Mindfulness is a Scam
Healing the disease of disconnection
The Mindfulness Scam and the Longing to Come Home
The Haudenosaunee people of the northeastern woodlands of the United States and Canada begin many of their gatherings with what they call The Words That Come Before All Else. Some call it the Thanksgiving Address, but that sounds far too polite. This isn’t a Hallmark-card recital. It is a ceremonial invocation of connection, a remembering of relationships with the waters, the winds, the berries, the thunderers, the trees, the winged ones, the sun, moon, and stars. And with the ancestors. And with you.
No one says these words to become more productive or efficient. These words reweave the strands that hold a people together. They remind everyone present: You belong. You are needed. You live in a world of responsibilities and relationships, not metrics and milestones.
Before mindfulness became a billion-dollar industry, it was something more like this. A way of inhabiting time and place. A medicine for disconnection. It didn’t sell you a better you. It returned you to yourself, the you that lives in the web of life held in relationship with all things.
But then came the productivity consultants. The tech bros. The armies of workplace wellness coaches who realized that if mindfulness could help monks sit for nine hours without flinching, it could probably help marketing teams get through Q4.
And just like that, a sacred practice became a strategy.
The Weaponization of Presence
Mindfulness, in its truest form, is a path of awakening. It doesn’t soothe you with empty promises; it strips away your illusions. You begin to notice the lie in your body before your mind can catch up. You feel the ache you’ve been ignoring, the hollowness of a workday spent in performative hustle.
And when you really start paying attention to your breath, your food, your inbox, your cubicle something shifts. The noise becomes unbearable. You begin to ask dangerous questions. What am I actually doing here? What is this all for?
Anthropologist David Graeber called this phenomenon the “bullshit job.” The job that looks good on paper but feels like soul erosion in slow motion. The job that mindfulness, when practiced with any degree of sincerity, will absolutely ruin for you.
You start your meditation practice hoping for stress relief. Instead, you get clarity and a quiet, terrifying knowing: this life I’m in doesn’t fit me. Not because you’re broken. But because the system is.
The Productivity Trap
Corporate mindfulness doesn’t want that kind of clarity. It wants compliance. It wants cool-headed, emotionally regulated employees who don’t cry in meetings or rage-quit on Slack. It wants performance, not presence.
And so the practice is repackaged. Stripped of its ethical roots. Sold back to us in neat little apps with soothing voices and pastel logos. Mindfulness becomes "mental fitness," a way to "optimize your focus," "manage your anxiety," and stay productive in a collapsing world.
But something strange keeps happening. Some people start practicing mindfulness and then they stop being productive. They start being honest. They walk away from jobs that no longer make sense. They drop the performance. They quit.
Mindfulness didn’t fail. It worked.
The Disease of Disconnection
Here’s the real danger of commodified mindfulness: it can become just another numbing agent. A way to tolerate the intolerable. Instead of acting on our anger about injustice, we breathe through it. Instead of grieving our losses together, we observe them with detached compassion. Instead of confronting a system that keeps us isolated, anxious, and overworked, we adjust our nervous systems to endure it.
We live in an age of profound disconnection. Most of us have lost touch with the rhythms of the natural world, spending our days in climate-controlled boxes, eating food whose origins we don’t know, breathing air we rarely think about. We’re disconnected from our neighbors, from nature, our extended families, our ancestral traditions. Many of us are even disconnected from ourselves—we’ve learned to numb our feelings through shopping, scrolling, binge-watching, overworking, or any number of distractions.
This numbness has become so pervasive that many people don’t even realize they’re feeling anything at all. We’ve mistaken this emotional flatness for peace. But disconnection is not peace. It’s a quiet grief, humming beneath everything.
Real mindfulness doesn’t ask you to cope. It asks you to feel. It doesn’t pull you inward to escape the world. It opens you outward, into relationship with all that lives and suffers and longs to be held.
A Path Back to Place
Real mindfulness isn’t a solo experience. It’s relational. It starts with feeling. With presence. With noticing. Even with discomfort. It’s not about managing feelings, it’s about being honest with them. It’s not about helping you survive a toxic system, it’s about helping you recognize it might be time to change it.
Which brings us back to connection. Not theoretical connection, but place-based connection.
True mindfulness doesn’t require you to become Indigenous or Buddhist or anything other than yourself. It asks you to pay attention to your actual life. Your “life shed”—the living web around you that sustains you, feeds you, shelters you. If I ran a workshop and asked folks to bring a photo of “home,” most would show me a house. But what if “home” included the tree that’s stood longer than your mortgage, the river down the road, the hawk circling above?
What if being mindful of that hawk meant learning about what it eats, where it nests, how it migrates, and what else lives in its territory? What if mindfulness invited you into relationship with everything that shares this patch of Earth with you—the rabbits, the wind, the seasonal shift, the understory fungi doing their mysterious work?
Suddenly, mindfulness isn’t just about your breath. It’s about the breath of the land, the rhythm of the tide, the thrum of relationship that never stopped pulsing beneath the noise.
The Words That Come Before All Else
The Haudenosaunee don’t open with a pitch. They open with a prayer. A remembering. A rooting. They don’t ask: what can we get done today? They ask: who are we in relationship with? What needs thanking? What needs tending?
This is mindfulness as it was meant to be: a ritual of reconnection. Not a way to escape our pain, but a way to bring our full aliveness into the places that need us most.
Maybe we don’t need more mindfulness. Maybe we need more remembering.
Not a productivity hack.
A path home.
If you’re feeling the weight of disconnection—disconnection from yourself, from others, from the earth—you’re not alone. This is the quiet crisis of our time, and it doesn’t have to stay that way. I offer one-on-one mentorship to help you reconnect with what matters most: your inner truth, your relationships, and the living world around you. If something in this writing spoke to you, I invite you to reach out. Send me a message and set up a time to talk. I’d be honored to walk with you.
Yes, as you point out, mindfulness can bring us to ourselves. It is connection that sustain us. The strength of the distant mountains and whispers of the close by trees have remained my daily companions while the culture and people around me have become strangers. My sense of community has withered as life in general has grown more mechanized. Making time to make connections has become a priority as I waken into this new world in which we live.