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Comment by supertofu | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't there any images from the game?? Even in the app store, there are just promo photos.

"Replace addictive scrolling with mindful entertainment." Hmm, this gives me pause. "Mindful" entertainment is no nobler than any other variety of scrolling.

"Mindful entertainment" is an oxymoron and quite ridiculous to read for anyone who practices true mindfulness-based meditation.

True mindfulness cannot be found on a screen.

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I didn't know you could do mindfulness wrong.

Someone probably said this about book reading in the past. Me personally, I find it’s about my quality of attention regardless if I am on the screen or not. But I can see that it is easy to confuse familiar things we get lost in and associate to mindlessness.

Any attempt to be mindful is probably better than no attempt, but I'd say, Yes, there are better and worse ways.

One that took me some time to learn is to not put effort or striving into the activity. Especially with that most common form of mindfulness, breath meditation, it's very easy to be very effortful about it. And that's IMO not the path you want.

Imagine you were training for a marathon. There's a right way to do it and many wrong ways to do it. You could injure your body by training poorly.

Mindfulness is the same way. There are correct techniques and hundreds of very wrong ways to go about it.

> Why aren't there any images from the game??

I think there is an image of the game in the Play app store... it looks like this is a text based choose your own adventure game.

https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/nOqkSR1E88LtWzpdwFdayV...

It looks like the interactivity is through an unfolding story where you press buttons to choose the narrative path.

Is there any true mindfulness?

Yes, but not under a commoditization format. Maybe a product or service can increase the willingness and earnestness of the seeker, but ultimately, just like there's no golden path to geometry, it's up to the seeker.

Can you expand on "no golden path to geometry"? I've not heard this and my mind immediately went to Phi - it seems to me that in geometry, there actually is a path, e.g. anyone would arrive to parallel line axioms and platonic solids ..

So to be exact, it's Euclid saying "there is no royal road to geometry". So Euclid means that a king for example couldn't spend a bunch of money to acquire an understanding of geometry, rather, just like a peasant he would have to go through the effort of thought to arrive at a proficiency with the ideas. It's not a saying that means there is no logically coherent path or something like that, it's a socially concerned comment that wealth or power won't necessarily give you a shortcut to true wisdom and knowledge.

It's interesting to me that the conversation went in this particular direction off of the original question.

Sam Harris has a commodotized mindfulness app and I've encountered little other than praise.

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