Author: Rahul

I came across two recent articles (one, on BBC’s website and two, Harper’s Magazine) that described the ill-effects of meditation, including profiles of people who’ve had terrible experiences after meditation – both mindfulness and transcendental. I suggest you at least flip though both of them.

I credit meditation – along with a couple of other things – with helping me get through years of depression. Having had a regular meditation practice in the past, here are some observations:

• For months into my mindfulness practice, I attempted to pay attention to everything around me. The act of trying to notice everything at once caused immediate anxiety, and the rush of sensory input was overwhelming, and made for dozens of hours of unhappy sessions that left me more frazzled than when I began. It was months later that I learnt to notice only what my brain was already filtering in, without trying to manipulate those filters. That was a step-change in the quality of my practice, and therefore the effect it had on my well-being.

• I also attempted to breathe evenly and deeply. Oxygen over-saturation is a real thing, and it causes me to become light-headed, with a tingling sensation on my nose, fingers and toes. I worsened the feedback loop by attempting to notice the tingling even as my brain dealt with the light-headedness, and that led to some light hallucinations and a spike in stress levels.

• Finally, while mindfulness eventually does help you form a more sustainable relationship with yourself and the world around you, the path doesn’t appear to be simple. Some of the realisations I had felt like gigantic crises, the storm before the calm of acceptance and understanding. I can see why people who are hit with the sudden clarity of just how insignificant they, their lives, their stories are feel broken. To me it’s quite possible that their brains create automatic defence mechanisms that could manifest as paranoia or mania. I’m not sure how to tackle this: whether meditation is to be performed in the same sorts of careful setting that psilocybin is administered in some parts of the world today, or whether there are forms of Meditation Lite that ease practitioners into understanding.

(Part 2)

In a study that found a correction between Western countries and parental burnout even before the pandemic made life at home challenging:

parenting norms in Euro-American countries … have become increasingly demanding over the last 50 years, resulting in intensification of parental investment, and growing psychological pressure on parents,”

“What parents feed their children, how they discipline them, where they put them to bed, how they play with them: all of these have become politically and morally charged questions… The distinction between what children need and what might enhance their development has disappeared, and anything less than optimal parenting is framed as perilous.”

As the article says, there’ll need to be other studies to determine causation. It’s unquestionably true that the politicisation of bringing up children, including education which wasn’t mentioned here, requires parents to constantly tread a line that seems to get finer every year.

These problems might be a microcosm of the schisms we’re seeing in increasing aspects of our everyday lives. For instance, whether it is ‘right’ to buy from Amazon given how it treats its warehouse workers.

As things become ever more interconnected, ordinary people feel they are responsible for taking stances and making choices about innumerable such issues.

I think this is responsible in large measure for what I see as a pervasively stressed society.

Earlier this year, The Atlantic wrote about what we’ve all felt but haven’t articulated. That all but our closest friendships have suffered greatly during the pandemic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/pandemic-goodbye-casual-friends/617839/

… much of the energy directed toward the problems of pandemic social life has been spent on keeping people tied to their families and closest friends. These other relationships have withered largely unremarked on after the places that hosted them closed. The pandemic has evaporated entire categories of friendship, and by doing so, depleted the joys that make up a human life—and buoy human health.

More on the withering:

There are people on the outer periphery of my life for whom the concept of “keeping up” makes little sense, but there are also lots of friends and acquaintances—people I could theoretically hang out with outdoors or see on videochat, but with whom those tools just don’t feel right. In my life, this perception seems to be largely mutual—I am not turning down invites from these folks for Zoom catch-ups and walks in the park. Instead, our affection for each other is in a period of suspended animation, alongside indoor dining and international travel.

Personally a significant percentage of friends are those with whom for years I’ve been in daily touch with chat apps and the occasional phone call. Those haven’t suffered because they weren’t in person to begin with. But all of them are with people who I had spent some time regularly in person at some time in the past.

I do think new friendships are rather hard to form in these circumstances – although not impossible.

Detailed article on the complexity of the chip deign process and the semiconductor supply chain. Specifically, how the company TSMC in Taiwan is probably the world’s most important chip company.

The world next innovations depend on a single country, Taiwan

The world’s current and next innovations depend on a single country: Taiwan. It’s probably one country you might never hear about, or perhaps confuse with its neighbor, Thailand, or even think it’s a part of China.
I’ve been living in Taiwan for 3+ years, and am baffled that I never pay attention to…

The last paragraph is a pretty good summary, but it doesn’t do justice for the detail in the rest of the article.

The cutting edge semiconductor chip manufacturing is (and was) done in Taiwan by TSMC. The island has acquired strategic significance, with partners all over the world depending on them. The chips they make are essentials to any of today’s and future hardware: (flying) electrical cars, space ships, servers, 5G, machine to discover new drugs or vaccines, and any military equipments.

Update 13 May 2021: Bloomberg has an in-depth article on the complexity of the chip manufacturing process. It also covers the dynamics of the industry.

… it takes years to build semiconductor fabrication facilities and billions of dollars—and even then the economics are so brutal that you can lose out if your manufacturing expertise is a fraction behind the competition…

Manufacturing a chip typically takes more than three months and involves giant factories, dust-free rooms, multi-million-dollar machines, molten tin and lasers. The end goal is to transform wafers of silicon—an element extracted from plain sand—into a network of billions of tiny switches called transistors that form the basis of the circuitry that will eventually give a phone, computer, car, washing machine or satellite crucial capabilities

This is why countries face such difficulty in achieving semiconductor self sufficiency. China has called chip independence a top national priority in its latest five-year plan, while U.S. President Joe Biden has vowed to build a secure American supply chain by reviving domestic manufacturing.

– The Chip Shortage Keeps Getting Worse. Why Can’t We Just Make More?