Be grateful to your boss for paying you? Fuck off, I'll be grateful to the hundreds of thousands of workers who came before me and protested for shorter workdays, weekends, lunch breaks, sick leave, maternity leave, safety regulations, reasonable dismissal, minimum wage, and a slew of other benefits I don't know about.

This positivity shit is precisely what gives Buddhism a bad rep in social justice circles. You can be mindful and grateful for all the little things that sustain you and your friends without sacrificing your intellectual capacity to recognise injustice in the world.

I tentatively liked its focus on self-examination, as a way of escaping the ego and its tendency to blame others. I've lived long enough to understand that self-responsibility should not be conflated with neoliberal subjectivity—that being honest to those around you, as well as examining your own conduct, is vital to healthy relationships—but what irks me about Buddhism is that it completely lacks any historical analysis of how the ego comes into being in the first place. Sure, selfishness is a transhistorical phenomenon, but understanding the ways selfishness manifests, towards what goals, and through what methods, alerts us to how power operates, in the here and now, through particular social institutions and cultural formations.

I would argue that critique is just as important as self-examination, because through critique we develop an understanding for and empathy towards those trapped in karma (the unexamined behaviours we inherit and reproduce towards the ill outcome of ourselves and those around us). Through critique, we understand that just saying "be grateful" will annoy the shit out of someone who's addicted to doomscrolling, because what needs to be engaged with are their feelings of boredom, insecurity, and lack of agency, as engendered by social media platforms driven by profit incentives.

You're not going to smash apart the ego without smashing apart the structures that engender it.