I know this may come off a bit loaded, but stick with me here. In our modern day and age, is zen just a wee bit of a bullshit construct for most people? Sure, those box breathing exercises are going to help me overcome my crippling anxiety attacks. I mean, I’m literally engaging my parasympathetic nervous system for crying out loud. But I’m talking straight zen here. I’m not talking about that wabi-sabi stuff. I’m talking about that toxic positivity crap, about that re-center my shit, shit.

How exactly are people expected to recenter their shit when they’re painfully aware of multiple genocides taking place? Riots in the Middle East with protesters being murdered by the hundreds. A mom trying to back away from a nightmare scene and getting shot in the face… multiple times. A despot for a president, claiming sovereignty over other countries, bombing oil tankers and then having meetings with oil executives in order to divvy up their piece of the pie. All I can picture is the last scene in Animal Farm where the pigs looked to one another at the table shared with humans and no one else could tell the two apart.

And meanwhile we’re all supposed to remain zen. Impermanence is the key word here. This will all end eventually, right? Right? But what if it doesn’t? What if this ever climbing rollercoaster never really comes down, it just keeps climbing and looping and swooping us around until we land in a pit of utter despair? It’s already been said time and again that even if the people in charge of America go away, it will likely take decades to repair the dismantled infrastructure of our bureaucratic systems. Well, you just need to breathe your way through this. You gotta recenter yourself. Cool it on the news. Take some me time. Have a piece of chocolate and a bubblebath. That will somehow fix that tingling feeling of impending doom haunting so many of us.

Obviously the major problem is that there are no easy solutions here. But really what choice do many people have? They have mouths to feed. Constantly climbing rent to pay. Energy bills that just keep going up. Thanks ChatGPT! So maybe it’s easier to give yourself a break and bury your head under the sand, even just for a day or so. After all, the sand is warm and the muffling is nice. But when we come back up for air, those bills and oppression will still be there waiting for us. So I don’t want to hear crap like, ‘take a moment to chill’ or ‘give yourself some me time’.

I think right now what people need is righteous indignation. We need to feed into our anger and rage, not necessarily as fuel for violence, but as a testament to standing our ground and not backing down. Maybe punch a boxing bag and think of your least favorite representative. Maybe break a plate every now and then and put every ounce of negative energy you got into that porcelain. Maybe attend a protest and scream at the top of your lungs. Maybe go to your local town hall meetings and demand answers from your local officials. Maybe organize your own town halls with other angry locals and start complaining in mass. Maybe get some senators or house representatives on the phone and tell them everything they’re doing wrong, because they seem all too zen about the state of things right now.

So maybe zen is bullshit.