Beyond Mindfulness:Hacking the Perception of Self
Hong Park
Hong travels between Asia and Europe doing academic research and business development about distractions in the digital age. He enjoys delving into scientific literature as well as esoteric teachings for self-development. He has led a mindfulness meditation retreat at Aalto University. He is currently building digital solutions to combat attention hijacking products.
The popularity of mindfulness in the western world has skyrocketed. Once an ancient technique is now a billion dollar industry. Some swear by it, some believe it’s a panacea to all their psychological woes. In this talk, the audience will hear about the origin of Mindfulness, the current narrative around Mindfulness culture, and Hong’s further exploration in Mindfulness and other Buddhist teachings.
Mindfulness is much bigger than just another coping mechanism; it is a radical way to hack the perception of self and the world around us.
Summary
- Information fatigue and shrinking attention spans in the digital age drive the widespread adoption of mindfulness to cope with constant distractions and screen switching. - Modern mindfulness stems from Buddhist roots and was scientificized through frameworks like MBSR to fit the needs of contemporary society. - The current mindfulness trend is often limited by an achievement-oriented culture that treats meditation as a simple task for immediate gratification. - True mindfulness offers a radical way to hack the perception of self and the world, moving beyond a mere coping mechanism toward a deeper evolution of consciousness. - Utilizing practical digital tools, such as website blockers and phone grayscale settings, can help recalibrate the brain for deep work and improved focus.
Article
Beyond Mindfulness: Hacking The Perception Of Self
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Hong Park Asked Whether Mindfulness Had Been Reduced To Just Another Productivity Tool
In an age of bulging inboxes, endless notifications and compulsive screen switching, mindfulness has often been sold as a soothing corrective, a ten-minute pause in an otherwise fractured day. But when Hong Park took the stage at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** on **Friday, 1 November 2019**, he argued that this popular version of mindfulness had been flattened by the very culture it sought to resist.
Park’s presentation, **Beyond Mindfulness: Hacking The Perception Of Self**, was not a dismissal of meditation’s rise in modern life. It was, instead, a challenge to go deeper. The South Korean researcher and business developer, whose work spans Asia and Europe, framed mindfulness not as a fashionable wellness ritual or a productivity accessory, but as a radical inquiry into the self, attention and the way digital life had reshaped both.
The Digital Age Has Fractured Attention
Park began with a simple line that served as both provocation and anchor: **“You are not your thoughts about yourself.”** From there, he moved quickly into the conditions that had made mindfulness feel urgently necessary.
Citing research by Gloria Mark, whose work he drew on for his own thesis, Park described a culture suffering from information fatigue, one in which attention spans had been shrinking, self-interruptions had become routine and people had been switching screens roughly every 40 seconds. The problem was not merely that modern life felt busy. It was that distraction had become structural.
This, Park suggested, had helped fuel the spread of mindfulness across workplaces, apps and wellness culture. People were overwhelmed, and mindfulness had become one of the era’s preferred coping mechanisms.
Yet coping, in his view, was not enough.
A Practice With Older, Deeper Roots
To understand what had been lost, Park retraced mindfulness to its modern Western lineage. He pointed to **Jon Kabat-Zinn**, whose development of **Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction**, or MBSR, had helped secularise and scientificise meditation for contemporary audiences.
Park credited Kabat-Zinn’s role in making mindfulness legible to the modern world, while also noting the deeper Buddhist inheritance beneath it, including the teachings of **Thich Nhat Hanh** and **Sung San**. What had become polished for mainstream consumption, he implied, emerged from traditions far less concerned with performance, optimisation or quick emotional returns.
That gap between origin and application mattered. The modern mindfulness industry had retained the language of calm while often discarding the more difficult questions the practice raised about identity, attachment and perception.
Beyond Achievement-Oriented Meditation
Park’s sharpest critique was reserved for the cultural packaging of mindfulness itself. **“The current narrative around mindfulness is married to achievement-oriented culture, like it is just another task to check off from a long to-do list,”** he said.
In that framing, meditation risked becoming one more item in the self-improvement economy, another measurable habit, another small act meant to produce immediate emotional profit. Park recognised the temptation well. **“We often expect immediate gratification after a ten-minute meditation and use it as a mantra to believe that we are automatically happier afterwards.”**
This, he argued, was a profound narrowing of what mindfulness could be. The point was not simply to feel better after a guided audio session, nor to “zen out” in order to return more efficiently to overloaded schedules. **“If we allow ourselves to deepen the understanding of mindfulness, it won't be just about zening out as a fashion or spiritual ego.”**
Instead, he proposed something more ambitious: mindfulness as a means of unsettling the fixed story of the self.
The No-Self Question
Park’s own path gave the talk its depth. He described himself as both a wellbeing entrepreneur and an academic researcher studying attention problems in the digital age, but also as someone who had pursued the inner architecture of mindfulness more seriously than wellness branding usually allowed.
He had attended ten-day Vipassana meditation retreats in Burma, he said, and had tried to return annually. He had spent time with monks and explored Buddhist communities linked to Thich Nhat Hanh and Sung San. These experiences did not lead him to present Buddhism as dogma. On the contrary, he spoke of it less as religion than as practical wisdom. **“Buddhism has been teaching me how to live this life skillfully and perhaps a skillful way to die as well.”**
That sensibility opened onto the central philosophical theme of his talk: the idea of **no-self**. Park referred to earlier conversations he had hosted under the title **Quantify Self As A Way To Understand No Self**, bringing together the language of data and self-tracking with one of Buddhism’s most elusive insights.
No easy answers emerged, he admitted. But the question itself was revealing. If digital culture encouraged people to build, display and defend increasingly elaborate versions of themselves, mindfulness at its deepest might do the opposite. It might loosen the grip of self-narrative altogether.
Mindfulness As A Radical Technology Of Perception
By the conclusion, Park had arrived at the heart of his argument. Mindfulness, he said, should not be understood merely as a buffer against overstimulation. It could be **“a radical way to hack the perception of self and the world around us.”**
The language was fitting for the setting. At Biohacker Summit 2019 in Helsinki, where human enhancement, performance and biological optimisation formed much of the surrounding conversation, Park redirected the idea of hacking inward. The system to be reprogrammed was not only the phone, the calendar or the nervous system. It was the self that believed itself solid, stressed and permanently at the centre of experience.
This was not the rhetoric of escape. It was a call to evolution, one that treated mindfulness less as sedation than as inquiry.
Practical Tools For A Distracted World
Park ended not in abstraction but with practical advice, showing that the philosophical and the everyday need not be at odds. If attention had been hijacked by design, then some of the first interventions could be technological.
He recommended **RescueTime** to track digital activity, the **SelfControl** app to block distracting websites during periods of deep work and grayscale phone settings to reduce the visual lure of notifications and help the brain return more quickly to its original task. These were modest tools, but in the context of his broader argument, they served a larger purpose: creating the conditions in which attention could stabilise long enough for deeper forms of mindfulness to emerge.
Park, who had been building digital solutions to combat attention-hijacking products, made clear that technology was not the enemy. The deeper problem was unexamined use, and the deeper opportunity lay in redesigning both habits and perception.
A Challenge To Go Further
What lingered after Park’s presentation was not a rejection of mindfulness culture, but a refusal to let it remain shallow. The practice had become ubiquitous because people were exhausted, fragmented and hungry for relief. But relief alone, he suggested, was too small an ambition.
At **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki**, Hong Park offered a more demanding vision. Mindfulness, stripped of its checklist glamour and immediate-gratification promises, could become something rarer: a disciplined way of seeing through the stories people told about themselves, and perhaps of living more skillfully within a distracted world.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki