Here Come the Warm Jerks
Mindfulness bros, AI meets IMS, and how to trick yourself into reading Russian lit
Hello again and happy Friday. I know what you’re (probably not) thinking: This newsletter didn’t show up for months and now it’s clogging up my inbox multiple times a week? Maybe. Maybe not! We’re experimenting here. In an effort to continue to draw a circle around the kinds of things that comprise Healings’ editorial purview, I thought I’d share a link roundup / media diet / loosies sort of thing, because not every post needs to be a 2,000-word personal essay about bodily fluids. Enjoy!
Here come the Jhana Bros. A theme running through this week is capitalism’s suspect relationship to mindfulness and vice versa. This piece by the Atlantic’s Ross Anderson about a startup whose mission is to induce meditative bliss on demand hits the bullseye, right down to one of the founders wishcasting his growth plan as: “Then we SpaceX it.” Perhaps it’ll work. Or perhaps these meditation barons will win some kind of award for most on-the-nose example of Silicon Valley’s god complex. These outcomes are not mutually exclusive.
Speaking of the god industrial complex, I listened to this conversation between Sam Altman and Jack Kornfield during a recent walk with the baby:
For those who don’t know, if mindfulness were rock music, Kornfield would be its Chuck Berry (if hip-hop, then DJ Kool Herc), a member of the small crew that imported the practice from East Asia in the ‘70s via the founding of the original Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Mass. In 1988, he started Spirit Rock in Marin, thus putting him in close proximity to Silicon Valley and its various tech overlords, several of whom have sought him and/or his teachings out over the years. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is the latest to declare himself under Kornfield’s influence, and I’m not sure how to feel about this. While I have no personal relationship with Jack, his beginner’s meditation videos helped introduce me to the practice, and I eventually did a day-long retreat at Spirit Rock that he taught. The man emanates loving kindness, wisdom, compassion, etc.; he’s the real deal. But this conversation is a series of softballs and gives Altman the chance to align his company with a set of much deeper and more altruistic values than I’ve seen any evidence of it deserving. Obviously big tech has a long history of this shit, going back to Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” and Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, etc., so no one should be surprised here. But like a lot of things these days, just because I’m incurred to it doesn’t mean it’s not depressing.
I associate most of the stories on life-extension, de-aging, and related topics as the worst kind of snake oil salesmanship, with that dude who’s starting to look like an Elden Ring boss being among the biggest offenders (and optimization bro Andrew Huberman running a close second). But this installment of Eric Topol’s Ground Truths newsletter/podcast, featuring professor Coleen Murphy, actually perked my ears up. Admittedly, I’m not qualified to follow most of the science here, but my bullshit alert didn’t go into the red through most of this. If nothing else, I learned about senomorphs, which are not be confused with xenomorphs.
Department of Lifehacks: One of my responsibilities as the parent who cannot lactate is I give the baby her middle-of-the-night bottles. This entails patiently holding the bottle for 10-20 minutes in dark silence, a period during which my phone addiction would otherwise have me scrolling, sighing, and sighing about scrolling. I didn’t care for this, and so to disrupt this addictive loop, I put the iPhone’s books app front and center, and downloaded Anna Karenina, one of dozens of classic novels you can get for free. It sounds totally stupid but it worked. Now, instead of opening one of several apps designed to game my dopamine response, I am 14 groggy chapters into this meandering masterpiece.
This concludes Healings’ first-ever experimental lightening round! See you next time.
This is the Healings Newsletter. We thank you for reading.
Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides artwork.
Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, in the months to come.
Healings is free for all at the moment. Paid subscriptions are currently paused but we plan to turn them back on pretty soon.
I demand more bodily fluids! JK jk this was nice.