Why I Deleted the Waking Up App
When your conscience knows continuing to support a person, platform, or institution is out of alignment with your deepest values.
Sometimes the most difficult part of waking up is realizing that someone who taught you to see clearly is looking away from suffering you can no longer ignore.
This week, I deleted the Waking Up app.
I’ve been a Waking Up user since the beginning. I purchased the lifetime membership because I believed deeply in its mission of helping improve people’s live by seeing each moment clearly.
The app introduced me to teachers and ideas that genuinely improved my life. It helped me become more mindful, more present, and more aware.
For that, I am grateful, but gratitude does not require silence.
Recently, I watched Sam Harris discuss what is happening in Gaza and argue that it could not possibly be considered a genocide since the US bombing of Japan was not considered a genocide. Another claim he makes for this not being a genocide is that if Israel wanted to it could eradicate Gaza and everyone within it in an instant so because Israel is holding back it couldn’t possibly be considered a genocide. As I listened, I felt a knot forming in my stomach.
What disturbed me was hearing someone whose work centers on awareness, compassion, and seeing reality clearly appear unwilling to recognize the reality unfolding before the eyes of the world.
This is not an abstract political issue for me.
Every day we see images of the utter destruction in Gaza that I wish I could forget.
Entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble.
Families living among the ruins of their homes.
Children killed and maimed. Schools and hospitals destroyed.
People trying to survive amid a level of devastation that defies comprehension.
These are real human beings.
When I look at the destruction of Gaza, the mass displacement of its people, the systematic destruction of homes, schools, universities, hospitals, and critical infrastructure, the daily shootings and killings by Israeli settlers and IDF, I cannot escape the conclusion that we are witnessing a genocide.
Francesca Albanese, an Italian legal scholar and expert on human rights goes into the exact reasons why this is a genocide by the Israeli government.
Others may disagree with that conclusion. They may argue over legal definitions, historical comparisons, or political context.
Debates over technicalities and terminology are designed to be a distraction from the crimes and the suffering itself.
Jewish voices calling this a genocide
Voices within Israel are also calling it as they see it. B’Tselem, an Israeli Information Center for Human Rights states:
“Since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel has acted in a coordinated and deliberate manner to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip, committing genocide against its residents.”
On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart and author Peter Beinart discussed the Genocide and the pushback they have received for calling out the genocide as they see it.
If an entire population is being bombed, displaced, starved, and deprived of the basic conditions necessary for life, what exactly are we arguing about?
Mindfulness and compassion cannot be separated
Mindfulness teaches us to observe reality without immediately retreating into stories, justifications, or abstractions.
To see clearly. To stay present. To remain open to what is actually happening.
The deeper lesson, however, is that awareness and compassion cannot be separated.
For years, Waking Up helped me cultivate the capacity to pay attention.
Ironically, it is that very capacity that led me to leave.
Because when I pay attention to what is happening in Gaza, I do not see a difficult geopolitical puzzle that is too technical or complicated for us to understand or solve.
I see human beings.
I see traumatized children.
I see displaced and broken families.
I see suffering on a scale that should utterly horrify anyone who values human life.
And when I hear people like Sam Harris dismiss or minimize that reality, I cannot simply nod along and continue supporting them as though nothing has changed.
But there comes a moment when your conscience knows continuing to support a person, platform, or institution is out of alignment with your deepest values.
For me, that moment is now, which is why I decided to delete the Waking Up app and will not support the app moving forward.
Free Palestine!🇵🇸
Rizwan