If you’re a person living in 2026, you probably have a long list of things you want fixed. Your list should look like this: It may be about affordable housing, the global economy, the cost of groceries, headaches, back pain, aging bodies, gas prices, food prices, global warming, and occasional self-doubt or chronic busyness.
And that’s just the top of the list.
In our collective overwhelm and longing to find peace and respite from our current landscape, any place other than “here” feels good, even if only for a moment.
Some of us have turned to spirituality for answers. Some of us have tried to distract ourselves with activities and to-do lists. And for others, we’ve dug deeper into the health habits, supplements, and workout programs that promise how to “get healthy.”
In our collective overwhelm and longing to find peace and respite from our current landscape, any place other than “here” feels good, even if only for a moment.
Enter mindfulness.
When practice becomes a product
For decades, teachers such as Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein have been instrumental in introducing insight meditation (Vipassana) to Western audiences. They have made meditative practices that have existed for centuries more accessible to people looking for a different relationship with stress, suffering, and the mind itself.
Over time, mindfulness spread beyond meditation centers to schools, workplaces, therapists’ offices, hospitals, and later throughout the larger wellness industry.
Essentially, mindfulness has become the new “superfood.”
But somewhere along the way, mindfulness became more than just a practice. It’s now a prefix. Today, when we encounter words like mindful eating, mindful communication, mindful parenting, and mindful productivity, the adjectives themselves lend credibility to the words that follow.
Essentially, mindfulness has become the new “superfood.” The label itself carries authority over what follows, encouraging us to believe that simply adding the word “mindful” to an activity somehow makes it a wiser, more educated, healthier choice on the fly, even when the reality is more nuanced.
Have I lost sight of the plot?
In my quest to find some answers, I picked up Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Living the Complete Catastrophe. Kabat-Zinn is credited with translating mindfulness into a clinical context, today known as MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), and medical professionals and hospital practitioners have adopted these practices.
The title comes from the Greek passage Zorba, where “complete catastrophe” refers to the chaos of life (stress, work, uncertainty, anxiety, love, joy, illness, loss) and everything that comes with it. The basic premise of this book is that you can’t control what happens to you in this world, but you can change your relationship to what happens.
Mindfulness, when applied to various situations in life, can help regulate emotions, develop self-awareness, and support mental health, leading to beneficial results.
The question is never “Does mindfulness help?” but rather what we currently expect it to help with.
But as mindfulness has grown in popularity, so have our expectations of it. In some cases, the word “mindful” itself has become a linguistic indicator of well-being.
The question is never “Does mindfulness help?” but rather what we currently expect it to help with.
Labels have a price
Part of the appeal of mindfulness is that it offers what many of us desperately need: a way to live our lives with more balance, greater awareness, and less reactivity.
But as more and more people recognized this dire need and perhaps tried several things to meet it without success, mindfulness began to take on responsibilities far beyond its original scope.
We seek reassurance rather than the skill to live with discomfort for which there may be no easy answers.
In some cases, expectations of mindfulness can transform into what some contemplative teachers describe as a form of mental avoidance. There, people often look to the practice itself to be the solution, rather than part of a much larger process that involves our participation. In other words, we seek reassurance rather than the skill to live with discomfort without an easy answer.
Marketing has played a big role in many of us becoming more mindful of mindfulness, but to what end? We may attend more mindfulness workshops or attend corporate mindfulness retreats, but I think we need to consider whether we want mindfulness to have a weight of responsibility that is outside of the practice.
Mindfulness is never intended to solve a “total catastrophe” in life, but rather to provide tools to meet ourselves where we are right now.
take the wrong route to the destination
The wellness trap begins when we mistake any practice or form of healing for being a solution in itself. Mindfulness is never intended to solve a “total catastrophe” in life, but rather to provide tools to meet ourselves where we are right now.
Yes, practicing mindfulness can help improve your attention, concentration, communication, and more, making your workplace better and more efficient. But since when did mindfulness have a role in making the workplace healthier, or more productive? When did we start taking responsibility for developing better leaders or dealing with burnout? Of course, these aren’t inherently bad uses for mindfulness. But blaming the success or failure of such efforts on practices like mindfulness prevents us from seeing the process accurately.
Mindfulness is a developmental tool, not a solution per se. In other words, mindfulness is a way to engage with all kinds of experiences. However, this is a very different solution to eliminating unwanted experiences.
Return to Foundation
So what does mindfulness actually offer? And why do we keep expecting mindfulness to “fix” whatever feels wrong in our lives?
Jon Kabat-Zinn repeatedly emphasizes that mindfulness is not just a technique, but “a way of wisely relating and experiencing things as we find them.” That distinction is important.
Jon Kabat-Zinn repeatedly emphasizes that mindfulness is not just a technique, but “a way of wisely relating and experiencing things as we find them.” That distinction is important.
Most of us avoid unpleasant emotions, conversations, and uncertainty as much as possible. This is a deep human tendency. When we start looking for something or someone to make those uncomfortable feelings go away, we fall into the wellness trap. When we assign those unwanted experiences to be dealt with with meditation apps, retreats, self-help books, or supplements, we “outsource” agency.
We live in a time when so many offers of relief are offered. Our trap is not what we use. It expects us to do the work that belongs to each of us, whatever it is we are involved with (whatever that may be).
When we mistake a habit for a “cure-all,” we are effectively giving up our agency to be part of the solution to what ails us.
Buddhist teachings maintain that although we cannot prevent pain and suffering, we do have some influence over our circumstances. What this means for most of us, as Kabat-Zinn suggests, is that joy, fear, illness, love, and uncertainty are all catastrophes in life.
Mindfulness invites us to learn how to live with those experiences. The goal is to learn to live with discomfort, rather than avoid it completely.
Cultivating a mindfulness practice is not a substitute for medical care, community, rest, boundaries, meaningful work, or structural change.
The wellness trap emerges when mindfulness is expected to deliver more than it was ever designed to. Cultivating a mindfulness practice is not a substitute for medical care, community, rest, boundaries, meaningful work, or structural change. This sheds light on what we need to see more clearly and helps us understand where the limits are and why they appear the way they do.
And, hopefully, this will help each of us (when identifying problems in our respective lives) to understand that the problem is not a matter of our ability to endure, but above all due to the causes and conditions of our situation. Perhaps most importantly, mindfulness can help you discern the difference between what requires compassionate acceptance and what requires compassionate acceptance combined with thoughtful action.
