Organizations
How companies, institutions, and movements embody the sixteen values.
Headspace
Stillness as a product
Headspace built a meditation company on the premise that the skills of attention, equanimity, and present-moment awareness can be taught systematically and delivered at scale through a smartphone app. Andy Puddicombe's background as an ordained Buddhist monk informed the product's commitment to teaching actual contemplative technique rather than simply providing relaxation audio. The company's central challenge is the inherent tension between commercializing a tradition built on non-attachment to outcomes and selling the product on the grounds that it produces measurable outcomes.
Headspace
Stillness as a product
Headspace built a meditation company on the premise that the skills of attention, equanimity, and present-moment awareness can be taught systematically and delivered at scale through a smartphone app. Andy Puddicombe's background as an ordained Buddhist monk informed the product's commitment to teaching actual contemplative technique rather than simply providing relaxation audio. The company's central challenge is the inherent tension between commercializing a tradition built on non-attachment to outcomes and selling the product on the grounds that it produces measurable outcomes.
Introducing genuine contemplative practice to millions of people who would never have encountered it through traditional religious channels. Research partnerships producing some of the most rigorous clinical evidence for digital mental health interventions. A product that works on its stated terms for a meaningful proportion of the people who use it.
The packaging of a tradition that explicitly teaches non-striving into a product whose business model depends on users striving toward results. The cultural moment in which mindfulness became a workplace productivity tool stripped of its original ethical and philosophical context. Engagement metrics as the measure of a practice whose value cannot be captured by engagement metrics.
The 2021 Netflix documentary, which made the paradox of the product explicit and invited viewers to sit with the contradiction rather than resolving it.