on a quiet balcony with a view of some trees, the same balcony where I had been each of the past five rainy days when the trees were dark and wet. But this morning the sun shone on the branches, making them stand out as bright golden veins stretching out among the saturated green. It was a glorious sight. I thought to myself “There are artists out there who would love to paint this.”

But that remark led me to think about an attempt to paint those sun-drenched branches. I saw a canvas in my mind, I imagined an artist executing some brushwork, and guess what? The result looked unimpressive in comparison to the actual trees in front of me. In this fantasy, I soon assumed the role of the artist myself, and now I was stuck with a lackluster canvas that I had made. What was I supposed to do with it now? The green wasn’t lush enough, the branches weren’t luminous enough — and I didn’t know how to make it better, and I couldn’t decide whether start over, give up, or try to fix it.

Out of that beautiful sun shining on the branches, somehow I had created a little “bad dream” in which I had given myself a problem, a burden. By now I had invested a lot of energy in this mental tangent and I could see that it had all been a waste. I had started with some refreshing sunlight and worked it into a source of stress. Still I was left with a feeling of wanting to get something — anything — from my “investment” in this line of thought.

I could have looked at this whole episode of mind-wandering and attempted an interpretation. What did this daydream reveal about me? Is there some inner source of negativity that I haven’t confronted? Some deep-seated fear about artistic failure? Perhaps a revelation or discovery about myself would be the payoff for all this.

But I realized I had another option too. I could think of the whole thought process about trying to paint the branches as junk. My mind had manufactured some garbage through free association, that’s all. Now I was suffering because I was taking that garbage too seriously and trying to find some kind of deeper significance in it. Like any garbage, it might offer clues, secrets, suggestions if I examined it closely. Like any trash it could be interpreted and studied, and there would be things to say about it. But the best thing I could do would be to ignore it, discard it, and return to enjoying the marvelous sight that was still in front of me. The glory of that sunlight could still be mine if I could abandon my daydream with its disappointing canvas altogether.

It so happened that the larger context for this episode was that I had been trying to meditate. That’s why I was out there on the balcony in the first place. Of course, the daydream had taken my attention away from the sensation of breathing which was the intended focal point of my meditation. The basic process of meditation would ask me to observe the daydream impartially, allow it to dissipate from my awareness, and return my focus to breathing. 

Meditation typically aims for gentleness. We don’t try to “force” our thoughts to leave, we simply observe them and allow them to pass. By showing less attachment to our thoughts, it’s as though we’re slowly reducing their fuel. But there’s some subtlety in the idea of “observing” a thought. When we “observe” a thought we’re still perceiving the sense or meaning it contains, which is to say that we’re still interpreting it, we’re not dismissing it altogether as gibberish, nonsense, or noise. To observe a thought with detachment means that we still apprehend its content, but we choose not to engage further with that content, as opposed to ignoring that content altogether, never even looking at it, as if there were no “there there,” as if there were nothing to be seen or understood.

This suggests a possibility though. Why not attempt a more active, even a more “aggressive” form of meditation in which we repeatedly choose to label the contents of the mind as “noise” – noise that we don’t try to interpret, noise that we don’t stop to witness or observe. How would we go about this practically?

Trying to carry on a conversation in a noisy, crowded room – that’s the model we can use. We can imagine that we’re trying to tune out a certain kind of background noise so that we can hear a certain conversation partner. But in this setting, our “conversation partner” is our breathing – that’s what we’re trying to hear, to sense, to connect with. And the noise that we’re trying to tune out is all of our thinking. Our task is to listen as closely as possible to our “partner” while resisting the temptation to parse the noise of our thoughts for sense or meaning that would distract us.

You can try it: to sit down for thirty minutes and when anything that passes through your mind, label it as noise that’s drowning out your breathing, which is the signal, the one thing you’re trying to hear.

As you do this, the “noise” of your thinking will try to convince you that it’s not noise. You’ll call a certain thought “noise” and it will say “No, I’m your task list, I’m an errand you have to run, I’m a meeting you have to attend. I’m important. I’m real. I have substance. You have to pay attention to me!”

When this happens, you should focus on the sensations of breathing, and notice the contrast between those sensations and your thoughts. The contrast between how it feels to breathe, on the one hand, and how it feels to think about about an upcoming errand or the email you forgot to reply to, on the other hand. That contrast is your key. That contrast allows you to see that while your thoughts are not absolute noise, while they are not absolutely devoid of meaning, they are still noise in relation to what you are trying to listen to now, they still are empty distractions in relation to what you’re trying to connect with now.

So while it might sound upsetting to label one’s thoughts as noise, the result can be quite calming. When we can see our mental content as noise and “tune it out” then we are free. Free to direct our focus as we choose. Otherwise we are stuck in a loop of hearing noise in our mind, and trying to interpret it, which creates more noise, which we try to interpret – and we drive ourselves ever onward in an exhausting loop.

Perhaps we should reserve more of our interpretive efforts for finding meaning at the large scale. We should look for meaning where doing so would help us connect, help us build, help us love, help us grow.

While there is endless meaning to be found in the things we call garbage and noise, and while there is value in questioning how we apply those labels, we shouldn’t exhaust ourselves in trying to find meaning all the time, everywhere. Instead let’s allow ourselves to call garbage garbage, and be done with it. Let’s allow ourselves to call noise noise. Let’s allow ourselves, when faced with the question “To interpret or not?” to sometimes choose “Not.”

On caring what other people think of us

One reason why we don’t all live our “best lives” is that we care too much about what other people think of us. We wait for social validation before pursuing our dreams. We doubt ourselves when we don’t get the external validation we hope for. We fret about social situations where we might be judged negatively. We compromise our true identities in trying to project an image that would make other people tell us what we want to hear: you’re good, we approve of you, you’re one of us.

But when we try to stop caring about what other people think of us, we find that we can’t. We’re addicted to our own inner gossip, where we speculate about how other people perceive us, where we imagine what they might be saying about us, where we guess how they might respond to what we do. Breaking the addiction to this inner gossip is nearly impossible.

In a sense, that’s good. It means we can have a civilization, right? If it were effortless to ignore the way others perceived us – if it were effortless to not care whether other people liked us or disliked us – and if it were effortless to completely disregard social feedback whenever we wanted to, then we wouldn’t be social animals anymore. It’s hard to see how society would cohere. Being totally indifferent to others people’s opinions of us, having zero concern for our image and reputation, would make us more than free spirits or rugged individualists – it would make us very unpleasant to be around, very hard to get along with. Indeed, “caring what other people think of us” is a prosocial trait, it’s a trait that helps us cooperate, even if this trait comes with the cost of sometimes making us abandon our dreams, worry endlessly, and fail to honor our inner selves.

But what is the mechanism by which we are made to care what other people think? When we try to stop caring and we find it so difficult, what causes that difficulty?

An answer is available through simple introspection. We can find an answer in noticing what happens in our own minds when we simply imagine another person. What goes on inside us when we think about any fellow human being we happen to know?

Let’s say we’re going to make a phone call to a person named Ron. To prepare us for interacting with Ron, our mind will do a lot of groundwork that we won’t notice unless we look out for it. How does Ron look? We might see an image of Ron’s face in our mind’s eye. How does Ron sound? We might hear Ron’s voice in our mind’s ear. This inner “conjuring” of Ron happens effortlessly, almost automatically. Along with sensory impressions of Ron, certain facts about Ron will bubble up in our awareness: Ron’s gender. Ron’s age. Ron’s status.

Mixed in with all this material concerning Ron as an individual, there will be other ideas, assumptions, and memories about our relationship with him. We might remember the last time we saw Ron – when was it? Where was it? How do we know Ron? Is he a friend or a foe? Does he make us feel comfortable or does he pose a threat? Are we happy to be talking with him or would we rather not? What does he think of us? Is there unfinished business to resolve? Does he understand us? Does he respect us? Does he see us as we want to be seen? Or does he hold ideas about us that we would like to correct?

Without voicing these questions out loud, or even being aware that we’re asking them, we will intuitively recall the answers as we believe them to be. These facts and assumptions will be part of the constellation of mental activity that defines our idea of Ron, that comprises our understanding of who this person is that we’re going to be talking with in the next minute.

If we try to think about Ron without also modeling the way he thinks of us, we might find it difficult. All of these relational ideas are supplied, more or less automatically, by our mind when we simply think of Ron, simply remember who he is, simply say his name. So if we want to ignore all these ideas about our relationship with Ron, including ideas about how Ron perceives us – this means turning away from compelling content that our mind is offering to us. This means ignoring vivid material that our mind is putting right in front of us.

So an answer to why we “care” so much about what other people think of us can be found in the way our minds work, in the details of how we conceive of other people. We can’t think about other people without also thinking about our relationship with them. And part of our understanding of that relationship is our theory about how they perceive us. Our minds are constantly presenting us with these theories and we have to make a conscious effort to ignore them.

To discover this for yourself, try an experiment. Think of an important person in your life and imagine you were a stranger to them. Imagine that you know something about them but they don’t know anything about you. Imagine that you can see into their life but they have no idea who you are. Imagine your mother, your father, your siblings, your employer, your best friend, your lover – imagine that all these people have no knowledge or opinion of you whatsoever. They’ve never heard of you. They don’t know your name. They don’t know your face. They can’t have a stance or an attitude toward you, because you don’t exist for them. Now how does it feel to hold them in your mind and think about who they are? How does it feel to vividly imagine a good friend, hearing their voice, seeing their face, their eyes, their nose, their hair, their smile, while also imagining that they don’t know you at all?

It’s weird, right? It’s difficult. It’s almost impossible to find a way of thinking of a significant person in your life in vivid detail while also imagining that they don’t know you and don’t hold any opinion of you. The fact that they know you, the fact that they perceive you in a certain way – these are essential parts of your idea of who they are. These are essential parts of how you imagine them.

This thought experiment can be more than a once-and-done kind of thing. It can serve as a visualization exercise or meditation that we might practice from time to time. We might find that it makes us intensely sad to imagine that we were strangers to the people we love. But in other situations it might create a feeling of relief, to imagine that someone who’s angry at us or disappointed in us doesn’t actually know us at all. It might reveal to us that the anxiety and discomfort we feel around someone else is coming from the way we imagine that they perceive us, and if we take this element out of the picture, the possibility for a smoother relationship comes into view. All of this is something we can learn from.

Our minds make us care what other people think of us by bombarding us with ideas and assumptions about what other people think of us, any time we try to simply imagine those people. But we don’t have to take these ideas and assumptions at face value. Through meditation, we can practice releasing these ideas and assumptions in the same way we would release any other thought that passes through our awareness. And we can do this quite safely in meditation – without any risk that we’ll become antisocial or permanently indifferent to how others perceive us – because when we “let go” of an idea or assumption in meditation, that doesn’t mean we’ll never have the thought again. Quite the contrary, it might come back to us later, in a more helpful form.

Crappy Breaks

We struggle because we take crappy breaks.

I don’t mean that we take breaks to crap.

I mean that we take breaks that are crap.

We take breaks that don’t fulfill their purpose: breaks that don’t refresh us, breaks that don’t calm us, breaks that don’t prepare us to keep working.

There’s value in noticing the crappiness of our breaks.

I’ve experienced that value.

When I’m working on something strenuous and I see that I’m about to take a crappy break, I say to myself, “Rudi, you are about to take a crappy break. Are you sure you want to do this?” Sometimes the answer is yes, but often the answer is no.

I write essays like the one you’re reading now. Writing is highly stimulating. Sometimes it’s highly frustrating. Often it leaves me needing a break. So what do I do when I’ve been writing for an hour and I need to change things up?

If I check email, that’s a crappy break.

If I read the news, that’s a crappy break.

If I browse social media, that’s a crappy break.

If these breaks have any value as sources of rest and refreshment, it’s that they take my mind away from my task for a moment. But they do that by cramming different things into my overwhelmed mind. And all of that new junk doesn’t help me at all when I return to writing.

Does knowing that there’s been a horrific bombing in a war overseas help me write?

Does knowing that scientists have once again confirmed that humanity faces a climate catastrophe help me write?

Does knowing that some celebrity wore a revealing dress to a gala help me write?

None of these things help me write. They actually hurt me, because now I’ve got to get them out of my mind before I can concentrate on writing again.

Usually, I assume I can handle it. I’m an adult, right? Consuming some news, reading some emails, sending a text, clicking a few links is not going to totally derail me, is it?

Maybe, maybe not. The real problem is that I need something important from these breaks – I need refreshment from them – and I’m not getting that.

These breaks actually do the opposite of what they’re “supposed” to do. They drain my energy rather than replenishing it. They make it harder for me to continue working rather than making it easier.

So why do I take these crappy breaks?

First of all, crappy breaks are convenient. I’m already sitting in front of the computer and the “break” is available right on my screen. 

Second, crappy breaks are tempting. They promise immediate gratification.

Third, crappy breaks seem like the only option available. That’s because I haven’t identified what a non-crappy break would even be. I haven’t figured out how to take a genuinely good break. I haven’t understood how to achieve real refreshment in the limited amount of time I’ve got. 

Getting up and stretching might be a good break. But if my mind is racing as I try to stretch – if I’m still “writing” in my mind – I won’t come away from the stretching feeling very relaxed at all.

Going out for an hour of vigorous exercise, or getting a massage might be an amazing break, but I might only have a minute to spare, so those options aren’t practical.

What about taking a minute to meditate? What about breathing calmly and clearing my mind? What about not thinking at all for a moment – not thinking about my project, and not thinking about anything else in its place? 

Sure, a moment of mental emptiness would be refreshing, but emptiness is hard to achieve, isn’t it? 

Hard to achieve for sure, but I’ve seen that by practicing meditation I can get better at it.

With practice, the idea of a meditation “quickie” seems more doable – you can meditate in as little as 1 minute.

Meditation is not the only effective sort of break, but it’s an important one.

My point is that we shouldn’t assume we already know how to take good breaks. We shouldn’t assume that break-taking is a natural and spontaneous thing where we’ll just intuitively figure out how to do it well and we’ll inevitably get the benefit of refreshment that we need.

We should think of good break-taking as a skill that we can develop with practice. A skill that will help us be more effective at the thing that we’re taking the break from.

If you’re exhausted at the end of a day of work, is that because work was hard?

Or is it because you took lots of crappy breaks?

It might be that those crappy breaks were more exhausting than the work itself.

The reason you’re finding work so tiring might be that the work is making you take so many crappy breaks.

But those breaks don’t have to be crappy.

Social Anxiety and Mindfulness

What does mindfulness reveal about social anxiety?

My own mindfulness practice — daily meditation — has given me an increased awareness of two things in my everyday life. I’m more aware of my breathing – I’m more likely to notice if I’m holding my breath. And I’m more aware of the pace of my thoughts – I’m more likely to notice if my thoughts are going too fast for my own good. In turn, these two kinds of awareness have given me a new way of understanding the anxiety that I sometimes experience in social situations. 

ONE

I can see that at its essence, social anxiety comes from thinking. It comes from a barrage of mental activity that draws me inward. 

Social situations are hyper-stimulating and people are complex. When you’re with a group of people, there are lots of things you could think about. What are they thinking? What are their values and motives? How do they perceive you? How do they perceive each other?

Any of these questions can trigger a cascade of thought that easily veers away from the social situation itself. Before you know it, you’re reminiscing about a past experience or unresolved issue in your own life.

This sets up a conflict between your inner thoughts and the people around you. Your mind is racing as you try to analyze the situation, your thoughts are drawing you further inward, but the people keep “interrupting” or stealing your attention away from this inner world. You wish the people weren’t there to get in the way of your thoughts. But you also wish your thoughts weren’t there to stop you from connecting with the people. Switching focus back and forth between the inner and outer worlds is a struggle. You feel stressed all the way around. So you start holding your breath.

What’s the “fix” for this? Be more aware of the pace of your thoughts. Remind yourself you can introspect, analyze, cogitate later. See if you can release some of your thoughts, just like you would do in meditation — observe them and let them pass. Be present for people now. The more calmly and fully you breathe, the better everything will work out.

TWO

Yes, social anxiety comes from “caring what other people think,” but that kind of concern is good and natural. We shouldn’t fight against it. We’re social beings. We naturally care what other people think. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t have a civilization.

The important thing to observe is that “caring what other people think” can result in two fundamentally different behaviors. It can send you further inward or it can send you further outward.

Here’s an example. I was at a mixer at a cultural institution – an elegant private library – and I was standing near a guy who was dressed up in a three-piece suit. I concluded that his choice of attire indicated that he cared a lot about appearance and that he valued formality. This led me to assume that he would be displeased by my own appearance because I was unshaven and my shirt was untucked. So I avoided the guy. My “interest” in him, my attention to what his values and concerns might be, resulted in an inward retreat that blocked me from connecting with him. I assumed he would disapprove of me based on the values he was signalling with his clothing.

But my “interest” in him, my concern about his thoughts and opinions could have led me in the other direction. I could have approached him and complimented him on his three-piece suit. I could have asked him where he got it. If I was concerned that he might disapprove of my less-formal attire, I could have jokingly asked him if he was OK with how I looked. I could have asked him if he wanted others to dress like him, or if he only dressed so formally because he wanted to stand out and be unique. If that was a real question in my mind, why not share it with him in the form of a joke?

The point is that “caring what other people think” can lead in two directions: inward or outward. We can speculate internally about the questions that we have, or we can approach other people and ask them those questions directly — filtered through some degree of politeness.

Social anxiety comes about when we let our concern for what other people think drive us further inward rather than leading us outward to engage with those other people and find out what they really think.

THREE

When I’m around strangers, I’m often frustrated that they don’t know, and can’t see my true self – that they don’t really know who I am. At the same time, if they don’t respond to me, if they don’t seem to appreciate or understand me, if they don’t show a lot of interest in me, then I assume that’s because they’re indeed seeing my true self and rejecting it. I interpret their response as a verdict on who I am. I feel hurt.

What’s the fix for this? It’s to remember that we’re all wearing masks and responding to each other’s masks. When a stranger encounters me in a social situation, they might know a few details about me and might notice a few aspects of my physical demeanor. Those details comprise the “mask” that they are responding to. Everything they say to me is something they’re saying to that mask.

But even if we were all naked, we’d still be wearing “masks,” because the forms that our bodies take are coincidental and do not represent the essence of our inner selves. Remembering this point can make social situations easier to navigate. When someone responds to you (including the “response” of ignoring you) they’re responding to the mask you’re wearing as they perceive it. That’s all.

FOUR

I love people. Really, even though I’m an introvert, I fundamentally want to engage with people and be around them. So this means that I’ve had wonderful, satisfying, enlightening, delightful, hilarious social interactions in my life and I can remember them. But that means I have high expectations of future social interactions. I want things to go well. 

I enter social situations with high hopes of how good I’m going to feel and this sets me up for disappointment.

I enter social situations with high expectations of how well I’m going to “perform” and this sets me up for frustration.

I have high hopes but negative assumptions about my ability to “be social” and about other people’s perceptions of me.

What’s the fix for this? Well, one fun experiment is to look around a crowded room and imagine that everyone is cheering for you. Imagine everyone is chanting your name in excitement and adoration. Then look around again and notice that they’re not actually doing that. Then tell yourself, OK, the only reason they’re not chanting yet is because they haven’t yet gotten the cue. 

The point is, you should assume that people want to like you and are ready to like you.

If you assume that people want to dislike you and are ready to dislike you, that’s probably one of the reasons why you are experiencing social anxiety. But you don’t have to suffer from that assumption. Your assumptions are your choice!

FIVE

Social situations bring to mind what others can take from you, by not responding to you, by not appreciating you, by not understanding you, by not valuing you. The idea of loss is anxiety-provoking. Instead you can focus on what you can give to others. Is there a way you can make someone else feel good, feel appreciated, feel understood? Even if not, remember that you are giving something by your presence. You are giving something to others just by being there with them in the room. Think about what you are giving — the gift of presence — and see if you can feel proud that you’re giving that presence.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, social anxiety comes from five things: 1) thinking too much, and breathing too little, but you can work to tame your thoughts, and you can remember to breathe more; 2) caring what other people think, but you can let this concern send you outward rather than inward; 3) taking people’s responses personally, but you can remember they’re only responding to your mask; 4) expecting too much from the situation while assuming that people don’t want to like you, but you can expect less and assume they do want to like you — your assumptions and expectations are truly under your control and you can claim that control; 5) focusing on what you might lose, but you can refocus on what you can give and what you are giving.

DISCLAIMER

To be clear, this essay is about social anxiety that arises from within the self. It does not address anxiety caused by the outer world — by the cruelty that people can exhibit to one another. It does not address trauma. I’m not a psychologist and this essay is not about social anxiety as a clinical disorder. This essay is only an attempt to share insights arising from my personal mindfulness practice that have helped me overcome anxiety in social situations, in the hopes that these insights might be helpful to others too.

I need a vacation

The more stressed a person is, the more frequently they might say to themselves, “I need a vacation.”  This means: “I need to get away from everything. Change everything up. Be in a totally different environment. Only that would make me feel better.”

But “I need a vacation” is not always a helpful thought. At the time when we’re having that thought, we’re probably overwhelmed. We’re not planning to do anything then and there about our desire for a vacation. Vacations are: Stressful to organize. Expensive. Logistically complicated. You can bring your worries along with you on vacation. You can be disappointed by your destination. Then you come home and you’re behind on everything and you’re even more stressed than before.

To be clear, vacations are good. This is not an anti-vacation essay. This is an anti-“I need a vacation” essay. The point is that we can think “I need a vacation” all we want – and we can keep thinking this all we want without acting on it, and nothing is going to change. When we think “I need a vacation” in passive frustration, it just makes us upset that we’re not on a vacation.

Here’s something new to try whenever you think “I need a vacation.”

Ask yourself: “Can I go on a vacation right now, this very moment?”

The idea is to take a mental vacation – to stop thinking about everything you’ve convinced yourself you need to think about. To set aside five minutes and forget about it all. 

If you need a vacation because you need to get away from your worries, why not get away from those worries immediately, by choosing not to give them any attention whatsoever for the next five minutes? Or two minutes. Or one minute. However much you can afford. The worries will try to convince you that you can’t not think about them, but why not do it anyway? If you need a vacation, take that vacation starting with your next breath.

Of course, we take such mental “vacations” all the time. That’s called procrastination. Avoidance. Diversion. We escape our worries by filling our mind with something totally different. We crowd out our anxieties with alternate mental content that’s equally stimulating. We think about something we’d like to buy. We listen to the news. We check social media. We drink. We play games. We research facts that we don’t need.

But we never achieve emptiness in these pursuits. We never achieve a mind that’s free of thought. We only change around the content of our busy, active thoughts.

That’s because we don’t recognize emptiness as a goal. We’re not even aware of it as an option we might pursue. When we’re overstimulated we think that what’s going to make us feel better is more stimulation. Different stimulation.

But if you practice meditation for long enough to get a glimpse of the benefits it can offer, you realize that there is something fundamentally different and special about emptiness. There’s something refreshing about clearing your mind – emptying your thoughts – that you just can’t get any other way. You can’t get the same refreshment by changing the content of your thoughts, you’ve got to empty them. Sleep doesn’t count. You’ve got to be present for the emptiness to get the benefit.

A diet analogy can help make the situation clear. You might be feeling stuffed all the time because you’re eating a steak for breakfast, another for lunch, and another for dinner, every single day. You could change that around by trying to eat a calorically equivalent amount of tofu. That’ll have some consequences, no doubt. You’ll be getting a different assortment of nutrients and it might have a different effect on your body. But one thing won’t change: you’ll still be feeling stuffed all the time.

That’s what we’re doing to ourselves when we take a break from a stressful thing by redirecting our attention to an overstimulating diversion like the news, social media, shopping, or anything similar.

A new thought pattern can help break us out of this cycle. Instead of thinking “I need a vacation,” try thinking, “I need emptiness.”

Consider mental emptiness as your goal, as the thing that’s going to provide the feeling of refreshment and renewal that you’re looking for.

Mental emptiness is not always easy to achieve. People work at it. They practice it. They need to practice it because it’s hard.

Imagine what it would be like if you were eating three steaks a day and then you tried to fast for a day. Your body would resist. You’d have a lot of complaints. You’d invent reasons to give up on fasting. Guess what? It feels the same way when you try to meditate or go on a “mental fast,” even knowing that it’s going to be a temporary fast.

But you can do it. And the way to start is to know what you’re looking for. Recognize emptiness as the thing you want. The thing you need. Not a vacation. Emptiness.

Mindfulness Exercise: Resolution Blitz

Here is a way of clearing your mind when it is crowded and full of nagging thoughts. I call this exercise a “resolution blitz.” It goes like this:

1. Do a mental scan to identify all the thoughts, worries, issues, and concerns that are occupying your attention right now. Aim for a list of five to ten top concerns.
2. For each concern, visualize a happy ending. If that issue were to get resolved speedily and favorably, what would such a speedy and favorable resolution look like? Your only job is to see this positive outcome, to imagine how it would look. You don’t need to believe that this outcome is actually going to occur, you just need to invent a story in which it does. And this story doesn’t need to be a coherent, well-argued story – you can fast-forward to the end when the good news is being revealed. It’s like you’re taking each expanding “line” of worry and putting a honey-covered cap on it to stop its growth.
3. Perform step 2 on each of your concerns in rapid succession, so you can begin to imagine a fantasy world in which absolutely everything that you’re worried about gets resolved in a pleasing way and every single trouble that you’re thinking about reaches a delightfully happy conclusion. What would that extreme world look like? Try to see it all at once.

Although this exercise might sound like a “positive thinking” exercise, this exercise is not asking you to believe or expect anything. You don’t need to boldly declare that you are going to succeed at everything in life and attain pure bliss. You just need to invent a story in which all of the items that are occupying your attention right now get resolved in a good way.

So this is a storytelling exercise, an exercise in creating fiction, where your task is simply to envision, to hypothesize what a preponderance of ideal outcomes would look like – how it would feel if all this good news arrived at once.

But this isn’t traditional storytelling, because you’re creating these stories very fast and not lingering too much on the details. This is not about making persuasive, well-crafted stories. You don’t need to explain or justify or provide a narrative arc that leads to each of the happy outcomes, you just need to imagine the outcomes themselves. The aim is to do this for all of your troubles at once so that you can see everything being resolved at the same time.

Here’s an example of how this exercise might play out for me right now. When I do a mental scan, I find that I’m worried about:

• Using the rest of my day well and being productive
• Preparing for an upcoming performance
• Responding to a relative about an important family engagement
• Resolving a conflict at work
• Getting more exercise and taking care of my health
• Finding my next steps for a new creative project
• Finishing this essay without getting sidetracked

If I visualize positive outcomes for each of these concerns, it might go like this. I see myself at the end of the day: I’m going to bed with a feeling that I used my afternoon and evening well. Fast forward and my performance goes well: I’m comfortable on stage and the audience loves what I’m offering. Talking with my relative is easier than expected and even though I needed to decline an invitation, we meet up later and have a great time. Things at work go well and I get what I’ve asked for and in turn I’m able to give more of my skills and talents to the company. I’m finding ways to build more exercise into my daily routine, and my new creative project gains traction and results in personal fulfillment. This essay gets done.

Why would I imagine such a uniformly, even oppressively rosy picture if I don’t believe that everything is going to work out like that? Why would I invent a fantasy like this if I’m not trying to make myself believe that all these good things will really happen?

The idea is simply to give my mind a momentary experience, a glimpse of pure calm, where I can safely forget about all the things that are demanding my attention because those things don’t need my attention anymore – they’re all resolved – not just one or two of them, but every single one of them.

When we’ve been worrying a lot, about a lot of things, we can easily lose track of what a good outcomes in each situation would even look like. We can arrive at a dark vantage point in which we’re only seeing bad outcomes in our mind and never imagining good ones even occasionally.

This exercise gives the mind a “taste” of something different. It shows this mind a scenario in which the mind no longer needs to “track” or “follow” all of the lines of thought and concern that it is currently managing.

Have you ever been to a restaurant where they gave you a steaming-hot washcloth to clean your hands and face before the meal? The heat of the washcloth will soon dissipate and the waiter will come around to take that cloth away after a minute or two. But the memory of how the streaming washcloth felt against your face will linger.

This storytelling exercise, this “resolution blitz” is similar to that washcloth. After you “use” the technique, you’re still going to have all of your same problems and concerns. But now you will be approaching those same problems and concerns with the memory of an experience of calm and relief. Like that steaming washcloth, this “resolution blitz” can continue providing a sense of calm and refreshment even when it is only a memory and no longer a present experience. 

In meditation, we approach a state of calm by observing our thoughts passively and non-judgmentally. Our aim is to notice and relinquish each thought rather than clinging to it or pursuing it.

This “resolution blitz” is a complementary technique – it’s more active than meditation. Instead of passivity, it demands visualization and creativity. But it can be used in pursuit of the same goal as meditation. It can be a lubricant that helps us make the transition from a busy, crowded mind to a calmer, emptier one. After you do this exercise, take a few moments to linger in that calmer, emptier state.

The Algorithm is a Mirror of the Mind

There have always been people scheming to capture other people’s attention, for profit or for power. A charlatan hawking a false cure in front of a wide-eyed crowd is a plausibly ancient image. So yes, attention has long been a commodity, subject to theft like anything else of value. But not until the advent of social media has our attention been hijacked, dominated, extracted, and exploited so totally. Is there any good in this development? Anything to learn from it?

If you’ve had that quintessentially modern experience in which your eyes are glued to a screen, first for minutes, then hours, then hours again the next day, and the next, as you scroll, click, like, hate, love, scroll, click, follow, laugh, like, vomit, share, comment, scroll, follow… and if anything ever seemed slightly unnatural about your addiction to this clicking, liking, scrolling… if you’ve ever sensed the presence of an Algorithm, working like a drug pusher, calculating what should be shown to you, and in what quantity, so that you would keep clicking the most, liking the most, hating the most, commenting the most, sharing the most, USING the most, just like a good and profitable addict, then this experience may hold a lesson.

Any social media algorithm will try to maximize a user’s engagement by exploiting their instincts. We like things that are current, trending, and buzzworthy, so the Algorithm will flash those things before our eyes. We’re suckers for social intrigue – anything that makes us feel envious or full of schadenfreude – any story in which someone’s status is dramatically raised or cut down, so the Algorithm will tempt us with those stories. We’re interested in our friends, and we’re also excessively interested in our enemies, so it will show us the most mundane things they’re doing and saying. We like to revisit significant memories, so it will remind us of our past vacations and reunions and anniversaries from time to time. We like to be aroused, so it will try to discover what kind of material turns us on, and show us hints of that. We’ll pour our energy into anything that heightens our most anxious suspicions or confirms our deepest fears, so it’ll do whatever’s necessary to bring that material in front of us and keep it there. I may be leaving a few things out. The Algorithm knows us better than I.

But if we know the Algorithm, then we know something about ourselves too.

If you sit down in a quiet room, away from all devices and connectivity, and if you try to do nothing, clearing your thoughts and concentrating only on your breathing, then you might come to witness your own inner Algorithm. One “part” of you is ready to be calm while another “part” of you is generating all sorts of mental content – thoughts, daydreams, ideas, questions, memories – as if in the hopes of capturing your own attention, maximizing your own engagement, just like a well-built social media algorithm would do.

You’re trying to meditate and all of a sudden, an image enters your mind. How did it get there and why was it “chosen” among all the things that could have entered your mind? Perhaps it’s a thought that makes you anxious, a thought that seems to confirm a deep-seated fear? A few moments later, another thought comes to mind, and it’s about something current, something fresh, something that just happened earlier today. Next, you’re replaying a pleasant memory of your honeymoon, but this leads randomly into a feeling of envy about a guest at your wedding who later won the lottery and bought a big house. And before you know it, there’s some X-rated content appearing and perhaps you tune it out, or perhaps you don’t succeed. 

When we set out to “clear” our minds, we often find ourselves in a struggle with intrusive or unwanted thoughts – but why is this a struggle at all? It’s a struggle because the thoughts that arise at such inopportune times are often not the boring ones, not the colorless ones, not the lifeless, droning, soporific ones. Quite the contrary, these thoughts are the vivid ones, the tempting ones, as if our own minds had specifically chosen them for the purpose of titillating and distracting us, as if our own minds had learned the same things about us that a social media Algorithm knows, as if our own minds were behaving like such an Algorithm, choosing content that’s buzzworthy, socially intriguing, arousing, enraging – whatever’s most engaging.

We know that the Algorithm doesn’t have our best interests in mind and in fact the Algorithm would let us sicken and wither as long as we stayed glued to its endless phantasmagoria of lures and enticements. 

Sadly, our own minds don’t necessarily have our best interests “in mind” either – in the sense that our own minds don’t always present us with the content that is the most useful or nourishing or beneficial to our long-term interests; rather, our own minds share the Algorithm’s interest in capturing our attention NOW, drumming up engagement NOW, whatever it takes to avoid silence and stillness, even if the price of that avoidance is anxiety and desperation.

But to draw this connection between mind and Algorithm – a connection we can only draw because we’ve had this quintessentially modern experience of being captured by an Algorithm and knowing how that manipulation feels – this gives us a kind of power to observe, understand, and perhaps to choose an alternate route when we feel so very persuaded by what we’re being shown — shown on a pixelated, digital screen, a screen external to the self, or shown on the inner one, the screen of our imagination.

Depersonalizing the inability to meditate

There are some days when meditation seems impossible. Even if you’ve been practicing for a long time and you have a solid routine. The idea of quieting your mind right now, this very moment? Not happening.

When we experience an inability to meditate, we might take it personally. Why is this so hard for ME? What happened to MY discipline? What is wrong with ME that I can’t sustain MY focus? 

In these frustrating moments, we might be tempted to give up and try again later, but there is still something we can practice.

Think of how it looks to meditate with ease – what’s going on there? We’re noticing any thoughts that enter our mind and we’re depersonalizing them. We’re not saying “That’s MY thought — I’ve got to hold onto it.” Instead, we’re saying “That’s a thought — I’ll observe it and let it pass.”

Likewise, when we find that we can’t meditate, there’s always something we can do. We can depersonalize our inability to meditate. We can stop thinking that this inability is ours. We can stop taking credit for the inability. We can stop assigning blame to ourselves.

To facilitate the relinquishment of self-blame, we can imagine that there’s an essential force within us, call it “The Distractor.” The Distractor is to blame.

The Distractor is the force that makes us seek new experiences. The Distractor is the force that makes us want to get up, move around, do something different. The force that makes us impatient. The force that makes us want to mix things up.

If we did not each possess a Distractor living inside us, we’d likely not survive. The Distractor can save our lives. But sometimes it does too much for us — more than we want.

When we can’t meditate, we might be tempted to think, “I am responsible for my own poor concentration. It’s nobody’s fault but mine that I’m so easily distractible.”

To absolve ourselves of guilt might feel wrong, but why not try it? Blame The Distractor instead. “The Distractor is hard at work today. The Distractor is full of energy.”

Now we can sit back and watch the Distractor do its thing. 

If we can observe poor concentration without blaming ourselves for it, then we are practicing the same depersonalization of mental phenomena that characterizes “successful” meditation. We’re accepting the inability to meditate and finding a way to meditate nevertheless.

Interruptible Meditation

One of the choices that has helped me set up and stick to my meditation practice is to say that interruptions are OK. 

If someone needs to come into the room where I’m meditating and do something that makes some noise, that’s OK. If someone needs to tell me something or ask me a question while I’m meditating, that’s OK. 

I don’t want interruptions, but if they happen, they’re fine. 

There are two reasons why this policy of “interruption acceptance” has been very helpful to me. The first reason is practical, the second is philosophical.

From a practical standpoint, I don’t have a dedicated meditation room in my house so I often meditate in the kitchen in the morning while I’m having my coffee. (There’s more to say elsewhere about coffee and meditation.) My partner needs to come into the kitchen in the morning and do stuff, and the morning is also a time we have to spend together before work begins. My acceptance of interruptions means that meditation can fit into our morning flow without causing conflict. I don’t want the radio turned on while I’m meditating, but if the kettle starts boiling or the fridge is opened and closed, or even if a few words are directed my way, that’s fine with me. And that being fine with me makes everything easier.

From a philosophical standpoint, well, what am I doing when I meditate? I’m constantly handling interruptions. Interruptions from my own mind. Thoughts come about. I practice responding to them in a non-judgemental way, not getting upset about their presence, but simply observing them and allowing them to pass. That’s what the practice of meditation is all about. So why should it be any different if the interruption comes from a person making sounds in my environment as opposed to a thought transpiring in my own mind?

If a person interrupted me and I said “Oh damn! That ruins everything!” this would be the diametrical opposite of the mindset I am trying to cultivate through meditation. The mindset I am trying to cultivate is “That happened? No problem. Back to breathing.”

If a person interrupts me during my meditation and I respond with anger and frustration, that says that meditation hasn’t been very effective for me in this particular instance. But usually, if a person happens to interrupt me during meditation, they’re going to be pretty lucky because they’ll be getting the best of me. They’ll be getting my full attention with a clear mind and without the baggage of competing thoughts.

And in a sense, I’m getting something from the interruption too: a chance to practice recovering from it, returning to breathing, continuing my meditation.

I stayed at a friend’s house the other week and one particular morning, another guest stumbled into the area where I was meditating, a secluded corner of a large Vermont deck where I happened to be sitting in a wooden lounge chair. This person needed to get something they had left there. But when this kind person saw me they apologized to me profusely and assumed I was going to be terribly upset that I had been interrupted. I said, “It’s fine! Hi!” and they replied, “Fine? Really?” Then they thought about it some more and continued “Maybe this means I can meditate too, if interruptions are OK, because I don’t have a quiet environment to do it in either.” I kind of love shocking people like this.

Of course, there are states of awareness that we can never reach in the presence of interruptions. It feels qualitatively different to meditate for a long time in a tranquil setting without interruptions as opposed to a noisy space with frequent interruptions. But there’s something to be gained from meditation in either case.

A radical mission of presence

Having a “mission” in life is good for us. So they say. Being “present” is good for us too. So they say. But having a mission and being present both come with challenges, and the two ideas don’t always get along.

A mission is an aim or objective that gets us out of bed in the morning, an overarching goal that we’re always striving to fulfill throughout our lives. 

Being present means staying receptive to each moment as it comes, immersing ourselves fully in the here and now – remaining aware of our own bodily sensations and the details of our current environment – without clinging to the past or being preoccupied with the future.

What’s the problem with having a mission? One problem is tunnel vision. When you have a mission you might be tempted to view life in a divided way – there are things that further your mission and things that don’t. A binary view makes it hard to “be present” for situations and experiences that fall outside your mission. You’re waiting for such annoyances to pass so you can get back to work on what really matters to you.

Another problem with having a mission is over-identification. You see your mission as the essence of who you are. When your mission isn’t going well, you might feel that your whole life is a failure. As much as missions bring meaning and the possibility of fulfillment they also cause stress and eventual burnout.

And what’s the problem with being present? Of course we can’t always be present – we need to plan for the future and reflect on the past. And some circumstances are so painful that being fully present for them would cause us to suffer unduly – there’s a case for numbing ourselves to severe pain or tuning out what we simply cannot bear. But the main “problem” with being present is just that it is so hard. If we could always control our attention and bring it to the current moment, then we wouldn’t be so consumed with worry, we wouldn’t procrastinate so much, we wouldn’t fight as much, we wouldn’t feel so stressed. But a world where everyone is in charge of their attention and able to manifest presence all the time – that’s only a hypothetical world.

So, if missions are complicated and presence is complicated and the two ideas often work against each other – but they’re both supposed to be good for us – then what about a radical solution? What about choosing presence as one’s mission? What about actually saying, “My mission in life is to be present for each moment”?

Would presence be easier to achieve if we truly considered it as the most important thing in the world, the most valuable thing we could possibly pursue, the very aim of our life? And would “having a mission” be easier if the mission were a thing we could actualize at any moment, a goal that brought calm instead of stress? Could we experience the benefits of “having a mission” and “being present” simply by combining those ideas? 

To find out, we could do an experiment, accepting “presence” as our provisional mission in life – just for a day – and seeing how it feels to hold this particular mission. If it felt good we could continue the experiment; otherwise, no harm done. But there are some challenges to doing such an experiment.

The mission of “being present” sounds like it would be easier to pursue than a mission like “ending hunger” or “protecting the environment” or “creating art” or “raising a family” – but what specific technique or approach should we use to “be present” when that’s so hard for so many people?

A person who is already mission-oriented might find it difficult to give up whatever mission they’ve been pursuing all these years and really think of presence as their new primary mission in life, with the other goals now secondary to that, even if they’re only trying this out for a day. Presence might seem trivial or worthless in comparison to what they’ve been pursuing. The simple fact of being present – does it help others? Does it change the world? Does it achieve anything significant?

A person who’s not mission-oriented might have trouble getting on board too, for much the same reason. What is so exciting or compelling about “being present” that they should finally dedicate their life to it when no other goal has inspired such dedication? 

To do the experiment of accepting presence as our life mission we might need to prepare for the experiment. We might need to get into the right mindset to take the experiment seriously, and we might need to gather the tools to enact it.

Meditation is a good way to prepare because when we meditate we’re essentially practicing being present. We’re treating presence as important enough to make it our exclusive focus for the twenty minutes, sixty minutes, or two hours of our meditation session – important enough to do such a session day after day. 

When a person first starts meditating they might consider it as a break from normal life, a stress-relieving activity to be performed from time to time, like going on vacation or getting a massage. When asked what their life is like, they might reply that there’s lots of stuff going on, and occasionally they step away from it all and meditate.

But as they build a meditation practice, the way they think about meditation’s place in their life might change. Meditation could come to seem as an anchor, a pillar, a center. What’s their life about? They’re meditating again and again. They’re returning to their center again and again. The rest of their life is what happens in between meditation sessions.

As meditation becomes increasingly central in a person’s life – as it brings more rewards and even creates what might be called “peak” experiences – it can begin to seem “mission worthy.” That’s to say, a person might entertain the idea that their mission in life is to meditate. Indeed, there are people who accept this mission and become monks.

But there’s another way to respond to meditation’s increasing significance in one’s life. Instead of carving out more and more time for meditation, a person might aim to carry the presence that meditation cultivates, more and more, into the rest of their life – so that they are doing something like meditation even when they are not explicitly meditating.

In meditation, we learn how to “connect” with our breathing – to keep bringing our attention back to the sensations of each inhale and exhale – allowing thoughts to pass through our mind without pursuing them. We make it easier to do this by removing distractions, sitting still in quiet space. But in the rest of life, there are countless distractions happening all the time. How do we practice presence when we’re experiencing the hustle-bustle of life, full of its noise, complexity, and chaos?

The idea is to stay connected to our breathing – retaining an awareness of the physical sensations of each inhale and exhale – as all of the other distracting, stressful, difficult things go on around us. How should we remember to do this? That’s hard, but it’s easier if we consider it as our mission in life: “By breathing and staying aware of it, right here and now, I am fulfilling my mission in life.”

Indeed, if “presence” is too vague or abstract a concept to embrace as a mission, we can be more concrete about it: “My mission in life is to breathe and keep an awareness of how my breathing feels throughout every situation, starting with the situation I’m in right now.” To be clear, the goal is not to practice deep breathing, conspicuous breathing, or beautiful breathing at every moment – it’s just to stay “connected” to one’s breathing, to “be present” for one’s breath in whatever form it takes at the moment.

Accepting this mission will create some informative and novel experiences, we should expect. All those moments that we hate – all those situations that feel annoying and meaningless, when happenstance seems to be working against our interests and goals in life – now there’s a new possibility inside them. We can go into the experience and know that right then and there, amid all the confusion and difficulty, there’s a chance to do the thing that we’ve accepted as most important. We can breathe and stay aware of it – we can be present – we can actualize our life’s mission. If we suddenly died this very moment, we would have died in a state of fulfilling our mission.

And that brings up a second way we can prepare to do this mission experiment. We can contemplate loss – the losses we’ve experienced. We can think about the people who meant the world to us and then disappeared. We can remember our loved ones who have left this world. What about everything they were working on, everything they cared about, all of their hopes and dreams? How can we make sense of their own missions coming to an end? Does death render all of their effort and aspiration meaningless? How do we contemplate the idea that they didn’t get what they wanted or didn’t live long enough to enjoy it?

We can begin coming to terms with loss when we remember that our loved ones were here, they were present. They had good times, they had bad times, they breathed the air, drank the water, heard the birds singing, felt the heat and the cold, saw the sun and the moon and the clouds. No matter how sad the ending, we can find consolation in knowing that they experienced presence, the only thing a person can really “have.” They partook of presence just like we are partaking of it now. They had what we have. 

If the idea of presence can make us feel better about the lives of those we’ve lost, then the idea of presence can make us feel better about the finitude of our own lives as well. To be afraid of the end of our own presence would be to not be present. So, to achieve our mission of presence we’ll have to release that fear, disengage from it, let it pass. To be fully present means overcoming the fear of transience, the fear of endings, the fear of death. If presence might seem trivial in comparison to other life missions then perhaps it’s not so trivial when framed like this.

To accept presence as our life mission does not require abandoning other pursuits, only subordinating them to presence itself. Would an artist have better creative results, would a scientist make more discoveries if they identify art, or science as their primary mission, or if they identify presence as their mission, with art or science as endeavors to be undertaken under the umbrella of a larger mission of presence? That kind of question is for anyone to contemplate and experiment with as it relates to their own life.

Here’s a concrete way to go about the presence experiment. Whenever you find yourself in a situation that’s complex, where you’ve lost connection to your breathing, and where your mind is racing into the future or plunging back into the past or simply chattering and evading the present, ask yourself “What is this situation like? What are the parameters? What’s going on? How does it feel for me?”

Then ask, “What is preventing me from being present for all of this?”

Finally ask, “How could I overcome those specific obstacles to being present if I viewed overcoming those specific obstacles as the most valuable thing I could possibly do – as the most important thing in the world – as my mission in life?”

An example: I left on an overnight trip with my partner last Thursday, staying at a friend’s house Thursday night and planning to return home Friday. But Friday morning, there was talk of extending the trip by another day or two into the weekend. The uncertainty about when I’d get home started causing me stress. We went for a hike late Friday morning, when the new plans were still up in the air, and I found myself in a beautiful Vermont forest, full of moss and tall swaying trees, and welcome cool breezes on a hot summer day, but I was fixated on “having a plan,” knowing when I’d get home and what transport we’d use. Whether it would be tonight or tomorrow or the day after, I didn’t care so much, as long as the details were pinned down.

I loved being on the trip, I loved the hike, I loved the company, but I also needed time to prepare for a busy work week ahead, and I wanted to write this very essay on presence. (If I don’t finish an essay when the momentum is there, it might never get written, and I’m afraid of that.)

So the birds were chirping and the frogs were jumping and a cool stream was bubbling against the rocks, but I was thinking about when I’d get home so I could do other stuff. 

I asked myself what was preventing me from being present for the birds and the frogs and the stream?

It was this essay on presence. The horror story of this essay not getting written.

It was a mental image of a busy Monday morning at work where I was feeling frazzled and stressed because I hadn’t planned my week, because I had gotten home too late. Another horror story.

It was the idea that I needed a plan. The idea that I needed to know when I’d be getting home so I could build my expectations around that certain fact. The idea that the current uncertainty might drag on forever. Another horror story.

Normally this would have been one of those situations that I just accept as stressful for me. I give up on applying any of my better skills and just accept that I’m going to have to suffer through my discomfort. I’m not going to be at my best until the plans are pinned down, oh well. Or perhaps I start demanding that the others involved cooperate with me to finalize a plan ASAP.

But the idea that presence was my “mission in life” changed everything. I told myself:

My mission in life requires forgetting my essay for the time being.

My mission in life requires forgetting my busy Monday morning for the time being.

My mission in life requires relinquishing my need for a plan.

My mission in life requires listening to the birds, listening to the trees as they creek and sway in the wind.

And so I had an experience that was new for me.

In a situation where my mind would normally have been full of racing thoughts and trepidations about imagined future difficulties, I was able to recalibrate: to be present for that forest, and to be present for my hiking companions.

There are some actions you might only take if you accept them – even experimentally – as furthering your mission in life, nothing less. And when you practice doing this in low-stakes situations, you build habits that might serve you when the stakes are higher too.