Category Archives: Opinion

Opinion, startups

No, You Don’t Need Founder Mode, You Just Need to Hire Well

The Critical Role of Missionaries and Mercenaries in Scaling Beyond Founder Dependence


In the world of startups, the “Founder Mode” concept has sparked considerable debate. This leadership style, where founders are deeply involved in day-to-day operations, is often hailed as a crucial ingredient for success. However, as startups evolve into more complex enterprises, the suitability of Founder Mode comes into question. This essay delves into the intricacies of Founder Mode, contrasting its benefits in the early stages of a company with its limitations as the organization grows, and explores alternative strategies that may better suit mature companies.

“Founder Mode” is a term popularized by Paul Graham, describing a leadership approach where founders maintain direct control over daily operations. Proponents like Airbnb’s founder and CEO Brian Chesky argue that this hands-on involvement is essential for startup success, fearing that reliance on professional managers might dilute the company’s core values and impede long-term achievements. 

As a four-time startup founder deeply committed to the hands-on approach, I firmly believe in the necessity of direct involvement in the early stages of a company’s journey. Early-stage startups do need a founder who interacts with the teams directly. However, this management style is not scalable for more mature companies. Companies mature like Airbnb should explore alternative strategies for growth. 

Before I delve into my argument, let’s start with the facts: Nobody disputes that when companies grow, more people must be brought in to run them. AI might change the slope of this equation, but directionally, this will stay true for the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, founders decide who to hire, especially in the early days. They have a choice between hiring Missionaries and Mercenaries. Missionaries fully subscribe to companies’ missions, will endure the uncertainty of starting a business, and will stick around longer than regular employees. Sometimes, they are even willing to accept lower pay, which is usually what early-stage companies can afford. However, Missionaries are rare because there might not be enough people who genuinely believe in your mission to support it as it grows. 

Therefore, as founders scale companies, they will need to rely more and more on the second type of employee, Mercenaries. Mercenaries are incentive-driven individuals who join companies looking at what they will get from it, usually financially. Because founders are hiring fewer employees who are naturally aligned with the company’s mission, they will need to devote more energy to maintaining the company culture as they scale. The problem is that typically, early-stage companies don’t have the bandwidth to invest in their culture, though, and they see an evident erosion on that front.

When a company’s culture begins to falter, it has a ripple effect across various aspects of the company. Employees who are inspired by the company’s mission are the ones who put in the extra effort, think about the company even outside of work hours, and go above and beyond to contribute to the company’s success. However, when the mission loses its strength, employees’ performance tends to suffer, especially when faced with complex challenges. This decline in individual performance can spread like a contagion if not addressed promptly, affecting other employees, including Missionaries, who may become disheartened and leave, further exacerbating the decay of the company’s culture. 

Founders should act to mitigate the natural process of company culture deterioration when a lower proportion of Missionaries are in the company. If there is no way to avoid bringing in non-Missionaries, companies should make sure that the employees they hire are legit Mercenaries. However, as Chesky and Graham claim (even without saying that way), hiring the right Mercenaries is easier said than done. It’s hard because companies fail to create proper alignment between the employees’ goals and the company, as I’ll explain later.

If you look at that angle, Founder Mode applied to later-stage companies is nothing but a way to fix the low performance driven by company culture degradation. It would be much better for founders to look for structural ways to fix the root cause of the low performance: culture dilution. 

As we navigate the scaling challenges, it’s crucial to understand that simply increasing numbers isn’t enough—how to grow matters just as much. The shift from early reliance on Missionaries to a balanced integration of well-aligned Mercenaries is not just a hiring strategy but a vital pivot to sustain companies’ core values during expansion. This strategic evolution in hiring practices is essential to maintain the integrity of the company’s mission and ensure the company culture thrives regardless of size.

So, what hiring strategy should companies adopt? Early-stage companies should over-index on hiring Missionaries to defend the culture. Tip: Many former founders are Missionaries by nature, plus they bring a holistic view of businesses since they typically understand other founders’ unique challenges. Founders in later-stage companies should set up generous compensation packages tied to concrete performance goals to force alignment throughout the company. 

In conclusion, it’s evident that the responsibilities of founders dramatically transform as their companies mature. This evolution requires a shift from hands-on tasks to strategic leadership, emphasizing the development of a resilient culture and a well-aligned team. By mastering this transition, founders can ensure their companies not only survive but thrive in competitive environments. The future of any company depends significantly on the founder’s ability to foster an adaptable, enduring culture and ensure alignment across all levels of the organization. To keep companies thriving long-term, founders should take responsibility for maintaining their company culture flourishing and align the team with the company’s success through any means necessary: purpose or greed.

Standard
Opinion

Social Media Have Failed Us: It’s time to be Anti-Social

Peter Steiner’s cartoon, as published in The New Yorker

With the advent of the internet, there was a belief that it would be a powerful tool for making new friends. In the early days of the internet, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and other platforms provided an opportunity to connect with people from all corners of the world and learn about different cultures. The problem is that the internet was conceived with anonymity at its core, so we could not know who we were talking to. As a (back then) famous cartoon by Peter Steiner says: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”

Over time, the internet has evolved significantly, and the way we communicate and interact with others has changed. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become the norm for staying in touch with friends and family, as well as making new connections. But they were still allowing anonymous users. The results? Tons of fake profiles, stalking, harassment, and trolling.

Facebook attempted to address this problem by implementing a real-name policy for user profiles. The idea was to make the platform safer, but in practice, it did not work, as evidenced by the proliferation of misinformation campaigns on the platform.

Despite the prevalence of fake users, trolls, stalking, and other problems, people continue to use social networks to find new friends and maintain existing relationships. This is largely because there are no viable alternatives available, forcing people to compromise their privacy and expose themselves to intrusive advertisers. Here’s the deal: Social media sold to us that they were connecting people, helping us make friends and stay in touch with our friends. But that’s a farce.

The truth is that social media companies convinced us to post publicly about ourselves, promising us that our friends would see what we’ve been doing and engage with our posts. This is such unnatural behavior. Would you broadcast in real life about the dish you ate? Or about the workout you did? Aside from narcissists, a regular person has no need to brag about mundane things. Now, influencers and brands do want to reach prospects and customers. Facebook and others might’ve started as Social Networks, but they morphed into Social Media companies. Emphasis on Media.

Do you see where I’m getting here? By pretending to still be social networks (or at least not being transparent they are media companies) those companies are in fact hiding their real agenda. They have successfully tricked us into becoming broadcasters, so we create enough organic posts to dilute the ads they sell. Basically, they normalized this weird behavior of broadcasting our private lives so that they could sell more ads. And by making this habit of oversharing mainstream, they also grabbed tons of data from us, which they passed to advertisers so they could sell more ads.

How many times have you posted something legit: like your kid’s graduation, and not many people engaged? Maybe it’s because they don’t care. Or, maybe, just maybe, is because they didn’t see your post at all because your post got scrambled into a torrent of garbage ads.

It’s time to be anti-social. It’s time for us to stop pretending that the pros of the current model of social media outweigh the cons. Teen depression, election influence, radicalization. The list of externalities from social media is immense, and the problems they cause to our society are profound.

Meta anticipated this trend and hedged their business by acquiring WhatsApp years ago. Zuckerberg is a visionary and realized that the days of social networking are ending. As he said in 2019: it’s a switch from the town square to a more private “living room”. The problem is that Meta shouldn’t be the one guiding this change. They have too much at stake to drive anything meaningful.

To solve for making new friends, what we need is a brand new model, a tool to help us find new people with shared interests with us. It’s more like dating apps than social media. Once we find those people, we can engage in private conversations using whatever service we want to.

We still have the problem of maintaining friendships. I bet you lost contact with good friends. I, for one, have so many friends I lost contact with, people I love and care about much. I moved countries, there’s the time zone difference, work, and taking care of kids. Ultimately, life got in the way, and I couldn’t keep those friendships alive.

So here’s my concept: Friend Relationship Management (FRM). Simply put, FRM will create prompts to prevent your friendships from going stale. It would provide alerts and nudges to promote conversation starters with your friends, from things you both like. It would suggest activities you could do together. Again, you would be in charge of picking the communication service you want to use to talk to your friend. Maybe you want to call them, who cares.

I’m considering building this company. Should I? Is this a stupid idea? Let me know your thoughts! Also, let me know if you want to get involved!

Update: I AM starting a business around this concept. It’s called Grape and you can join our waitlist here!

Standard
Opinion

We need to protect content creators against ChatGPT

It’s a battle for our creativity. We will lose if we don’t update internet’s default business model.

The dirty little secret of Big Tech is that they’ve built their empires on the backs of small businesses and individuals, who invest their time and money in giving away the content that ultimately fuels these platforms.

Take Google, for instance. Of course, Google delivers a lot of value to users. Because it’s the de facto global data repository, every content creator must be in Google. Here we have a classic network effect in play: users rely on Google because it has all the content, and new content providers join Google because all users are there.

Google makes most of its money by selling ads on search result pages, and it’s not exactly incentivized to give users a quick and precise answer to their queries. They’d rather inundate users with a barrage of results and hope they’ll click on as many paid ads as possible. It’s a conflict of interest, plain and simple.

Now let’s look at the distant second search engine: Bing, from Microsoft. It basically copies Google — from the product to the business model. Nothing weird in it — as even Google copied its sponsored search ads model from another company. However, Microsoft’s Bing is finally bringing something new to the table. After investing in OpenAI, they’re integrating ChatGPT into their search engine to provide users with a single answer, cutting down on the endless clicking and scrolling that Google forces on its users.

Google and the original Bing might have been exploiting content creators all these years, but at least those creators could get some visitors from time to time. And with those visitors, creators could make some money (by selling stuff, subscriptions, etc). But now, with Bing generating a text response by repurposing content from millions of sources, how will creators get paid? Bing shows the sources of the text, but frankly, who will click on a citation? Microsoft should pay creators who provided the content OpenAI used to generate results. It’s that simple.

Maybe it will take years, maybe a whole generation, but I’m positive that without a new business model that values content creators, we will get to a point where there will be no original content anymore. AI will be creating content based on AI content. Are we prepared to give up our creativity to machines? I, for one, am not.

We have been having nightmares about SkyNet and robots annihilating humans. We’ve been wrong all these years. They are coming for our souls, not our bodies.

Standard
Opinion

Ethics and Game Design: Are They Like Oil And Water?

Can the gaming industry grow and prosper without compromising ethics?

I had the opportunity to attend a very interesting roundtable at GDC 2018 presented by IGDA. The event was called Professional Ethics for Game Designers and was hosted by Sande Chen, Writers Guild Award and Grammy-nominated Writer and Game Designer (you should check out her interesting review of the event, by the way).

The roundtable beckoned readers to voice an opinion “as to whether or not game designers need a professional code of ethics much like the Hippocratic oath for doctors.” Here is the event description:

“With gaming disorder a mental health concern, do game designers have an obligation to refrain what would be considered ‘exploitative design,’ that is, game design that takes advantage of player addictions and/or mental defects?”

I expected to leave that event with some sort of consensus. What I really wanted was to see a core of game designers starting a movement that could culminate with a positive change in the industry. After all, we’ve seen similar movements on adjacent industries such as Social Media, where industry luminaries and even former Facebook executives complained about the addictive nature of social media (even implicating themselves). We’ve also seen organizations such as the Center for Humane Technology which was created to demonstrate how this technology could be used for good.

[Read our article about Social Media and Depression]

However, it seems that the gaming industry hasn’t reached that stage of enlightenment yet. Sadly, the roundtable ended with no consensus. What we saw instead was gamers split into three groups, which I have categorized:

  1. The Concerned: Game designers very concerned with the wellbeing of players, and with addiction and its consequences.
  2. The Skeptics: Those that were refusing to see the danger that games could cause. They attempted to blur the lines between an engaging experience with an addictive one.
  3. The Pragmatists: Those who took a more profit-driven focus. This group believes that exploiting addictions and vulnerabilities is the nature of the industry, and that those who refuse to do so will be less competitive.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

What I realized after leaving the event is that the industry is facing what is called a Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is a psychological experiment that tests self-interest. Basically, if two criminals betray each other, they each receive two years in prison. If one betrays the other, the betrayer walks free while the betrayed gets the maximum sentence of three years. If they cooperate, they each receive only one year on lesser charges. The criminals must make this decision without any knowledge of what the other will do.

Game designers seem to be faced with a similar dilemma, and few are willing to cooperate. They want to betray each other (and their consumers by proxy) by making their games more addictive than their competitors’. The harsh consequence they would receive by the betrayal of their competitor would be loss of revenue or even their company’s economic viabilities. Alternatively, game designers could cooperate and do what’s in the best interest of everyone involved.

Choosing to betray one another and continuing to design games to be more and more addictive can lead to very frightening consequences (such as the kid who had a seizure in China after playing the mobile game, Honour of Kings, for 40 straight hours). If something like that becomes the norm, it is likely that there will eventually be social pressure for the government to step in. The outcome could be harsh limits imposed by laws, which could mean compliance costs that will only benefit large corporations that can absorb those costs.

Professor Ian Schreiber, from Rochester, NY, talks about these potential government limitations, mentioning that gridlocked US politicians looking to score easy political points with their constituents could do so by regulating loot boxes (we will talk more about them below). “It is an easy bipartisan political win that’s almost sure to happen in the near future,” says Schreiber. He pointed out that the gaming industry must work on self-regulation, and take a proactive role to stop psychological exploitation of users before it’s too late. Using the Honour of Kings case again, the Chinese government stepped in by setting a strict 1-hour-a-day limit on gaming for kids 12 years old and younger.

But Pragmatists and Skeptics don’t see it this way, so they don’t see the need to self-regulate. They tend to view it as a simple supply and demand scenario, firmly believing that if they don’t offer this addictive service, someone else will.

It’s really no different than when criminals justify their actions by claiming that they hold no personal responsibility for providing a service that people demand. You hear this over and over in movies, usually when a criminal is caught by the good guy and justifies his actions by claiming he is just one among many, a cog in the machine. “If I don’t sell, some other drug dealer will. People are looking for this anyway.”

In real life, many famous gangsters used similar lines. Otto Berman, an accountant for the mafia in the 1930s coined the phrase “Nothing personal, it’s just business”. By ignoring the wellbeing of its players, aren’t game designers ultimately subscribing to this idea as well?

Or maybe, Pragmatist game designers prefer a quote from another mobster from the 1930’s called Lucky Luciano (he ordered Berman’s death, by the way). His phrase was “There’s no such thing as good money or bad money.There’s just money.”

Personally, I think it’s really hard for game designers to argue that they’re not only in it for profit, especially when you consider another topic we discussed at the roundtable: video games and gambling. It turns out that there are a lot of disturbing similarities between the two.

Loot boxes and gambling

Take for example loot boxes. For those who don’t know what loot boxes are, they are treasure chests with random items. Players do not know what’s in loot boxes, and the chances of finding valuable items inside them are very low. Players can buy more loot boxes with real money, and are incentivized to do so, with the promise of huge payoffs, just like in casinos. The difference is that, with technology, game designers can actually personalize the payoffs depending on the individual player’s appetite for risk and reward, maximize their attractiveness. As Robert de Niro’s character in the movie, Casino, says: “In the casino, the cardinal rule is to keep them playing and to keep them coming back. The longer they play, the more they lose, and in the end, we get it all.”

Some countries, such as Belgium, are already classifying loot boxes as gambling. In the UK, regulators admitted that “the line between video gaming and gambling is becoming increasingly blurred”, but have not made any moves to classify loot boxes as gambling. Here in the US, some regulators are increasing the scrutiny over loot boxes, but the practice is still permitted. It doesn’t help that ESRB, the self-regulatory organization founded by gaming companies, considers loot boxes to be no different than any other paid content, refusing to classify it as gambling. For me, ESRB is just another Skeptic, and is being willingly blind to the negative effects this feature could have on children.

To add to the pile of evidence that game mechanics are inspired by gambling, Consider that video game companies use the term “whale” to define a user who spends lots of money on virtual items. The same term is used for casino players who bet (and lose) great sums. And, like in casinos, game companies focus their marketing efforts to extract the most from those whales.

And like gambling, video games can be extremely addictive. But many Skeptics tend to use misleading language to convolute the argument and blur the line between what is compelling and what is addicting. For example, Aaron Marshall, a video game designer from LA summarizes how Skeptics think: “Video games are akin to most legal products and pastimes today. They can be responsibly consumed, or they can be abused. We do not condemn books because an avid reader is spending an irresponsible amount of time reading fiction novels. Why should video games be singled out when a player is playing too much?”

His point is valid, but I would argue that his conclusion is false. If someone reads so much that her life is affected, that person should seek “rehab,” just like any other addiction. In fact, there are rehabilitation facilities for digital addiction. But the reality is that children don’t spend that much time reading — less than 30 minutes a day. However, they do spend many hours per day on screens. According to Common Sense Media, even kids as young as 0 to 8 years spend over 2 hours a day on screens. According to another study from Common Sense media, for tweens (8–12 years old), this time triples to almost 6 hours a day on average. Teenagers (13–18 years old) spend an astonishing 9 hours per day interacting with screens.

However, it turns out that there is a scientifically measurable difference between a desire to play a video game, and an addiction to video games. With a focus on internet games, the North American Psychiatric Association (APA) has defined this addiction as Internet Gaming Disorder. It is disturbingly similar to gambling addiction (which is the only recognized addiction besides substance addiction). It basically states that a person is addicted to gaming if it interferes with other aspects of their lives and the pursuit of their goals.

Game Addiction and Cigarette Addiction

No discussion of addiction would be complete without mentioning tobacco, and some Pragmatists are not even embarrassed to make the connection between gaming and tobacco. Take for instance how this game publisher shamelessly recommends the use of celebrity endorsements: “For generations, celebrity power has been used to sell everything from soda and cigarettes”.

But there were also Concerned participants who made the same connection between gaming and smoking, specifically pointing to how some gaming companies employ similar practices used by the tobacco industry in the past. And gaming isn’t the only industry that is faced with these issues, nor is it the only industry where people are concerned with the effect that these tactics are having on children. For example, at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff was interviewed and voiced his concerns. Later on, he made the following statement via Twitter:

But again, we see the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Do game designers betray each other in a never ending cycle, continuing to make video games more and more addictive in an effort to stay ahead of the curve? Or will we eventually see an era where the industry cooperates to create better, safer games? The biggest question is whether or not game designers would be willing to potentially lose some profit in order to self-regulate.

Professor Schreiber summarized this dilemma well, saying: “If the goal of game designers is to maximize the revenue a game brings, creating addictive experiences might be required”. He added, saying, “Trying to ethically monetize a game might impact the company’s profits.”.

Solving the Dilemma

But what if there were a way for Concerned game designers to create non-addictive experiences, without abandoning the goal of maximizing monetary profit? Well, there is. Companies should be more transparent with users (or parents of users) and enable them to set controls controls such as screen time. While users get the tools to effectively curb their digital addiction, game designers are incentivized to implement the feature, since they can differentiate their product from competitors and potentially charge a for the feature. It’s truly a win for everyone involved.

Standard
Opinion

Why Parents Should Pay Attention to Children’s Digital Consumption

Apply the same attention to children’s diets: curb excess and mind quality

In 2015, a report by Common Sense Media found that teenagers are spending an average of nine hours per day on social media. It also found that tweens – aged between eight and twelve years old – averaged six hours per day. Now, two years later, a new report by Common Sense Media shows that for children eight years and younger, the amount of time spent on digital media has tripled from 15 minutes a day in 2013 to 48 minutes per day in 2017. With school, extracurricular activities, family time, and sleep, it’s hard to even fathom how kids are finding enough hours in the day for this amount of digital media consumption.

In light of these statistics, researchers have begun to ask the question, “how is this affecting children?” What they’ve found is that too much digital media use, just like eating too much junk food, can have adverse effects.

For example, recent studies have found that even the mere presence of a digital device (such as a smartphone) can suck concentration and disrupt cognitive function whether the device is on or off. For example, if a child is taking a test and their smartphone is turned on airplane mode and tucked away in their backpack below their desk, their concentration and cognitive function may still be affected by its proximity. While the study did not measure test scores among school children with smartphones present, we can assume that disrupted attention and cognitive function most likely has a negative effect on test scores and schoolwork in general.

Another study, conducted at Stanford University, tested media multitasking. Media multitasking has widely been believed to be a practical (and maybe even a beneficial) skill because many of us tend to move quickly between media; for example, writing a report for work, answering a chat from a coworker, and handling a sales call. This idea of media multitasking as a strengthening skill is mirrored by children and teens, many of who believe that watching TV, texting, or interacting with social media has no effect on their ability to focus and do well on their homework. However, the study found that heavy media multitaskers had a much higher difficulty allocating their attention to specific tasks, switching tasks, and identifying key elements between tasks.

While the cognitive and attention aspects of media use are certainly worthy of consideration, one of the biggest concerns about children and teens’ well-being regarding social media consumption has to do with their mental state. A recent study conducted by economists at the University of Sheffield found that social media use among children makes them less happy in nearly all aspects of their lives. Even spending just one hour a day on social media has the chance of reducing a child’s feeling of overall happiness in the areas of schoolwork, the school they attend, their appearance, their family, and their life in general by 14%. However, they did find that social media tends to make children, on average, feel happier about their friendships.

But with all we know now about the adverse effects of digital media use among children and teens, there comes an obligation to do something about it. Part of that obligation, according to England’s Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, should belong to the social media companies themselves. After all, social media is designed to capture attention and ensure that users are engaging with these networks as much as possible. While this may be beneficial for social media networks, it is not necessarily beneficial for the people who are using them.

In an article in The Guardian, Longfield gave an example of the Snapstreak feature on Snapchat to demonstrate the absorbing nature of social media platforms. Snapchat users can create a “streak” when they share photos between friends for three consecutive days. If one person in the streak misses their turn, the streak is destroyed. This creates a kind of social pressure to continue interacting with the app. While it can be fun for friends, it can also be argued that the feature is inconsiderate of users’ time.

But Longfield also stresses that it is not only the responsibility of the social media networks to protect children from digital media overuse; parents must also be proactive in helping their children develop healthy habits when it comes to social media, just like they should be proactive in outlining a healthy diet for their children.

Modeling the 5-a-day campaign for healthy eating in England, which provides guidelines for balanced meals, Longfield has recently initiated a digital 5-a-day campaign that seeks to help parents teach their children and teenagers how to have a healthy online presence, balanced with a healthy life offline as well. These are the five proposed tenets:

1. Connect: Message, have fun and play with friends and family both online and offline.
2. Be active: Take some time off and get active – movement helps boost emotional well-being.
3. Get creative: Don’t just browse the internet but use digital tools to create content, to build new skills and discover new passions.
4. Give to others: Be positive online, report bad content and help others to balance their own 5-a-day.
5. Be mindful: If time online is causing stress or tiredness then take some time off and ask for help when you need it.

With the digital 5-a-day campaign, Longfield argues that children should not be entirely blocked from social media, as it is a modern fact of life. Instead, it should be moderated and used reasonably to have a well-rounded digital and non-digital social experience. To help moderate digital media consumption, parents can take advantage of parental controls to put limits on which sites their children can view, what features they can use, and when they can or cannot be online.

Longfield also suggests that parents talk to their children about the strategies that social media networks use to keep them engaged and the effects that digital media overuse can have on their development. This gives children the tools to navigate their own lives and make informed decisions.

Overall, it’s important to keep in mind that, even though we live in a world surrounded by digital media, it’s not impossible for children and teens to maintain a healthy relationship with social media and keep a balance between their offline and online life.

This post was featured first in Saferize Blog.

Standard
Opinion

Meditation Adverse Effects

I was introduced to mindfulness meditation in 2016 by my friend and business partner at Nossa Labs Flavio Rump. He has been practicing mindfulness meditation for some years and had already been to a couple of meditation retreats. I decided to give a try despite the fact that I always thought that this “whole meditation thing was a bit hocus pocus”. After been guided in a few sessions by Flavio and sometimes using apps I started to enjoy meditating. I subscribed to 10% Happier and have been using the app almost on a daily basis. I calmed myself down a bit and was able to understand that I could tackle my obstacles one by one without feeling anxious about them.

And let me tell you something: feeling less anxious is great! Being calmer gives me more room to think thoroughly about the issues and ultimately get closer to better outcomes. However, besides feeling calmer I also felt that I lost a bit of my drive, a bit of the urge I had in the past to do stuff – as if I had normalized my emotions: I don’t feel that sad anymore but also not that happy as well. I am not sure this change is due to meditation or if it is happening because I am simply getting older and more experienced (I’m now 40 years old). Anyway, I decided to research the side-effects from meditation. Turns out, some people are also studying this and I will try to summarize some of the conclusions were made about how meditation can be harmful to some people.

Mindfulness is becoming increasingly popular

Before we get to the potential negative effects meditation could give us, I would like to give some sense on how popular mindfulness has become. Below we can see the interest for Mindfulness in Google searches grew over four-fold since 2004.

 

Screen Shot 2017-06-22 at 3.18.50 PM

Google Trends for “mindfulness” since 2004.

 

There are hundreds of Apps about mindfulness and meditation available for iOS and Android. The most prominent app is Headspace – the company claims to have over 3 million users in over 150 countries and raised $30 million in their last round of financing. Other relevant players Calm.com and the already mentioned 10% Happier, which is based on the book by Dan Harris 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works.

Many companies such as Google, Ford and Target have also embraced mindfulness. According to the author David Gelles on his book Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out, meditation improves employee performance and thus increases company’s profitability.

Not only businesses have been created around meditation and mindfulness but the subject is also popular within the academia. A quick search for “meditation” in Google Scholar returns 114,000 articles, with a steady growth as you can see on the chart below.

screen-shot-2016-11-21-at-7-01-59-pm

Is mindfulness a mere hype or it is really beneficial for everyone?

Indeed, mindfulness became a mainstream movement because it has been able to help improving the lives of meditators. According to an extensive meta-analysis performed by Madhav Goyal, Sonal Singh, Erica M. S. Sibinga, and others, mindfulness meditation has moderate positive effects for reducing anxiety and depression and low effects for reducing stress and improving quality of life. After reviewing almost 19 thousand studies, they discarded 97% of them for being performed without scientific rigour. Meaning that only 47 studies were Randomized Controlled Trials, had been performed in adults, compared the the effects with a control group over a certain long period of time (Longitudinal Studies). So,  yes, mindfulness meditation is beneficial to people, albeit not as a silver-bullet as many bloggers and journalists promote.

Now, the hidden secret about meditation that almost no one talks about: Meditation can be dangerous to some people.

According to Shonin, E., Van Gordon W., & Griffiths, M. D, mindful-based interventions can be indeed harmful if practiced without proper supervision. The authors note that, although mindfulness meditation derives from Buddhist practice and has been practiced for over 2500 years, there are no dedicated regulation nor accreditation bodies to guarantee that instructors have a minimum knowledge on the subject. Basically, anyone can claim to be a meditation teacher and incorrectly guide others. What to say about meditation apps then? If instructors can teach mindfulness in a wrong way, meditation apps can be risky as they offer a completely unsupervised practice.

Other authors and researchers also studied possible adverse effects from meditation and mindfulness. According to Deane Shapiro from the University of California Irvine, almost 2/3rd of people that went to a meditation retreat reported at least one negative effect from meditation and some even mentioned serious adverse effects such as panic attacks, depression and anxiety. Important note: this study was performed on a very small sample (N=27) . However, at Just Neurons we still believe that even if only a few people reported suffering after meditation, this is already enough to be concerned about the dangerous aspects of meditations.

There are small signs of more critical voices becoming more mainstream. Psychologists Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm have written the book The Buddha Pill, where they talk about the lack of research about the potential adverse effects meditation can cause.

According to research, what are the most common negative side effects from meditation?

There is very little data on how frequent adverse effects occur, however, these are the most common negative effects people can get from meditating:

  • Feelings of depression, including
    • Decreased life motivation/boredom
    • Increased negativity/self-judgment
  • Feelings of depersonalization and derealization, including
    • Autoscopy
    • Double vision
    • Grandiosity/elation
  • Feelings of anxiety, including
    • Panic and/or tension
  • Feelings of dissociation, including
    • Disorientation/confusion
  • Feelings of meditation “addiction”
  • Reports of pain
  • Hallucinations

Why is there so little research about the negative side effects?

There are many more scientific papers that show benefits of meditation than ones that talk about negative effects. Here are the main reasons we believe this is the case

  • Researchers have a bias to design their experiments in order to prove their hypotheses, as we presented in our inaugural article article.
  • Patients themselves don’t want to ‘disappoint’ the caring researchers and may chose to under-report any negative side effects. See Demand Characteristics and Observer Expectancy Effect for more.

We believe human beings are always looking for a way to become happier. There is something about meditation ‘intuitively’ feels right. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could reduce our suffering by sitting and observing our breath for a few minutes a day? Since we all want to believe this to be true, we end up conducting studies to validate our intuition. It is rather uncomfortable to talk about negative effects to a tool that seems to provide so much relief. Unfortunately, this bias affects everyone, including esteemed researchers.

There’s no shame in giving up on meditation if it does not make you feel well.

Some people tend to feel somehow “forced” to meditate since mindfulness is so mainstream now, with so many books, articles and people talking about it. Some people even stick with meditation even not feeling well, as if they are not feeling well while meditating because they are doing something wrong and they should meditate even more to finally get better. No one should force herself to meditate if doing so increases suffering instead of reducing it, which is one of buddhism’s main objectives. In fact, we should not forget that there are many paths to well-being like exercising or conducting other behavioral therapies.

So, should we meditate or not?

Overall, I still feel like meditation is an invaluable tool to be connected with yourself, see the impermanent nature of emotions and thoughts and create space between stimulus and reaction. in other words, when something difficult arises, you don’t take action that creates more harm but can choose a wise (non)action. Again, as the comprehensive meta-analysis made by Madhav Goyal and others, there are proven beneficial effects one can get from meditation.

My recommendation is to start meditating under the guidance of an experienced meditator or teacher. If you had any prior mental condition such as depression, trauma or PTSD, please avoid unsupervised meditation and look for some well-known meditation teacher or therapist to guide you. If you want to give a try on one of the meditation apps, start with around 10 minutes a day and keep practicing only if you are still feeling well. Remember: meditation is not a panacea and is not indicated for everyone.

 

Standard
Opinion

What Brazil and US elections had in common – Facebook’s role

I moved to America at the end of 2014 to pursue happiness, not just for me but mostly for my family. Since 2003 I’ve been seeing someone I don’t support being elected for presidency in Brazil. In fact, I just realized that in my whole life just twice I voted for someone that got elected president. Being so different from the majority of the population is something hard to cope with.

My wife and I decided to leave Brazil as, after over a decade of bad policies in all areas we realized that things were not changing at a pace that could justify us to stay. Since we were kids we were “thought” that Brazil was the country of the future, like a sleeping giant that one day would wake up for its grandiosity. We thought that in 2012 that future was finally happening. Brazil’s GDP grew by over 7% that year, 30 million people got out of poverty as the country had a massive influx of people in the workforce and was surfing the wave of commodities, plus a massive oil reserve was found. The international recognition came as Brazil was picked to be the host of two major global events (summer Olympics and Soccer World Cup). The Economist cover featured the Christ Redeemer statue flying as a rocket. But a mere couple of years later the rocket was landing forcefully and everyone was bracing for impact.

This frustration proved to be too hard for me and my wife and we concluded that Brazil would never progress at a pace that anyone of my family could ever benefit from. As my great grandfather did while moving from Italy to Brazil back in the early nineteen hundreds, I realized I have one life to live and I don’t want to waste it in a country where people don’t agree with the way I think and don’t appreciate my contributions. I’m tired to do my best and see that it’s never enough to make a change. I voted, I paid huge taxes, all for nothing. I want to offer a brighter future to my kids and an environment where they can prosper and be free to pursue their passions and dreams. That’s my duty as a responsible parent.

Don’t get me wrong. I miss Brazil, I miss my friends and the stuff I know and I’m comfortable with. It’s sad that my Brazilian culture will not be fully passed on to my kids and will die with me. My references are different from yours. You know that joke you’ve been hearing since you were a kid? My jokes are all from the TV shows, folklore, lullabies I was exposed to when I was little in Brazil. My sense of humor is quite different from yours and I start seeing this with my daughters and their jokes. They are absorbing America’s culture and will have a different background than mine. Hopefully, I’ll be able to inject a bit of Brazilian influence but even the Portuguese language they are starting to lose.

As people who adopt children, my love for America wasn’t inherited – I picked America because I wanted to. Even though I’m also European and could move to Europe I believe in the American Dream. Despite all the difficulties, America is the place my wife and I chose to work, prosper, raise our kids. Is the place we want to get old and die. We had and have other opportunities but we left our comfort zone and moved to America because we believe this is the best place to live.

Have been experiencing frustration with presidential elections for almost all my life, I want to calm down my friends that are worried about Trump’s election. Guys, America is the best place on earth – has solid institutions, bright minds and an ever-boosting economy. America is much bigger than any person that may take the office. We will thrive. Always. We might zig-zag a bit but I truly believe we will always move forward.

My friends didn’t expect that Hillary wouldn’t be elected. Here in San Francisco Bay Are where I live, almost everyone is Democrat, supported Hillary and criticized Trump’s lack of concrete program and his personal behavior towards women and minorities.

That being said, even though almost all the media and all polls also didn’t anticipate Trump’s victory, I still think the surprise my friends felt was amplified by Facebook. Facebook’s immense scale makes us think that our activities inside its platform replicate our real lives but in reality, our virtual relations are dictated by how Facebook works.

You see, we all tend to live and have relationships with people that think like us. That’s why, if we can, we move to a neighborhood or city where we feel comfortable living close to people that are also like us. This is a conscious decision we make. In Facebook, we know that we invite friends to be part of our network and the posts they write are theirs. Again, most of our friends think like us so we see posts that in general share our own beliefs.

However, Facebook morphed to become a news aggregator and after a while, our news feeds started to show all sorts of, er, news and supposedly unbiased content. So if I liked the New York Times or Techcrunch, I can see in my news feed posts these outlets write about their articles. However, on a daily basis, I also find several posts citing articles from dubious sources being liked and shared by people the same way articles from reputable outlets. Plus, advertisers can target me as an audience that likes Techcrunch to sponsor a post about anything they want. Facebook then push these dubious articles as they generate engagement and or revenue. And the cycle goes on with people believing in stories without giving any thought on its veracity.

Political campaigns explore this Facebook flaw. As people don’t want and don’t care to fact check what candidates claim, we have all sorts of untrue, biased and dubious content being shared and propagated within Facebook. People that want to believe or already do believe in what is being shared get their beliefs reaffirmed. We pick friends that are trustworthy and thus we trust what they write and talk about. Facebook’s eager to generate engagement can cause us to mistakenly think that what is presented in our news feed is also trustworthy content, endorsed by our friends and mixed with content our friends write themselves.

Another problem with Facebook is that we believe we are discussing politics by writing a post and getting likes from our friends. Sorry to inform you that Facebook was never made to foster political discussions but, again, to generate post engagements and revenue (with engagement they can sell more ads).

I saw in Brazilian’s last presidential elections the same behavior I just saw again in ours. I couldn’t find a single Facebook post with contrarian view compared to mine. With the exception of my sister who has opposite political views in Brazil and a close friend here, all Facebook posts in my news feed were containing comments that I somehow already agreed with. My sister’s newsfeed was totally different, though: all she saw were posts from friends and media outlets she agrees with.

As a result, Facebook’s algorithm is creating polarizing echo-chambers. We believe we’re talking politics on Facebook but the truth is that we just engage with people that already share our current political views. By liking and getting likes on posts with our beliefs we just reinforce what we think. We now believe that everyone we know thinks like us and when we meet anyone that thinks differently it becomes an unpleasant surprise. In our minds, as so many people think like us that it’s not possible that we could be wrong. We are not prepared to discuss with people with contrarian views anymore. We don’t respect contrarian views anymore. We’re all becoming radicals and Facebook is partially responsible for that.

It’s time for us to wake up. We need to have a better place to discuss politics than Facebook. We need to appreciate the contrarian view and understand that people usually act in good faith and share the same end goal as us. We need to agree that although we might have different views, we all look for a brighter future. We need to find a way to listen to the other side independently from Facebook likes. Ultimately, we need to respect each other’s point of view, even if we disagree. As someone who moved to America to pursue happiness, I still believe that respect and honesty are inherent qualities of the American people. I hope with Trump we don’t become more radicals and we can coexist with different opinions. I hope to have made a good choice moving to America.

I’m not alone on criticizing Facebook. Read this article from Mashable and this one from Techcrunch  about Facebooks role in the US presidential election.

Standard