My Boyfriend Won’t Stop Meditating!

My boyfriend says he should meditate for one hour on daily basis. Why does this annoy me a lot? He works in tech, if that’s related. —In search of Enlightenment

Pricey In search of,

I feel it’s fairly apparent. On the one hand, meditation is essentially the most self-­centered, delinquent behavior there may be—or one in every of them, a minimum of. (I can consider one other intensely solitary act that some individuals insist they “should” do every day to keep up a transparent head.) Its motives are normally openly egotistical: private productiveness, sleep hacking, enhanced creativity. However, it’s also a religious self-discipline whose highest intention, historically, is ego demise, self-­transcendence, and the eventual enlightenment of all the world. The contradictions pile up. No surprise meditation is so standard in tech, an business during which the persistent effort to extend market share usually sails beneath utopian language about connecting the world, obliterating human limitations, and making life for all beings unimaginably nice.

I’m not saying that you need to inform him this, in fact. In case your boyfriend is way sufficient alongside his path to enlightenment (God assist him), he’ll seemingly level out that such “contradictions” are literally paradoxes, koans, the best type of religious reality. The dualistic thoughts is clouded by both/or pondering, you see, a sort of binary logic that can’t but glimpse that loftier airplane the place all 0s are concurrently 1s and obvious hypocrisies synthesize into unified Reality. I’m certain you’ve gotten this lecture earlier than, and as tiresome as it’s, he’s not fully incorrect. We waste a lot of our lives attempting to repair the frictions and logical oppositions that make our world significant within the first place. The thorn is critical to the fantastic thing about the rose. The bug is definitely a characteristic. The issues in our family members are inseparable, in the long run, from their strengths.

All of which is to say: Be grateful that your boyfriend shouldn’t be but so developed that he eludes all inconsistencies. The one factor extra annoying than human contra­dictions is the one that has efficiently transcended them.

Why is it that when a good friend asks to take a photograph of me it’s positive, however when my beloved mother does it I wish to scream? —Brat

This query would possibly really be above my pay grade, Brat. A sure sort of psychotherapist would let you know that any picture is an act of acquisition—the photographer is attempting to own, to seize, to make static—and that the shutter-happy mother embodies the archetype of the Oedipal Mom, who’s attempting to devour her personal youngsters. Perhaps your hostility stems out of your conflation of the digicam with the maternal gaze, the ever-present eye that threatens to obliterate your individual viewpoint. Or perhaps the violent language of images (to shoot, to seize) evokes, on some unconscious stage, the sublimated aggression of the mother-child relationship that have to be repressed to keep up a viable household life.

You most likely don’t discover these explanations very convincing. I don’t both. The reality is that I might most likely listing dozens of actions—asking about your day, checking in about your well being, shopping for unsolicited presents—that function in response to the identical double customary: positive when it’s a good friend, annoying as hell when it’s a father or mother. The issue has nothing to do with photographs and each­factor to do with proximity. It’s straightforward to resent your mother exactly as a result of she is your mother, an all-purpose dispenser of affection and assist whose sole goal is to be obsessively attentive to your wants and delicate to what irks you. It’s straightforward to neglect that she can also be an autonomous being who might be coming into the second half of her life and easily attempting to doc, in some small means, the fleeting moments of happiness that appear to be passing extra rapidly yearly.