I Got Your Mindfulness
One of my staff decided she needed to call off. It happens. My team is now to the point where most of them can be honest about the reasons rather than manufacturing a lie to justify it which is good in my opinion. This specific call out was due to needing a night to practice “mindfulness.” I asked what that meant.
“I just need a night to be alone with my thoughts.”
“No worries. Make sure you brick your phone for the night.”
This suggestion, for her, was unheard of.
As a man of a certain age, while my generation didn’t really use the word, we were immersed in it. Gen X didn’t download mindfulness. We got dragged into it kicking and swearing because there was nothing else to do.
No app. No soothing British voice telling us to breathe like we’d just discovered oxygen. No push notification gently reminding us to “be present” between doomscrolls and DoorDash orders. Just time. Big, empty, echoing time—the kind that makes you stare at a ceiling fan like it’s a Stanley Kubrick monolith.
You want mindfulness? Try being ten years old on a Tuesday in 1980 with three channels, a broken bike, and no one coming to rescue you from your own thoughts.
That was the curriculum.
We practiced awareness because boredom was a blunt instrument. It didn’t tap politely on your shoulder—it cracked you over the skull and said, “Congratulations, kid. You and your brain are roommates now.” You learned the texture of silence the way other generations learned the interface of a touchscreen. You counted the seconds between passing cars. You watched dust float in sunlight like it was a religious experience because, frankly, it was the best show in town.
Gen X didn’t “find the present moment.” We were sentenced to it.
You know what? It (mostly) worked.
We knew how to sit in discomfort because we had no alternative. No dopamine slot machine in our pocket. No infinite binge engineered by a team of behavioral psychologists whose entire job was to make sure you never finished anything. You couldn’t anesthetize boredom—you had to metabolize it. You had to chew it like gristle until it turned into something resembling patience.
You ever sit on a curb for an hour waiting for a friend who might not show? No text. No update. Just the slow realization that maybe—just maybe—you’ve been stood up by a twelve-year-old with a skateboard and poor time management. That’s not just waiting. That’s existential training. That’s learning how to feel disappointment in real time without buffering it through distraction.
Mindfulness? That’s just a fancy word for not running away from your own mind.
We didn’t run because there was nowhere to go.
Instead, we paid attention. Not because it was virtuous, but because it was inevitable. You noticed the sound your house made at night. The way the refrigerator clicked on like some mechanical heartbeat. The rhythm of your own breathing when you couldn’t sleep. You learned your own thoughts the way a long-haul trucker learns a highway—every crack, every bend, every weird roadside attraction of anxiety or daydream.
And yeah, sometimes that highway got dark. Real dark. But you stayed on it because, again, there was no exit ramp labeled “TikTok.”
Now fast-forward to the present, where mindfulness has been repackaged, monetized, and sold back to people like artisanal bottled water. “Take ten minutes,” they say. “Close your eyes.” As if ten minutes is a pilgrimage instead of a rounding error. As if silence is something you schedule between meetings instead of something that used to swallow whole afternoons.
We didn’t need mindfulness practices because our entire environment forced us into mindfulness whether we liked it or not. It was baked into the architecture of our lives. Waiting in line meant waiting. Riding in a car meant staring out a window and letting your brain wander into strange, uncharted territory. Even television signed off at night like it had somewhere better to be, leaving you alone with the national anthem and your own restless thoughts.
The modern world doesn’t lack mindfulness techniques. It lacks friction. It lacks the empty space where a human being can bump into themselves and not immediately reach for an escape hatch.
Gen X lived in that space.
We were the generation of long pauses. Of unanswered questions. Of wandering attention that wasn’t constantly herded back into a monetizable lane. We got lost—physically, mentally, emotionally—and in getting lost, we accidentally learned how to be present because presence was the only map we had.
And sure, there was plenty we got wrong. We weren’t enlightened monks—we were feral kids with questionable judgment and a deep familiarity with boredom-induced stupidity. But underneath all that chaos was a strange competence: we knew how to exist without constant stimulation. We knew how to sit in a moment and let it unfold without demanding that it entertain us.
That’s the part that feels almost alien now.
Because today, the moment isn’t allowed to just be. It has to perform. It has to compete with everything else screaming for your attention. And if it doesn’t? Swipe. Scroll. Refresh. Replace.
Gen X didn’t replace the moment. We endured it. And in enduring it, we learned something the modern world keeps trying to re-teach itself with apps and retreats and expensive silence: your mind is not the enemy. It’s just loud when you finally give it the floor.
We gave it the floor because we had no choice.
And somewhere between the boredom and the waiting and the long, empty afternoons, we stumbled into mindfulness the way you stumble into a quiet room and realize, after a minute, that the quiet isn’t threatening—it’s honest.
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