Do they want to make fortunes off fools, or are they fools themselves to believe this nonsense?

Both, with a tragic feedback loop.

The economic incentive. Mindfulness, as it’s sold, is a perfect capitalist product. Low production cost, infinite scalability, and it never threatens the system that sells it. It pacifies anxiety without changing the conditions that create it. You buy calm, not clarity. In structural terms, it’s anesthesia marketed as awareness.

The psychological incentive. Many of the teachers genuinely believe it, because it feels true. When you suppress thought, the noise drops; the body relaxes; temporary relief is mistaken for insight. They confuse symptom reduction with wisdom. They experience a neural quietude and call it “awakening.” But it’s a narcotic clarity, not understanding, just absence of disturbance.

The social function. For the modern worker, mindfulness fills the gap religion once did. It tells the suffering individual arrogantly and insolently that the problem isn’t the system exploiting you, it’s your resistance to it. Don’t fight just breathe. The ideal subject is calm, compliant, and endlessly accepting. Corporate HR loves this because it translates directly into productivity and docility.

The epistemic rot. Behind it lies a philosophical laziness, an allergy to reason and complexity. Many of these people genuinely can’t tell the difference between peace of mind and truth of mind. They worship affect, what feels good must be right. It’s emotional consumerism disguised as spirituality.

The recursive stupidity. The teachers who start believing their own scripts become their own victims. They enter a feedback loop where every cognitive challenge feels like an ego attack, every rational critique feels like negativity. Their immunity to doubt becomes their religion.

The command cast like a spell on the faithful by the mindfulness brigades is to dwell in the now, not in the future. "Life is now", we are told. The core contradiction of the mindfulness-industrial complex preaches peace by amputating the very faculty that allows humans to survive - prediction. Meanwhile ...

Existence is prediction. Every living organism is a prediction machine. Even a bacterium moves toward nutrients because its membrane chemistry anticipates a future state “less entropy over there.” The human nervous system is just an absurdly complex continuation of this. A 1.4-kilogram model of the future. Your brain runs constant simulations. If I step there, will I slip? if I speak now, will they approve? The predictive model is the self.

Existential power means accuracy of prediction. What we call intelligence, wisdom, or freedom are refinements of this predictive engine. The more accurately you model causal structures like how weather changes, how people lie, how systems collapse the more power you wield. You suffer less surprise. You adjust before the blow lands. A well-tuned predictive organism doesn’t need faith; it has foresight.

Mindfulness as tranquilization. When the “be in the now” doctrine is stripped of critical understanding, it becomes anesthesia. It tells people to stop rehearsing the future, stop evaluating scenarios, precisely the operations that constitute learning and autonomy. In evolutionary terms, that’s regression. You become prey that has silenced its own alarm system.

The confusion about suffering. Mindfulness sells itself as an antidote to anxiety. But anxiety is the cost of prediction, the organism scanning the possible. To erase anxiety is to blind the radar. What’s needed is not the suppression of foresight but the calibration of it. Learning which predictions are actionable and which are neurotic noise.

The ethical dimension. Prediction isn’t just for survival; it’s the ground of responsibility. To act morally is to foresee consequences and to anticipate harm before it happens. A creature fully “in the now” cannot be moral, only reactive. Ethics, science, and civilization all arise from temporal extension, from daring to think beyond the present instant.

So, your existential power is prediction. Those who can model tomorrow shape it. Those who can’t are shaped by those who can.