Turns out that people who meditate are less motivated: “Meditation was
correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings
of calm and serenity – states seemingly not conducive to wanting to
tackle a work project.”
People who had meditated were more focused, but they didn’t perform
better than their less calm, more anxious colleagues, because “their
lower levels of motivation…seemed to cancel out that benefit.
During the heyday of psychedelics, the prevailing conspiracy theory
explaining the criminalization of “mind-expanding” substances was that
the boss class realized that people who could perceive greater truths
would be unshackled from meaningless materialism and the need to work to
attain status goods. Whether or not that was why regulators acted to
ban psychedelic substances (an act that former UK Drugs Czar David Nutt
called “the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo”),
there certainly seems to be a correlation between discomfort and
anxiety and your willingness to work hard for someone else’s enterprise.
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