Western capitalism came, saw, and co-opted, and recently two social movements have supercharged interest in meditation: the Millennial wellness fad, and the life-hacking fad. In the aughts, personal care became a kind of wan bulwark against the ravages of modern wage-drudgery, smoothie bowls and mushroom teas and Korean skin-care routines serving as balms for a generation unsure whether they would ever be able to buy a house or work fewer than 50 hours a week. “The meditation app is part of a mindfulness trend, which is part of a wellness trend,” says Ophelia Yeung, a senior research fellow at the Global Wellness Institute, who has estimated that “wellness” writ large is a $120-billion-a-year business. At the same time, intense personal betterment became an obsession of geeks and nerds, particularly in the Bay Area and cities such as New York and Austin. Any number of practices for quieting the mind, dissolving the ego, and disciplining the flesh—from psychedelics to ice bathing to fasting to journaling to giving away nearly all of your stuff—have been transformed into tools for thinking more clearly and working harder and squeezing more out of every tick of the clock... Meditation apps really do undercut the stresses of modern life. Researchers believe that they have led to large increases in the number of people meditating; data collected by the CDC show that the share of Americans who meditated tripled in just five years. Studies also show that app-based meditation seems to have many of the same effects as in-person meditation. In a randomized control trial held among students at Arizona State University, Calm spurred significant reductions in stress and sleep disturbances and improvements in mindfulness and compassion. (There are limits to these things. The app had no effect on students’ tendency to binge-drink or eat vegetables.)