My boyfriend says he should meditate for one hour daily. Why does this annoy me a lot? He works in tech, if that’s related. —Seeking Enlightenment

Dear Seeking,

I feel it’s fairly apparent. On the one hand, meditation is essentially the most self-­centered, delinquent behavior there’s—or one in all them, at the least. (I can consider one other intensely solitary act that some folks insist they “must” do each day to keep up a transparent head.) Its motives are often overtly egotistical: private productiveness, sleep hacking, enhanced creativity. On the opposite hand, it is usually a religious self-discipline whose highest intention, historically, is ego demise, self-­transcendence, and the eventual enlightenment of all the world. The contradictions pile up. No surprise meditation is so in style in tech, an business by which the persistent effort to extend market share typically sails beneath utopian language about connecting the world, obliterating human limitations, and making life for all beings unimaginably nice.

I’m not saying that it’s best to inform him this, in fact. If your boyfriend is way sufficient alongside his path to enlightenment (God assist him), he’ll doubtless level out that such “contradictions” are literally paradoxes, koans, the best type of religious reality. The dualistic thoughts is clouded by both/or pondering, you see, a type of binary logic that can’t but glimpse that loftier aircraft the place all 0s are concurrently 1s and obvious hypocrisies synthesize into unified Truth. I’m certain you’ve gotten this lecture earlier than, and as tiresome as it’s, he’s not solely incorrect. We waste a lot of our lives attempting to repair the frictions and logical oppositions that make our world significant within the first place. The thorn is important to the great thing about the rose. The bug is definitely a function. The flaws in our family members are inseparable, ultimately, from their strengths.

All of which is to say: Be grateful that your boyfriend just isn’t but so advanced that he eludes all inconsistencies. The solely factor extra annoying than human contra­dictions is the one who has efficiently transcended them.

Why is it that when a buddy asks to take a photograph of me it’s wonderful, however when my beloved mother does it I wish to scream? —Brat

This query would possibly truly be above my pay grade, Brat. A sure type of psychotherapist would let you know that any picture is an act of acquisition—the photographer is attempting to own, to seize, to make static—and that the shutter-happy mother embodies the archetype of the Oedipal Mother, who’s attempting to devour her personal kids. Maybe your hostility stems out of your conflation of the digital camera with the maternal gaze, the ever-present eye that threatens to obliterate your individual viewpoint. Or perhaps the violent language of images (to shoot, to seize) evokes, on some unconscious stage, the sublimated aggression of the mother-child relationship that should be repressed to keep up a viable household life.

You in all probability don’t discover these explanations very convincing. I don’t both. The reality is that I may in all probability listing dozens of actions—asking about your day, checking in about your well being, shopping for unsolicited presents—that function in response to the identical double customary: wonderful when it’s a buddy, annoying as hell when it’s a mum or dad. The drawback has nothing to do with images and each­factor to do with proximity. It’s straightforward to resent your mother exactly as a result of she is your mother, an all-purpose dispenser of affection and help whose sole goal is to be obsessively attentive to your wants and delicate to what irks you. It’s straightforward to neglect that she can also be an autonomous being who might be getting into the second half of her life and easily attempting to doc, in some small manner, the fleeting moments of happiness that appear to be passing extra rapidly yearly.