Heard a story about a girl who didn't know to save Word files. She would work on a file, and after she was finished, she would print it. If she had to edit the file, she would go back to the computer and retype the whole thing.
She didn't know how to save files. Shocking.
What wonderful things have happened today in my personal economic life?
Since I've worked at Google, I've only been seeing more and more posters about positive thought life and mental engineering. These are geek codewords for meditation. Today, I saw one talking about how meditating increases your rate of alpha waves, relaxes you, and helps you perform better on psychological wellbeing tests.
Maybe this poster was a reaction to the growing number of people at Google who don't credulously assume that meditation is the best thing since sliced bread. But the posters don't really get me to where I want to go. I don't care about alpha waves or my score on a psychological wellbeing test. I care about happiness and health. Where is the evidence to show that meditation can deliver those?
And just showing that those happen is also not enough to get my buy in. It has to compare favorably to the spectrum of other activities I might undertake instead. Is it better for me than going home and playing video games? Than staying late and getting more work done? Than a vacation? Than reading? Than having sex? Than going out for dinner with friends? Than sleeping? Than watching TV? Is it better than the other things that it competes with for my time?
The meditation advocates in my life haven't been making this case. I suspect that's because it can't scientifically be made.
