#451 — The One Resolution That Matters Most

Happy New Year, everybody. This is Sam Harris. As another year begins, many of us will resolve to exercise more and sleep better and eat more sanely. Of course, these are all good things to do. But there's a prior commitment, whether one makes it consciously or not, that will determine the quality of everything else, and that's the commitment to take care of your mind. As has been widely discussed, we are living through a all out war for our attention. Most of the digital economy has been engineered to keep you clicking and scrolling and sharing and doing these things in a continuous state of agitation or outrage. And even when the mood is different, let's say you've been captured by something genuinely amusing, that cat sleeping on top of that dog, sleeping on top of that tiger. The result is now a new normal of perpetual distraction and fragmentation. We start a conversation and then reach for our phones. We sit down to read. This is a book we really wanted to read and find that we just can't help but check our messages. We watch a film while simultaneously scrolling some digital timeline. We barely live in the vicinity of our bodies anymore. And this has become entirely normal to be elsewhere almost all of the time. We want meaningful experience and yet we are training ourselves to avoid it. Well, this is why mindfulness matters. Mindfulness isn't just something to add to your list of commitments. It's the skill that can revise and reorganize the list. Mindfulness clarifies what deserves your attention and what doesn't. It allows you to notice pointless and even painful distractions and to drop them and reveals a deeper truth. So much of the quality of our lives isn't a matter of what happens to us or even of what we do. It's a matter of how our minds respond to everything we experience in each moment. Many people think mindfulness is a strange practice that is based on some spiritual superstition. Others imagine it to be a kind of endurance test. You force yourself to sit perfectly still, suppressing your thoughts, and you're chasing some drug like experience of bliss. These are misunderstandings. Mindfulness is simply the ability to pay clear attention to the contents of consciousness in each moment, to sensations, perceptions, emotions, intentions, thoughts, exactly as they are, as they arise, without grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away. The point is to make what is unconscious or barely conscious something you're aware of. Why did you say that thing that you now regret? How were you feeling the moment before you said it? And how are you feeling now? And what in you is aware of every feeling? What does awareness itself feel like? You don't need to change your experience to clearly observe it. And paradoxically, the act of observation begins to change how you feel and perceive the world. This matters because your …