Noah Shachtman in “enlighten engineer”

Noah Shachtman in “enlighten engineer”

Meditation has been in existence for a long time and is usually associated with Buddhism and eastern Asian cultures. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is a meditation technique involving attendance of the present time without making judgment or reference on the past or future. Recently meditation has been adopted in western culture as a way to ensure peace of mind and handle various life situations. Tech companies in Silicon Valley are also using meditation to improve the welfare of their employees, which in turn improves productivity, creativity, and quality of work. Noah Shachtman in “enlighten engineer” convey the themes of mindfulness and meditation in various ways. The search inside yourself program and wisdom 2.0 have been used in the passages to help illustrate meditation and mindfulness effectively.

The first passage involves the search yourself program that teaches google employees in Silicon Valley about meditation. The theme of meditation gets conveyed by the sharing of stories of employees of tech companies in Silicon Valley. Kenneth Folk, a meditation trainer in San Francisco, shows that companies are investing in meditation due to its importance in the tech industry. Therefore by combining technology that plays a significant role in our life with meditation based on the eastern Asian faith, the tech engineers seek to enhance themselves and productivity for the organization. The passage also uses Bill Duane, an employee who advocates for meditation to ensure that emotion does not make us fail in making rational decisions. Bill, who has attended meditation classes by Meng, has credited meditation for assisting him to go through hard times after his father’s eventual death. It is through meditation that Duane’s productivity got enhanced without using hippies though he later left the job to assist other employees in meditation.

The passage also shows us the importance of meditation following studies by Boston University that it helps in the management of stress. Furthermore, research shows that meditation training help in rational responses to emotional scenarios. Executive function and working memory are also proven to get improvements with meditation. Also, there seems to be increasingly resistant to flu among meditators. Fast-changing stimuli affect concentration and thus the importance of mediation, which increases the concentration in such situations. Among the engineers in the tech industry, emotional intelligence, and understanding of workmate’s motivation seem to be limited. Still, with meditation, all these can be improved, thus providing a conducive working environment. It is through Meng a google employee from Singapore that Googlers have appreciated the importance of meditation in the industry. Meditation is also essential in reducing employee turnover.

The second passage conveys the theme of mindfulness through Meng’s and Gordhamer’s meditation and mindfulness training. Gordhamer using uncontrollable twitter personal experience, show how mindfulness can help in incorporating technology in our lives. The wisdom 2.0 event is used to show how technological advancement and communication may take over our lives if they do not get handled appropriately. Other people that play a critical role in mindfulness events in Silicon Valley include Kenneth Folk, Vincent, Emily Horn, Jack Cornfield, and Evan Williams. The passage also conveys the theme of mindfulness using talks by twitter co-founder about mindfulness workshops. Wisdom 2.0 event with a light basis of Buddhism promotes mindfulness.

It is also worth noting that tech companies get used to convey the message in the first and second themes in the passages. Facebook and Twitter are highly used in the second passage, and Googlers got used in the first passage. The second theme conveys the theme of mindfulness using practical compassion examples by Facebook and Twitter. It is through mindfulness that people are empathetic about each other. According to Bejar, a guest at wisdom 2.0 event mindfulness allows for kindness in the society and thus betterment of the world at large. Just like the first passage, practical examples get used to prove the usefulness of compassion. Using Facebook offensive content reporting, Bejar shows how compassion can be used to improve the reporting by maximizing on Facebook user’s emotions. Other practical examples involved the use of personalized messages while requesting people to pull down offensive posts related to certain celebrities in India.

The theme also has other similarities in that both use people’s experiences to show the effect that mindfulness and meditation have. The first passage uses Duane’s experience of losing his father to show the importance of meditation. The second passage shows the journey of Folk from being a drug addict to becoming a reformed man due to mindfulness training in a Burmese monastery. Though the process is not simple since it has severe depression episodes, it finally leads to enlightenment. Also, just like in the first theme where Duane shared his experience with other employees in different organizations, and in the second passage, Folk shares his experience in a web forum known as dharma Overground to advocate for enlightenment. Some of the forms of mindfulness also get shared through social media apps. The meeting between Meng and Duane in the first passage was helpful, and the same case Folk meeting with Nosek plays a significant impact in Nosek meditations

Therefore there are substantial similarities in the mindfulness and meditation themes supported by search inside yourself and wisdom 2.0 events, respectively, as discussed above. Thus one can be enlightened by not judging the situation but taking every situation as okay. Therefore meditation and mindfulness lead to the enlightenment of employees in the tech industry, thus providing a conducive working environment that fosters productivity. The enlightened individual will mean that people have peace of mind, are kind and empathetic to one another, which in turn will make the world a better place for everyone.