Meditation and mindfulness make one smug, says new research

It would appear that the mindfulness movement is overrun by preening narcissists. Who could have guessed? A Dutch study by Roos Vonk and Anouk Visser, entitled An Exploration of Spiritual Superiority: The Paradox of Self-Enhancement, is the first to measure how people feel they’re more advanced than others in terms of wisdom, self-knowledge and psychic intuition.

An investigation involving around 3,700 people found that practices that are supposed to minimise the ego tend to enlarge it and that those who put extra effort into enhancing spirituality – mindfulness retreats, aura-reading, past life-regression – are the smuggest, most self-aggrandising and unbearable of all (I may be paraphrasing a tad there). Such people cling to unmeasurable and irrefutable claims about their innate superiority, such as greater insights into the human condition, deeper compassion for others and more advanced psychic abilities (they sense things, dontcha know!). Most of us will have come across people like this. Roughly 99% will wish that we hadn’t.

These people are sashaying in yoga pants, banging on about “inner peace” and the “true self”, smiling with sad, wise eyes at your earthbound concerns and, the biggest “tell” of all, chiding you for making jokes. The self-styled spiritual hate jokes: they can’t do funny, so they desperately want to stop you using funny against them. Thus, humour, one of the most spiritually enriching qualities, one of the greatest human assets, is demoted to a mere “defence mechanism”. Humour threatens and undermines the professionally spiritual - they need to shut it (and you) down.

But hey, this is the time of year to make resolutions and, after a grind like 2020, people are entitled to search for meaning. They shouldn’t be lampooned or criticised for trying to broaden their horizons. However, as the study shows, too often this becomes less about “how can I be better?” to “how can I be better than you?”. Self-improvement morphs into a pious one-upmanship, a contest to become the most perceptive, enlightened, empathic, evolved. It’s no different, really, to travel bores droning on about far-flung beaches in Goa, only this time they’re “travelling to themselves”.

What I’ve found in life is that the genuinely spiritual don’t need to broadcast it or go on retreats about it. Truly spiritual people just are, but how could anyone make a quick buck out of that? There’s the real issue: mindfulness (awareness of how you think, feel, act, react) isn’t a bad thing, quite the opposite. However, there’s a global industry seeking to monetise it, turning people into self-absorbed, smug, crystal-stroking monsters determined to prove they’re a cut above spiritually as well as every other way. When you think about it, industries don’t have followers, they have clients. With the spiritual snake oil merchants, just like any other business model, the customer is always right.