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Many of you know me primarily through my writing and the Making Sense podcast, where I spend most of my time thinking about intractable problems: political and religious extremism, existential risk, the unintended harms of new technology. Waking Up is a place where I don’t think about any of those things. Or so it seems. In truth, the connection is direct: every problem I examine outside the app is, at some level, the result of human minds being out of control. A person who can notice negative emotions like fear or anger, without being ruled by them, can stay in a difficult conversation. A society of such people can disagree without coming apart.
The mind you train in meditation is the same mind you bring to your marriage, to your work, to your friendships, and to your encounters with strangers. By meditation, I don’t mean anything spooky: it’s simply the practice of noticing what your mind is doing before it does something you’ll regret. That gap—between impulse and response, between an arising thought and your helpless identification with it—is where freedom can be found.
We don’t merely live our own lives. We inhabit the lives of others. So a practice that might begin as “self-help” can become the foundation of an ethical life. Once you see it this way, sharing the practice of meditation stops being a matter of just marketing a product.
Anyone who follows the link below gets 30 days of Waking Up for free, with full access to the app and no obligation to subscribe. And if you already use Waking Up, I want to encourage you to share it with others. You can do that by forwarding this post, or by using the Share button inside the app. You can also send individual sessions to friends or link to them wherever you spend time online.
It’s awkward for me to ask you to share my work. But picture how things look from my side: Many thousands of people, from complete beginners to those who have practiced meditation for decades, have told me that Waking Up profoundly changed their lives. The response to the app is unlike anything I’ve received for my books or my podcast. Apart from just eating more ice cream, helping to improve the lives of others is the whole point of being here.
So if your life was changed, as mine was, by paying closer attention to the nature of your own mind (meditation, by whatever name), please help me change someone else’s life. And if you’ve never tried Waking Up, let this be the month you do.
Access your free 30 days of Waking Up here: www.wakingup.com/makingsense
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