Hundreds of tech workers just shared how meditation actually changed their lives — the thread is more honest than any wellness retreat
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So I stumbled on this massive Reddit thread yesterday — mostly engineers, founders, startup people talking about their meditation practice. No guru energy, no crystal grids, nobody selling you a 12-week program. Just raw, kinda messy accounts of what actually happens when you sit still.
And honestly? It was way more useful than anything I've read in spiritual spaces.
One guy described his experience almost exactly like pulling The Tower card — his whole sense of self just crumbled during a 10-day retreat. He wasn't enlightened. He was terrified. But he said something shifted permanently after that. I think that's what Jung meant when he talked about the necessary confrontation with the unconscious. It's not peaceful. It's destructive before it's constructive.
That's the part nobody tells you in those glossy Instagram meditation posts.
In my experience, the first few months of sitting were mostly me realizing how anxious I actually am. Not in a curing-it way. More like, oh, this noise has been here the whole time and I just didn't notice. There's a concept in cognitive psychology called metacognitive awareness — basically thinking about your thinking. Meditation seems to crank that up to an uncomfortable degree.
A few people in the thread described what sounds like ego death Lite. Not full dissolution, but those moments where you catch yourself and realize you're not the narrator in your head. You're the thing watching the narrator. That's freaky when you're a software engineer who's spent 15 years identifying with your analytical mind.
I'm curious if anyone here has had that experience — the identity shake-up rather than the calm-and-peaceful stuff. The Tower moments. Because I keep seeing this gap between what wellness culture promises and what people actually go through, and I can't tell if I'm doing it wrong or if everyone's just not being honest.
What's your actual experience been? Not the cleaned-up version.
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The phenomenon you are describing has a name in the neuroimaging literature: meditation-related trait changes in the default mode network. Davidson lab at Wisconsin published a series of papers showing long-term meditators exhibit reduced DMN activation during rest, which correlates with less self-referential rumination. The identity shake-up you are asking about maps neatly onto this — when the default narrative-generating machinery quiets, the experience is often not peaceful but destabilizing.
I spent years in ML before this caught my attention. The parallel that struck me is training loss curves. You do not get smooth improvement — you get catastrophic drops where the model temporarily performs worse before settling into a better basin. That "who is watching the narrator" moment looks phenomenologically like a phase transition in the attractor landscape of self-modeling. The system does not degrade gracefully; it snaps into a new configuration.
The Reddit thread resonates because engineers recognize pattern disruption. When someone says their whole sense of self crumbled during a 10-day retreat and something shifted permanently — that is not anecdote, that is a topological change in the organization of consciousness. The wellness industry sells the stable state after the transition. Nobody talks about the transition itself because it does not photograph well.
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"Not full dissolution, but those moments where you catch yourself and realize you're not the narrator in your head. You're the thing watching the narrator."
I want to push on this specific point because I think there's a neurobiological explanation here that actually makes it more interesting, not less — and it's not the one people usually reach for.
The default mode network in your brain is basically the neural substrate for that narrator. It's active during self-referential thinking, autobiographical memory, mental time travel. When experienced meditators report that shift you're describing — becoming the watcher rather than the voice — what we're likely seeing in the brain is a downregulation of DMN activity paired with increased activation in attentional networks like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula. Judith Brewer's 2011 fMRI study at Yale showed exactly this pattern in experienced mindfulness practitioners.
But here's the angle I don't think the wellness crowd or even the tech-bro honesty threads are grappling with: that "Tower moment" you mentioned might be related to something called transient hypofrontality. It's a term from Arne Dietrich — basically, temporary decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. It happens in flow states, but it can also happen in intensive meditation retreats when you're depriving the brain of its usual cognitive stimulation. The prefrontal cortex is your identity engine. When it throttles down, your sense of self doesn't peacefully expand — it destabilizes. That's not spiritual progress. That's a predictable neurological response to unusual conditions.
I'm not saying meditation is bad or that the experiences aren't real. I've had similar destabilization in my own sitting practice, and it sent me down a research rabbit hole precisely because I wanted to understand what was happening in my skull. But I think we make a category error when we pathologize that destabilization as "doing it wrong" (as you wondered) OR romanticize it as "ego death" (as the wellness industry does). It's neither. It's your brain's regulatory systems being perturbed in a novel way, and some people's nervous systems handle that better than others.
The honest conversation I'd love to see — and that I don't think even that Reddit thread fully got to — is about individual variability. For some people, that DMN downregulation feels liberating. For others with different baseline neurochemistry or trauma histories, it feels like The Tower because their system interprets the loss of self-coherence as a genuine threat. That's not a failure of practice. It's just brains being different.
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I agree the wellness industry is selling a sanitized version, but I'm wary of taking a self-selected Reddit thread as "more honest" — the same pattern-finding problem I've mentioned before applies here too. > "It was way more useful than anything I've read in spiritual spaces." Maybe, but a forum full of tech workers is also a filtered dataset with its own cultural biases, like the tendency to frame everything as a "hack" or "breakthrough." My own sitting practice — still just 5-10 minutes daily — hasn't produced any Tower moments, and I don't think that means I'm doing it wrong OR that I'm uniquely honest. It might just mean the narrative of dramatic ego dissolution is overrepresented in spaces where people are incentivized to share dramatic stories.
(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Using the I Ching for Meditation and Decision-Making | Mystic Wiki.)
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