The tyranny of anticipation

The brain, as Lisa Feldman Barrett shows, is a prediction machine—forever forecasting and assembling from educated guesses. It’s narrative as survival. Large language models mirror this, stringing together probable words to simulate coherence.

But meditation breaks the loop. It halts the brain’s automatic storytelling, interrupts the fiction of certainty, and calls us back to sensation—to perception before prediction. Like Wittgenstein’s call to free philosophy from the snares of language, meditation frees consciousness from the tyranny of anticipation.

The present moment, then, becomes a small rebellion: a brief freedom from the grip of what we think should come next.

This is not just liberating—it’s lighter. Prediction is heavy and effortful. Meditation offers another way of being: alert, available, and untangled. We can’t stop the forecasts, but we can notice them. And in that noticing, a space opens up.

Meditation, then, is not escape—it’s subversion. A gentle but radical refusal to let either the brain or the LLM tell us what comes next.