You can learn a lot from utopias, even though you (probably) don’t live in one.
When we think about the future, our minds turn almost effortlessly to bad things. Maybe it’s the climate problem, or the AI apocalypse, or political chaos — the list goes on and on.
Dystopianism has always been an easy game to play, and there’s something useful about imagining how badly things might go if we don’t deal with our issues now.
If imagining the worst-case scenario is a useful exercise, then imagining the best-case scenario must also be useful — and for the same reasons.
So why does this seem so much harder to do?
A new book by Kristen Ghodsee called Everyday Utopia offers some interesting answers. It’s a sweeping look at various communal experiments over the last two centuries and it makes the case that utopian thinking is both necessary and pragmatic. Beyond that, it’s a critique of our present society and the lack of care and connection that defines so much of it.
I invited Ghodsee onto The Gray Area to talk about what she learned from all these experiments and how we might apply those lessons today. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.
Sean Illing
A book about alternative ways of living is obviously animated in some way by a critique of the present order. How would you sum up that critique?
Kristen Ghodsee
This is very much a post-pandemic book. It was initially animated by a lot of the isolation and loneliness and general discombobulation that people felt during the pandemic and what we realized about our family structures. The hegemonic model in the United States is monogamous pairing, generally heterosexual, where we provide exclusive bi-parental care to our own biological offspring in a single-family home surrounded by hoards of our own privately owned stuff. That’s our model and for many people it made the pandemic even more difficult.
Almost immediately, people who had families rushed out to form pandemic pods. They tried mutual aid experiments and they did everything they possibly could to create communities of support, which shows you that the way that we live normally is somewhat problematic.
The real arc of the book is to go through every piece of that formula. So the nuclear family, the exclusive bi-parental care, the way we raise our children in these isolated single-family homes away from other children, our relationship to property and the physical built environment within which we dwell, within which we warehouse ourselves when we are raising our families — all of these different pieces of the way we organize our private lives are fairly recent inventions. And they are conventions that are eminently changeable.
When we look out across the historical record and when we look cross-culturally, we can see that there have been multiple ways of organizing our family lives, depending on different external factors. Human beings are uniquely creative, flexible, and adaptable. And our family forms and our mating practices are also uniquely creative, flexible, and adaptable.
So the critique here is that too many of us today are fixed in our idea of what a family is supposed to look like. How we form families, how we insert those families into dwellings, and the ways in which those families interact with other families. All of those things are preconditioned by a certain set of cultural norms that are very anachronistic for the world that we are going to be living in in the 21st century.
It’s about a change in our attitude towards the natural environment. We are coming from an era where people believed that the earth’s resources were abundant. And we are now having to come to grips with the idea that the earth’s resources are not abundant and that unlimited economic growth is not necessarily desirable.
Sean Illing
One of the things that makes the sort of experiments you’re describing in the book feel like such distant possibilities is that they’re revolutionary in the most concrete, intimate way. Because we’re talking about transforming not just our social and political lives, but our private lives, our family lives. And this is something you say a lot of people fail to appreciate. Why do you think that is? Why are so many people so eager to critique our economic system, but much less interested in what might be amiss in our private lives?
Kristen Ghodsee
I think that people do feel that their private lives are under much closer scrutiny. You can talk about economic systems, you can talk about politics, and it’s not necessarily about you and the people that you love and the people that you’re sharing your resources with.
There’s this way in which our private life is this place of incredible expectation around unconditional love, care, and support. And I really want to stop and recognize that. I’m not saying that family is bad. I’m actually saying that family is really good and that we should just expand our definition of what family is.
Especially for communities of color and for immigrant communities, the family is an incredibly safe space where you get support and you get unconditional love. But there’s this very primal fear that people have, that if you start to change anything about these relationships and the way that they get maintained and sustained over time, then the whole thing could fall apart and we will all end up being unloved and alone. We are so afraid, on a very visceral level, of being unloved and alone. And given that the family is this place where, in a very cruel, hostile environment, we often get company and support and emotional care, it’s really hard for us to shake that up in our personal lives. What I argue in the book is we’ll actually be more loved and in a greater level of community if we expand our notion of what family life is.
The other part of this argument is the much more radical part. I think that our family form as it is currently instantiated for most people, particularly in the United States, is that our form of the family upholds a particular kind of political and economic system. With high levels of inequality, where the nuclear family and this exclusive bi-parental care in our own privately owned homes with our stuff actually facilitates the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege largely from fathers to their legitimate sons. This model was a particular adaptation to plow agriculture where you didn’t want to divide agricultural estates and then you get the institution of primogeniture or ultimogeniture, where either the first son or the last son inherits everything so you don’t have to divide the estates.
There are really interesting evolutionary and anthropological reasons, as well as historical reasons, why we have the particular family form that we do. But the key thing is that the way we do family really underpins a particular political and economic way of being in the world. And so if you critique the family, if you try to challenge the family in any way, you’re already challenging the economic and political and social system.
Sean Illing
I suppose one of the conservative reactions to this is to say that, on the one hand, you’re right, the way we live now is a historical aberration. This is not how humans have lived for most of our history. The world could have turned out very differently. And yet this is where we are. This is how our society evolved, and our institutions and even our psyches in lots of ways have adapted to it. And that’s not something you can easily overturn, or at least not too quickly. Does this sort of objection give you any pause at all?
Kristen Ghodsee
The simple answer is no. But I’d also say that I respect the hesitation there. I understand where it’s coming from. I am sympathetic to this fear that if you upset the status quo the whole thing might fall apart. But I go back to the evolutionary anthropology of the family and the fact that it’s becoming increasingly clear that our mating practices are separable from our child rearing practices in the contemporary way that we imagine the family.
We think of the bi-parental model of exclusive care for biological children as the appropriate container for childbearing, right? So there’s a romantic couple (usually it’s a romantic couple), and that romantic couple pairs off and has kids and raises those kids exclusively without much support from outside of that bi-parental unit.
But that’s not really how human beings evolved to raise children. We are pair bonders. There’s very good evidence that we tend to form pairs, we tend to have strong attachments. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re heterosexual, that doesn’t even necessarily mean that they’re monogamous, but we do tend to be pair bonders.
We even see in cenobitic monastic communities when you have groups of monks or nuns who are taking in children, often orphans, and they’re raising those children collectively. Even there you find that pair bonds form, though they’re not couples in a romantic sense. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the pair or the pair bond is the appropriate container for child rearing.
Any argument that human beings are naturally one way or the other, or that we’ve evolved in a particular way because of a particular set of environmental or climatic or political circumstances, that’s not true. We are so flexible, and that’s true for both parts of this, for the child rearing part of it and for the mating practices part of it.
We are fixed in a particular model right now, but if certain external factors were to change — or if we wanted to change certain external factors — we could change our family lives, the way we’re organizing our love and care and support, because we live in a society right now with high levels of loneliness and isolation and with a real care deficit.
I think we need to think creatively the way we did during the pandemic about reorganizing our domestic lives to make them more capacious and more supportive and more loving in the absence of any sort of state efforts to do things like expand universal child care or provide support for the elderly and so on and so forth.
Sean Illing
There’s a whole chapter in the book about raising kids in common. Plato famously makes the case for this in The Republic and he says it’s the only way to ensure that citizens remain truly committed to the good of the society. Maybe he’s right about that, I don’t know. But I’m a parent and I can definitely say that there’s no way in hell I would ever want to do this, and I don’t know any parents who would. I guess the question is, what are the benefits to that radical arrangement and what we can learn from that and how can we adapt it to the world we’re in now?
Kristen Ghodsee
I think this is a great question. You have this utopian extreme put forward by Plato, where child care is common and parents don’t even know their children and children don’t know their parents. That’s the absolute extreme. But I walk it back to something that people can understand.
I’m talking about letting your kids spend more time with their grandparents. Let your kids spend more time with other loving adults in your community. They might be your neighbors, they might be your college friends. They might be your colleagues at work. In a lot of religious traditions, there are these things called godparents; the idea is that a couple has a parental backup plan in case you and your partner dies. But it’s really a case where religious traditions are trying to instantiate a relationship with other adults in their children’s lives, so that they’re surrounded by a loving community of adults.
I’m a mom. I understand what you’re saying, especially when your kids are young and vulnerable and you’re overprotective of them, and the world is this big, bad, scary place and you want to make sure that they get all the love and attention and resources that they need to thrive. And let’s face it, for a lot of us, other children are competitors, not only for resources, but for our attention. Anybody who grew up in a really big family will know this. But if you think about the evolutionary anthropology of the family, we’ve always been these cooperative breeders. Older siblings have always played a role in raising young children because unlike other non-human primates, we have our children very close together and they’re so dependent on us and we’ve always relied on broader networks.
I don’t say in the book that you should go join a commune and give up your parental rights or something like that. But I do point out that there are some states in the US which now allow for what’s called de facto parenting. So if you’re a divorced couple, and let’s say there’s a stepparent, a stepmother, or a stepfather who’s providing parental care, in many states that person cannot become a legal guardian unless the biological parent gives up their parental rights. So some states are saying, why shouldn’t children have three parents? Why not four parents in LGBTQ+ communities where you might have a surrogate mother and an egg donor and maybe two sperm donors? Or in the case of mitochondrial replacement therapy, which is where you have an egg from one woman, and then the mitochondria of that egg is from a second woman, and then you have a sperm donor. You literally have a child that is biologically related to three adults, three parents.
But our society doesn’t really know what to do with a non-bi-parental model of care. And so there are legal interventions we could make. There are social interventions that we could make. We could really take godparenting seriously and think hard about identifying other adults that can be a presence in our children’s lives as they grow up. I don’t think anybody would say that that’s a bad thing.
It is not psychologically healthy for us to be so isolated and to have all of our love and care from just two people, and I think this became really apparent to people during the pandemic. And now that we are coming out of that, I want people to think, “Hey, maybe those pandemic pods were a great idea! Maybe we should keep them around in some form as a supplement to our parenting efforts.”
Sean Illing
One thing we definitely agree on is it’s worth remembering how easily things that seem permanent or fixed can change almost overnight. Often it’s because those changes are forced, like during the pandemic where suddenly the state just starts giving out a form of universal basic income, and parents are forming these pandemic pods where they’re sharing child care and homeschooling responsibilities. That doesn’t prove these are things we should do, but it does prove that we can do them — and there’s a lesson there.
Kristen Ghodsee
Yeah, and it’s really worth emphasizing because I think there are two critiques of the book. One that I’ve heard and that I want to address head-on is that I’m saying that all the different examples that I give in the book are somehow models for us to emulate. And that’s not at all what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that they can each teach us different things about how people in the past have organized and reorganized their domestic lives in certain ways for certain reasons, and that we could learn from those things.
The second thing is that by talking about the ways that utopian communities have organized their private lives differently, that I’m advocating for some kind of state intervention. And in fact, the whole point of this book is to ask what we can do in the absence of state intervention. I’m not talking about socialism here. I’m saying that if we’re not talking about top-down transformations from the state, what are the sorts of things people can do in their own lives within their own communities?
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How stores sucked the fun out of an American pastime
Whether it was spritzing on perfumes in a department store or fantasizing about a more organized home in the seemingly endless aisles of Bed Bath & Beyond, shopping was once a far more pleasurable experience than it is today. It was both a social and languid activity, an opportunity to connect with a friend or explore our materialistic desires in contented solitude. Retail therapy, we called it.
Now going to the store, whether it’s a Macy’s in a suburban mall or the neighborhood CVS — basically, all but the most luxury of retailers — is a battle that leaves consumers feeling defeated.
Shoppers’ complaints abound. Vox spoke with customers across the country who bemoaned a dearth of employees in stores of all stripes. Equally aggravating: empty shelves, or only a register or two open at any given time.
Hayley Leibson avoids in-store shopping whenever possible. But the 29-year-old wasn’t able to avoid it after she had a baby and needed formula, she says. While the worst of the baby formula shortage has ebbed, sometimes Leibson still needs to visit a few stores in the Bay Area to find it. A couple of months ago, the Target she frequents started locking up formula, and there seemed to be fewer employees around to help her get it, with “much more emphasis on trying to funnel people to self-checkout,” she says. She sees lines of people waiting for the product they want to be unlocked. To shop in a store these days, she laments, “You have to budget a lot of time.”
A Target spokesperson declined to comment on whether it locked up baby formula, writing in an emailed statement, “On a limited basis, we employ theft-deterrent merchandising strategies, such as locking cases, for categories that are prone to theft.”
Understaffing, inventory problems, and heavy-handed theft prevention measures are hardly new to the retail industry, but the problems have become more commonplace in the last few years, when the dial of frustration and discomfort turned higher. Yet the through line of why shopping from beyond the comfort of your home feels so miserable now has less to do with the pandemic’s disruption and everything to do with retailers unable — or unwilling — to invest in stores, including the labor that makes a shopping trip go smoothly or not.
Despite what companies may want you to think, nearly every issue you encounter while shopping is a result of bad working conditions for retail employees.
The early department stores that popped up in the late 1800s and early 1900s were an elegant, even opulent innovation that centralized consumers’ shopping needs; their beautifully decorated windows drew in passersby, and the stores themselves were massive and filled with a vast range of goods, with knowledgeable, attentive staff ready to aid customers. These retail spaces not only had sales floors, but also gardens, tea rooms, and full-service restaurants.
“Shopping really was a delightful thing, a special thing that you got to do,” says market researcher Pamela Danziger, whose work focuses on the behaviors of affluent consumers in particular. Bloomingdale’s, the famed New York department store founded in 1861, “was one of the first on the forefront of experiential retail,” creating a beautiful, comforting in-store environment and fostering an aspirational desire to consume, says Danziger.
Retail jobs in department stores were coveted, too; they were much safer than factory jobs, came with benefits and vacation days, and conferred a degree of job security. They provided a novel path of economic opportunity for white women in particular, though such desirable employment opportunities were denied to Black Americans.
The department store set the trend for pleasurable shopping experiences, which trickled down to other retailers, from drug stores to big-box retail. As retail jobs grew much less stable and lucrative, however, the joy of shopping also began to wane.
Most consumers still shop in physical stores, at least for certain items. It’s one thing to buy clothes online — Amazon recently became the top clothing retailer in the US — but less common to buy groceries on the internet. While Covid-19 boosted consumers’ reliance on e-commerce, the gains haven’t lasted. According to the Census Bureau, e-commerce made up only 15 percent of total retail sales in the first quarter of 2023. Brick-and-mortar stores have been closing for years, long before the pandemic. Still, retail foot traffic is indeed down, and a kind of chicken-or-egg effect is taking place.
Fewer shoppers mean retailers have been stocking fewer items in-store, instead having inventory delivered to brick-and-mortar locations when a customer places an order for pick-up. That only reinforces the experience of the modern store as an under-stocked desert, making people even less likely to want to shop in person, and stores less inclined to spend their tightened budgets on staffing stores adequately or improving them. None of this bodes well for the future of retail: The investment bank UBS estimates that between 40,000 and 50,000 retail stores will close in the next five years.
“The upshot over time is that you lose market share,” says Neil Saunders, a managing director of retail at the analytics and consulting firm GlobalData. “The business that you run becomes smaller and smaller, customer satisfaction goes down, sales go down. And eventually you enter a vicious cycle.”
Early department store owners “were real merchants,” Danziger says. “What we’ve got today are executives sitting in their corner offices who haven’t met a shopper in years.” Physical stores will always exist, she adds. “But we’re continuing to see erosion in terms of the number of visits, erosion in terms of time spent there.”
That last bit is crucial: It’s not just the number of visits a consumer makes that retailers care about. How long someone spends in the store, called “dwell time,” matters, too. The longer someone is in a store, the more money they’re likely to spend.
Dwell time understandably hinges on how pleasant the store experience is. Are there knowledgeable staff members available if a customer needs help? Are the items they want in stock? How easy are in-store returns? If customers are itching to get out of there as fast as possible, that’s bad for sales. A 2019 survey by First Insight, a consumer analytics firm, found that the majority of respondents spent more money when shopping in physical stores than online. Since the pandemic, however, consumers have been making more frequent but shorter visits to grocery and superstore chains, according to a report last year from Placer.ai, a location analytics firm that has been tracking retail foot-traffic trends. Today, shopping in stores has narrowed into a task with a clear start and end: Find an item, buy it, exit.
Susan Reda, vice president of education at the National Retail Federation (NRF), an industry trade association, doesn’t believe that consumers are now less willing to shop in person. “I do think they’re going back into stores, and that when they get there, they expect a good experience.” Despite negative shifts in foot traffic, research shows that people seeking out brick-and-mortar shopping do so in part because of the experience of being in the store.
In an attempt to lure crowds back, some stores are leaning into experiential offerings, emphasizing the beauty or the engagement that a physical space can offer shoppers. Reda cited the opening of a redesigned Tiffany & Co. store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, the famed luxury shopping destination. It’s one thing for high-end brands like Tiffany to pour money into their stores — that’s what they’ve always done — while the deterioration of more mundane retail experiences is an entirely separate matter. Target, for example, is also absolutely concerned with improving the in-store experience, according to Saunders. “Target has invested billions into its stores to refurbish them, to make them more shoppable,” he says. A less brand-conscious chain like Walgreens? Not so much.
Like Leibson, New Yorker Angelica Wilson has noticed the many everyday household items locked behind plastic cases at her local drugstore, where it is supposed to be convenient to grab a few items and go. Given how understaffed the stores also seem, the entire experience is far more of a hassle — and simply more unpleasant — than it once was or ought to be. Wilson finds herself using the in-store pickup option more often, just to minimize the time she has to spend in the aisles.
Stores locking up merchandise is a last resort, Reda says, and in the NRF’s view, an exception rather than a trend. But Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid, which together make up the vast majority of pharmacy sales in the US, all lock up some items. “I don’t think retailers move to do that until there’s absolutely no other solution,” she says.
In some cities, the issue of theft has reached a breaking point, with the NRF pointing to Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Miami, San Francisco, and Oakland as the worst areas for organized retail theft last year. Recently, the owner of the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall announced it was giving up control of the property after several of the mall’s retailers closed, citing crime as a primary reason. San Francisco’s Cotopaxi location briefly closed, and its CEO blamed organized theft rings that he said had become unmanageable and a threat to its employees. (The store reopened three weeks later.) It’s worth being skeptical of just how widespread the problem of so-called organized retail theft is; the average rate of “shrink” — the industry’s term for lost inventory — was 1.4 percent in 2021, lower than 2020’s 1.6 percent, according to the NRF’s own figures. So why are so many things locked up?
It’s proof that retailers are struggling to address issues without affecting the in-store experience. “I’m not sure that they’ve got the balance right,” Saunders says. “Locking things up has a negative impact on sales.”
Even a once-respected retailer with a long heritage can fall hard if its leadership doesn’t bother investing in stores — just look at Sears or, Saunders argues, Macy’s, which he refers to as “the most atrocious retailer in the country,” noting the outdated styles of the stores and their state of disarray, as well as other effects of cutting in-store staff and customer service employees.
“They do absolutely nothing to entice the customer to buy.”
The decline of the in-store retail experience — both in terms of its quality and the number of stores that exist — has transformed what it means to work in retail, and how pleasant customers find the in-store shopping experience is inextricable from how retail employees are faring. It’s directly affected by how well-paid they are, how well-trained they are, and how well-staffed their stores are. This link often goes unmentioned; the discontent of customers and the woes of employees are viewed on parallel tracks instead of as mirrors.
Working retail has long been physically and mentally arduous. The pandemic revealed how dangerous the work can also be: In the US, almost seven in 10 people who died in the first year of the pandemic were of low socioeconomic position — the majority of whom worked in blue collar, retail, or service jobs. Over 7.3 million retail workers quit last year; one consulting firm reported a 75 percent turnover rate last year for hourly in-store positions, while a 2023 US News ranking of 190 jobs put retail salespeople at the very bottom.
Understaffing is a chronic issue in the retail industry. Cutting hours for existing staff, too, is hardly a new strategy to keep costs down in retail — Covid has, once again, merely put more pressure on that lever as workers were pushed past their breaking point.
And then there’s the treatment of retail employees by shoppers themselves: The subreddit r/retailhell offers infinite accounts of customers who harangue, bully, and even assault workers. One person who worked at a big-box retailer but did not want to be named for fear of professional repercussions told Vox that retail had been a “nightmare job” for them — that customers “did nothing but torture” employees.
Though there’s a current worker shortage in the industry, the long-term forecast is that there will be fewer stores and fewer retail jobs. For example, the post-lockdown recovery in the nation’s retail playground, New York, has lagged far behind that of other industries: There are 11.1 percent fewer jobs in the sector than there were in February 2020, according to a report by the Center for an Urban Future.
The labor shortage has temporarily allowed workers to demand better pay and working conditions, and empowered them to unionize. It’s also meant ugly, protracted battles as companies deploy an arsenal of union-busting tactics, whether it’s cutting pay or closing store locations that have signaled an intention to organize. Some retailers are even doubling down on replacing human workers with cheaper machines such as digital kiosks and self-checkout counters. The lack of staff that shoppers are noticing in stores is in part by design, and it predates the pandemic.
To be sure, one way to tackle the high turnover and labor shortage of retail — and address customers’ growing complaints about the state of in-store shopping broadly — is paying workers more. Major retailers like Walmart and Target have advertised a higher starting range of pay, but real wages for retail — that is, wages after accounting for inflation — have only seen a 0.5 percent bump since 2019. More money also isn’t a magical salve for all the other dangers that come with a retail job today. How high a wage is acceptable to contract a deadly virus? Or to fend off angry customers, enforce local public health mandates or store policies on masking, or act as security guards on top of other in-store duties? Or even be punished when you do intervene to stop theft?
Steve Rowland is a former retail store manager of 27 years who now hosts a weekly podcast called The Retail Warzone; each episode features stories sent in by retail workers or other issues that concern the industry.
“I was a store manager for a very long time, that had to do these things that I didn’t really agree with, that caused unnecessary hardship on a lot of people in the industry,” Rowland says. “A lot of the retail workers are really just overlooked. So it’s my mission to shine a light on it and try to help some consumers actually understand what’s going on behind the scenes.”
One of the most memorable stories that Rowland covered is that of Kroger employee Evan Seyfried, who died by suicide in 2021. His family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Kroger, claiming that “torturous conditions” at work had led to his death.
“We have a society that will boycott over the smallest thing. Why don’t you boycott the fact that employers treat their employees as a controllable expense — having less staff in stores, less people to serve the customer, less people to make the customer experience what they expect it to be?” Rowland asks.
The dissonance between cutting costs — a perennial directive of a profit-seeking business — and providing the kind of store where people want to shop is only growing. And consumer dissatisfaction with this newly austere shopping experience means more stress for retail workers.
Big retail companies should lead the charge to enact and enforce policies protecting their staff from customer abuse and violence, argues Rowland. If a huge corporation like Walmart — one of the biggest employers in the US — had “ironclad” policies protecting its workers, “that company is going to be the one people want to work for.”
For the shopper, there’s also a conundrum. Who do you speak to when you have a problem with a store being understaffed or understocked? Asking to speak to the manager can feel like Karen behavior, while complaining to a company’s corporate offices can lead to a handful of store workers being punished for policies and strategies that they have no involvement in setting. Retail workers underscore the value of recognizing cause and effect, and how top-line business decisions trickle down to affect the everyday experience of picking up a few things from the mall.
“The average consumer has the argument that if you raise wages, those costs are going to be passed on to the consumer,” says Rowland. “The thing that they should be complaining about is when they raise wages, they cut staff in stores. That’s where the cost is getting passed down to the consumer — that person being there to help them.”
Exploring the wider range of meditation is no longer reserved for the monasteries. The new science of meditation is just getting started.
Meditation has taken two divergent paths through the Western mind. For many, it’s a few quick, calming breaths, perhaps timed with a smartphone app, in search of a stress tonic that can soften anxiety’s edges. Along a less-traveled route, meditation remains what it long was: a deeply transformative pursuit, a devoted metamorphosis of the mind toward increasingly enlightened states.
But this bifurcated view of meditation as a relaxing practice for the masses and a life-changing practice for the committed few is deeply misleading. A spectrum runs between them, harboring experiences that are far more interesting and powerful than what the growing mindfulness industry advertises, and more accessible to average people than what tropes of arcane states like enlightenment suggest.
Given that wealthy countries like the US aren’t exactly riding trend lines toward new peaks of mental health (depression rates in American adults are at an all-time high, while young people appear in the grips of a mental health crisis), scalable ways of not just mindfully soothing, but completely re-creating psychological experiences for the better should set off sirens of general, scientific, and funding intrigue.
For the past two decades, the growing science of meditation has roughly followed the same split that ignores this middle path. Most research studies basic mindfulness as a health intervention in novice meditators, where modestly positive results have led to comparisons like exercise for the mind, or mental flossing. On the other end, researchers will occasionally strap EEG electrodes to the scalp of Tibetan monks, offering a glimpse inside the unusual brain activity of an advanced meditator.
A new band of researchers, however, is finding that you don’t need 10,000 hours in a monastery before meditation can upend your entire psychology — and yet, the current body of meditation research has had surprisingly little to say about this middle ground between stress relief and enlightenment.
As the number of meditating Americans has more than tripled in recent years, an onslaught of apps, books, and seminars helped mold the public image of meditation around the simpler and more sellable idea of mindfulness as a form of stress reduction. That image is paying off: The broader mindfulness industry was valued at $97.6 million in 2021 and is projected to triple in value by 2031. Critics call it “McMindfulness,” a capitalist perversion of meditation that deals with stress by focusing inward on the breath, rather than outward on the social structures that cause so much of that stress. Regardless of how you package it, “mindfulness programs only scratch the surface of meditation,” Matthew Sacchet, a neuroscientist, professor of psychiatry, and director of Harvard’s Meditation Research Program, told me.
Sacchet is part of a recent turn in meditation research that is putting the fuller, stranger range of meditative experiences under the scrutiny of laboratory conditions. Rather than evaluating meditation in the same way that we do therapy or drug trials, new theories from cognitive science (like predictive processing) along with new tools — such as machine learning models that read more deeply into neural activity than humans can alone — are shifting the science of meditation in the direction of grasping after the nature of the mind and the ways we might transform it for the better.
“There was this initial focus on meditation as attention and emotional regulation practices,” said Ruben Laukkonen, an assistant professor at Southern Cross University. “But over time, there’s been a recognition that in contemplative traditions, that’s not really the goal. These are side effects. When you talk to people who really take this stuff seriously, you find that there’s these layers of experience that unfold that are much deeper.”
Research labs and private companies are already developing technologies they hope can democratize access to meditation’s deep-end experiences. From psychedelics to brain stimulation, the hunt is on for ways to cut the time it usually takes to begin experiencing more profound effects. “Ultimately, our mission is to understand advanced meditation to scale advanced meditation, and we believe that this will have profound impact on individual well-being and the collective health of society,” said Sacchet.
Scaling access to the benefits of advanced meditation could offer something a little stronger (or a lot stronger, depending on how the tech fares) to the more than 100 million users who turn to mindfulness apps like Calm or Headspace in search of a psychological balm. In a world hell-bent on hacks for everything from emails to nutrition, why not consciousness, too? If deeper states of meditation can go beyond calming the mind and transform its fundamental habits in ways that dissolve stress and raise well-being, then making the process faster and more user-friendly could pay major dividends.
But concerns abound. Even if profoundly altered states of consciousness are amenable to hacking (an unsettled debate), there’s hardly any evidence that today’s generation of tools is up to the task. Worse, if it is, what if accelerating the process of pulling up and shifting around the roots of consciousness just short-circuits millions of minds? And yet, without serious shortcuts, how many people will realistically devote a meaningful chunk of their daily lives to sitting quietly, doing nothing?
On one hand, the Western study of consciousness has been hamstrung since Galileo cleaved sensory experience from the scientific method, and I can think of few things more worthy of deep research. Just as studying the extremes of particle physics (say, smashing atoms of gold together to create temperatures in excess of 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit) can reveal generalizable principles about all matter, the extremes of conscious experience are probably a good place to look for a better understanding of all minds. We have a lot more to learn about how to raise well-being, which, at its core, is a property of consciousness.
As far as defiling ancient practices with shiny new technologies or the perils of swapping gurus for algorithms, these are the fascinating, messy, indeed dangerous, and perhaps extraordinarily wonderful examples of how the dharma — the Buddha’s teachings — is adapting to a new environment. We should support this process as wisely as we can, not turn away. And how could we? The future of our minds may depend on it.
How mindfulness defined the first wave of contemplative studies
What we now call contemplative science is the interdisciplinary study of how practices like meditation, prayer, and psychedelic use affect the mind, brain, and body. Its American roots go back to at least the 1960s, when the inflow of Buddhist ideas enchanted a generation of, as the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg put it, “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” But it wasn’t just poets and hipsters; the likes of scientists and lawyers also started meditating.
Back then, there were no mindfulness apps or corporate “Zen booths” offering meditation as a reprieve to stressed-out workers. The point of meditation, as taught by transplanted Asian teachers of the time like Japan’s D. T. Suzuki and Tibet’s Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was a deep transformation of consciousness — the full force of awakening. Suzuki described Zen, which derives from the Sanskrit word for meditation, as “the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being … it points the way from bondage to freedom.”
The idea of meditation as a means of awakening flared up and then began fading out along with the counterculture itself. The hippies’ rejection of the soulless, sexless mainstream failed to build an alternative that could last, leaving their gusto for higher levels of consciousness adrift, sailing out to the cultural fringes. In the light of modern science, the quest for higher vibrations has come to appear essentially unserious — a New Age trope. But one of those scientists-turned-meditators, Jon Kabat-Zinn, had a vision for how to bring it back into the mainstream.
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The son of a biomedical scientist and a painter, Kabat-Zinn earned a PhD in molecular biology in 1971. Having already established a daily meditation practice in 1966, he spent his early years at the University of Massachusetts Medical School stewing over what his “karmic assignment,” or life’s work, should be. Then, during a two-week meditation retreat in the woods west of Boston, he saw it in a 10-second vision, “an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable connections and their implications,” as he put it. Simply: “Why not make meditation so commonsensical that anyone would be drawn to it?”
Shortly after, in 1979, he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the medical school, which eventually became the eight-week course known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and served as the format for the mindfulness boom to come. In this interpretation, mindfulness is a simple instruction: pay attention to the present moment, on purpose, without judgment. Secular and testable, MBSR offered a form of meditation fit for accountants and clinical trials, rather than hippies and communes.
Kabat-Zinn authored a few studies on MBSR in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that mindfulness research really took off. At the 2005 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, the Dalai Lama told a crowd of 14,000 conference participants (some of whom were upset by the presence of a religious leader at a scientific affair — one online petition to withdraw his invitation received nearly 800 signatures) that Buddhism and cognitive science share deep similarities. “I believe a close cooperation between these two investigative traditions can truly contribute toward expanding the human understanding of the complex world of inner subjective experience that we call the mind,” he said.
Shortly after, scientists picked up on the already existing construct of MBSR, publications on mindfulness began erupting, and the field of contemplative science sprang to life.
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