treebot

I have been around addicts my whole life (drugs and alcohol), I've known many people who died from their addiction, and I've struggled with addiction myself at times (drugs and alcohol). I have a few issues with this article.

1. Behavioral addictions are not comparable to a serious chemical addiction. The person who can't stop watching Netflix or can't get off Facebook is not the same as someone who can't stop sticking needles in their arm (heroin) and is flirting with death everyday. I've had behavioral addictions and chemical addictions, and I can tell you first hand that a chemical addiction is a different monster. You start to feel physically and mentally ill when you can't get your fix for a chemical addiction. Flu like symptoms, you can even die from withdrawal from some things. Comparing that to something like video game addiction is a huge stretch and somewhat offensive.

2. Saying that an addictive personality is really just deep seated emotional issues is not really changing much. Deep seated emotional issues are very hard to change. We try and some do, but a lot of us only make minor progress or don't change at all. Especially the people whose emotional issues have led them to a serious drug or alcohol addiction. Sometimes the best they can do is just abstain and use something healthier to cope.

The whole article feels like the author is engaging with the issue on an intellectual level. Sure, there are addicts who can recover and then even use their substance without relapsing. But there are many addicts who relapse and die, or ruin their lives. It makes sense then to err on the side of caution. For most addicts, there's more to lose than to gain, and it's hard enough fighting addiction that I don't think we should encourage addicts to push their boundaries.

I've just known many people first hand that truly embody the phrase "Once an addict, always an addict." Sure, maybe it's not true for some people, but it's true for a lot of people, especially the addicts that have it really bad.

I'm saying that the reason cities are such expensive places to live is because a lot of people want to live there, because their work is there. If you aren't actually working in the city, you're paying a premium for something you're not using.

There are very good schools outside of cities, as well as good hospitals. There are also plenty of beautiful towns with tons of shops and whatnot within walking distance, or a short bike ride. And they are a lot cheaper to live in than a city.

Maybe this is because a lot of tech workers are living in cities? Where space is expensive? There's no reason to live in a city if you work remote.

> Basically, he was meditating at monk-like levels, and if he were actually in a monastery, he would probably have gotten help at some point beforehand.

This is spot on. It seems to me like the author took meditation and removed it from it's cultural, historical and spiritual context. In Buddhism, the community of other practicioners is extremely important, as well as the teacher, and it seemed like the author didn't have those. Meditating for 10 minutes a day on your own is fine, but meditating for hours a day and going on week long retreats without a proper teacher or community does seem like opening up the door for things to go wrong or get too intense or for one to become confused or lost. The red flags should have been when the author began convulsing or disassociating or feeling bad. I think the warning is not about the ill effects of meditation, but rather the ill effects of practicing meditation deeply without the proper grounding in tradition, spirituality and community.

To be fair, it's not really the author's fault that he removed meditation from it's proper context. All of the workshops he was going to did that as well. You go, do 1-2 weeks of really intense meditation, and then leave. You might never see those teachers again, or at least not for a while. It's on you to integrate your experience, which can be very difficult.

I hate to invalidate this author's experience, but I really think it was that the author was not doing it right. It's okay to say this. If you start deadlifting every day for 30 days, and then blow your back out, and then try to say there are negative effects of deadlifting, the proper response would be "you're not doing it right." Because that would be the truth. Again, it's not totally his fault for not doing it right, as all these retreats seemed to enable not doing it right. I think he should spread the word about what happened, but it shouldn't be "meditation has some bad side effects" but rather "meditation can have some bad side effects when not done correctly. This is how to do it correctly." The article doesn't really present much of any framework for understanding how and when the bad side effects occur, and a solution for avoiding them. Which is why it's getting a lot of pushback I think.

The article also has a really bad title: "When Buddhism Goes Bad". The article hardly talks about Buddhism. Things like the four noble truths, the eightfold path and other important Buddhist concepts are not mentioned at all. Meditation is not the same as Buddhism. In fact, it seems like his mediation practice was actually missing true Buddhism, and that might be how this whole thing occurred. Regardless, the only thing that went wrong here was meditation practice, not Buddhism.

Props to the author for sharing, and I hope everything goes well for him, but I have to push back on the way he's trying to communicate this warning.