There’s no peace from the purveyors of corporate mindfulness

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/17/no-peace-purveyors-corporate-mindfulness

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So far this week I have received three unsolicited press releases from PR companies on the subject of mindfulness. Beyond the obvious confirmation that few things are as likely to induce a state of umbrella-gnawing tension as being reminded repeatedly of your failure to achieve a state of life-enhancing calm, there is a chance the mindfulness industry may now have reached tipping point.

This week at Google HQ in Dublin, something called Wisdom 2.0 Europe has been staging a huge mindfulness-themed corporate event for high-end tech companies. Meanwhile, a Surrey University study has suggested that tech-based mindfulness aids – including an app that involves an alarm bonging regularly to warn you to be more calm – have tangible benefits on stress levels and (key detail) productivity. And this week alone 37 books on mindfulness have been published, including Mindfulness for Insomniacs, a Mindfulness Colouring Book and An Idiot’s Guide to Mindfulness.

Working life has dissolved in the past few years into a tinnitus of endless digital harassment. The appeal of mindfulness is its promise as a coping mechanism, a place to hide, a minute’s peace. That it should become another item on the to-do list, a heavily marketed measure of lifestyle adequacy, is probably some kind of dramatic irony. But somehow I can’t really seem to focus on that right now.

Westminster’s riot club

Whatever the result of tomorrow’s vote on Scottish independence, the no campaign should probably be grateful for small mercies of timing. It could, believe me, have been so much worse. The Riot Club, a film based on Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, goes on general release on Friday, a day after the polls close and three days after its UK premiere at the BFI. It is a very funny film peopled by delightfully hateful characters that captures perfectly the full youthful horror of that small group of boarding-school peacocks currently running Westminster politics. Frankly, I defy anybody to watch it and resist the urge to reject not just the Conservative party, or England, but the prospect of any kind of continued human co-existence with these frock-coated sociopaths.

There is even an eerie echo in the film’s key scene of the last week of campaigning. Alistair Ryle, a new Riot Club member with a streak of genuine nastiness – and destined for high office in what is clearly intended as the Tory party – gives a tender, elegiac, hate-powered speech about the decline of the English ruling class before battering a Scots publican around the head with a plank. By coincidence, a few short hours before its first airing in the UK, the prime minister delivered his own tender, elegiac speech centred around the decline of the English ruling class’s influence over Scotland, a choked and tearful thing with its own not-so-buried sense of threat. One of the most striking parts of the endgame to all this has been the sense of shock among the no campaign at Scotland’s passion for separation. How could it have come to this? Another good reason to watch a fine, fun, if rather depressing, British film.

Champagne’s moment?

Some goodish news from the world of sport. Sepp Blatter, the 78-year-old president of Fifa – who, with his bronzed sheen, increasingly resembles a life-sized version of the World Cup itself – will face a challenger when he runs for a fifth term next year. Former diplomat Jérôme Champagne has announced that he will stand, describing global football as “a dangerous cocktail of deregulation ... legal, tax, regulatory and judicial loopholes”, which all seems fair enough. More recently he outlined 11 proposals to reform football’s opaque and bloated governing body, none of which, sadly, involves leaving its tax-haven bolthole or sacking every single time-serving wonk on the international committees. Still, you can’t have everything.