Mad Men and Mindfulness

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, / I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where / you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any mail / downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

—Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

The television series Mad Men (created by Matthew Weiner and aired on AMC between 2007 and 2015) forms an extended reflection on the creative process. The show compels its viewer to think about thinking, to think about how ideas and images emerge in our brains, and to think about the instrumentalization of thought in advertising and other creative sectors (such as academia). Mad Men ends mindfully when, toward the end of its seven seasons, advertising genius and wandering soul Don Draper finds himself meditating in a hippie retreat in central California, his legs in lotus, his gaze inward, breathing out into a collective "Ohm-m-m." It is 1970. Gone are the days of Sterling Cooper, the rookie Madison Avenue "mom-and-pop" firm where Don started his career over a decade

Figure 1.

Mad Men's final episode, "Person to Person" (AMC, 2015).

Figure 2.

Mad Men's final episode, "Person to Person" (AMC, 2015).

Figure 3.

Mad Men's final episode, "Person to Person" (AMC, 2015).

earlier but now has been swallowed by the corporate hallways of McCann-Erickson. And Don? Don is in his own space. Having walked out of a Miller Beer meeting a few episodes earlier, he has presumably quit advertising, drifted west across the Great Plains in a cloud of anxiety dreams and marijuana, in order to arrive, in the sense that one arrives in a mediation class: right here and right now, connecting body and mind by focusing on the act of breathing. While the meditation instructor speaks the soothing words that "the new day brings new hope," the camera zooms in on Don's blissful face against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean. Then the image cuts to Coca-Cola's iconic "Perfect Harmony" commercial bubbling up in Don's well-rested mind. The commercial (which in reality dates from 1971), shows a multicultural group of youngsters who are standing on an Italian hilltop while they sing "in perfect harmony" that they'd like to buy the world a home and a Coke and "furnish it with love." It is on this note of bottled love that Mad Men leaves its viewer and concludes its eight years of some of the most captivating television ever made (Figures 1–3).

The reader familiar with meditation will recognize what has just happened in Don's brain: It is typically those moments one lets go of thinking that the best thoughts come to mind. Half a century after Don's retreat, this insight—that creativity requires not only focus but also relaxation of mind—has also spread widely across today's creative industries, especially those of Silicon Valley, just north of Don's hippie resort (which has been pegged as the Esalen Institute in Big Sur),¹ and the place where new American Dreams are made. As Wired reports, "across the Valley, quiet contemplation is seen as the new caffeine, the fuel that allegedly unlocks productivity and creative bursts. Classes in meditation and mindfulness—paying close, nonjudgmental attention—have become staples at many of the region's most prominent companies."²

The embrace of mindfulness by the tech world is somewhat paradoxical. As Evgeny Morozov observes, "in essence we are being urged to unplug, . . . so that we can resume our usual activities with even more vigor upon returning to the land of distraction."³ This quest for mindfulness, Morozov adds, plays the same role as Buddhism: "Accept the world as it is—and simply try to find a...