Since beginning Hacked Man, I've sort of loved all the different apps and services that I've tried. I might not have kept on using all of them, but they've felt cool and useful and I've been impressed that clever people have built these things for me.

Today, I tested a service that I actually I disliked. This post won't be a rant or a bash. The service seems brilliant.

Which is why it's curious I dislike it so much. Introspection will follow.

Headspace is a meditation aide or a toolbox of all sorts of mindfulness exercises and practices. It's a subscription based service, which gives you courses in meditation and feeling more aware and living a healthier, happier life etc. Once you do the first 10-day course on basics, you unlock all sorts of different exercises and programs for different goals.

Oddly, this annoys me to no end. I tried one (one!) session of Headspace guided tutorial meditation and wasn't relaxed at all. Mostly I was annoyed about being talked to in a calming voice and given stuff to do when I was trying to concentrate. I think objectively the exercise was nice and well executed and the service looks great. But man, it annoys me.

There's all sorts of explanations I can think up for this. Maybe I'm a puritanical luddite, who thinks meditating without internet courses is more noble. Even more probably I'm somehow not comfortable with giving up control of my meditation in this measure to a service. For sportsing, I love Sworkit and the random training programs it creates for me. No problems there. But for meditation I somehow feel annoyed about someone trying to usurp my agency, or something.

I'm trying to give Headspace a couple of days to prove my initial annoyance wrong. It will be interesting to know if the annoyance passes or if I keep hating the service.

I know people also really love Headspace, so I'd love some feedback on this. Has anyone tried it? Have you found it useful or can you emphatize with what I'm talking about here?