In a culture obsessed with optimisation, equanimity — the quality of maintaining inner balance and steadiness — is widely praised as a productivity tool. But what if its defining feature is its absolute uselessness? Psychoanalyst Michael Uebel argues that even within philosophical Buddhism and psychology, equanimity is too often treated as a means to an end, when its essence lies instead in aiming at, and achieving, absolutely nothing.

The value of practicing equanimity is widely celebrated and indeed taken for granted—for example, in ancient Greek philosophy and Buddhism, and especially in the contemporary psychologies that derive from both. But what if the facet of equanimity that most clearly reflects its essence is its absolute uselessness? Here, I want to explore the meanings of equanimity, both received and radical, in order to highlight the nonutility at its core, where nothing is aimed at, and nothing is finally achieved. It is precisely in this “nothing” that I think equanimity finds its true value.

Equanimity is one of those words that immediately evokes positivity. Who doesn’t want to be calm, cool, and collected in the face of life’s adversities and vicissitudes? Steady, imperturbable, not easily overwhelmed? Count me in. And as news events and social media storms relentlessly demand of us that we quickly, sometimes uncritically, choose a side—right or wrong, objective or subjective, rational or emotional—wouldn’t it be ever so restorative to stand above heated debates that often pull us into defending or condemning points of view held as singular Truths?

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With the flourishing of the earliest Buddhist texts (after the 1st century BCE), equanimity attains the status of a spiritual virtue rooted in insight and mindfulness.

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Consider the word equanimity. It is derived from aequus, a Latin adjective meaning level, equal, or fair. Combined with animus (soul or mind), as in the phrase aequo animo, the notion of acting “with an even mind” emerged. It wasn’t until early in the 17^th century that English speakers, in keeping with the Latin phrase, began using the term in the now obsolete sense of “fairness or justness of judgment.” Equanimity quickly came to connote keeping a cool head under pressure and, eventually, it acquired the extended sense of general balance and internal harmony, even peacefulness.

As an essential virtue, equanimity has long held a kind of hallowed place in the Western moral imagination, from the ancient Greeks until the present day. Originally a dimension of eudaimonia (often translated as flourishing or happiness), it was understood along Aristotelian lines in the context of living in accordance with virtue. We may recognize its echo in closely related Latin terms, including tranquillitas and serenitas.

Reaching back to pre-Socratic thinkers like Democritus and Greek philosophical schools, most notably Epicureanism and Stoicism, a constellation of words would give expression to a series of similar dispositions: euthymia (good mood or cheerfulness), athambia (having a mind free from fear); hesychia (stillness or silence); ataraxia (freedom from mental distress); and apatheia (undisturbed by the passions).

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The difference between the sage and the fool, in the Stoic view, is that the former accepts what comes with equanimity, while the latter, through egotistical striving, accepts only what he likes and refuses what he does not. Importantly, ataraxia was never the ultimate goal in Stoicism but a natural byproduct of commitment to virtue and living in accord with nature. While in the Epicurean view equanimity was an end in itself, the Stoic approached it as a state that arises spontaneously through virtuous action and rational management of judgment and desire.

With the flourishing of the earliest Buddhist texts (after the 1st century BCE), equanimity attains the status of a spiritual virtue rooted in insight and mindfulness. The Buddha saw it as the hallmark of liberated awareness. Equanimity involves being mindful of the worldly dhammas (phenomena) of praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, and fame and disrepute. Holding these contrasting conditions in mindful awareness, as they arise and impinge upon our lives, allows us to see the suffering issuing from attachment and avoidance. Ultimately, we may grasp the essential emptiness and impermanence of these conditions. A mind filled with equanimity, said the Buddha, is “abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility and without ill-will.”

In contemporary research psychology, the salutary aims of equanimity are identified with a multitude of positive effects. Gaëlle Desbordes and colleagues, for example, look at the psychological state of equanimity in terms of how skillfully maintaining a balanced or even-minded response to provocative stimuli, whether internal or external, negative or positive, may help us to recover from emotional or physical stress. Equanimity does this, they suggest, by more rapidly disengaging from initial emotional responses and thus affording a faster return to baseline.

Yuval Hadash and colleagues specify a new model for conceptualizing equanimity. In their view, it is best understood in terms of what they call “the decoupling model,” where desire is detached both from wanting to have or prolong a pleasant experience only because it is pleasant and from avoiding or stopping an unpleasant experience only because it is unpleasant. In other words, in the state of equanimity, the pleasantness or unpleasantness of any current or anticipated experience does not motivate desire, and, alternatively, such positive things as values, adaptive goals, and prosocial intentions may determine our wanting or not wanting the experience.

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Equanimity works by freely and spontaneously relating to all experiences, beyond those dichotomously categorized as desirable or undesirable.

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Building on the findings of the above research, Catherine Juneau and colleagues examine the application of mindful attention to both negative and positive objects, highlighting the familiar roles of non-judgment and acceptance in reducing, or de-automatizing, cognitive reactivity to internal and external stimuli. The authors go on to posit that equanimity attenuates approach/avoidance bias or motivation, that is, the direction of behavior toward positive stimuli and away from negative ones. This attenuation could, in turn, contribute, they suggest, to developing a more decentered attitude towards emotions.

This quite skeletal view of equanimity is meant only to show that the concept has a predominant history of association with actively managing attraction and repulsion, the reputed engines of our emotional world. In the hands of quantitative researchers, equanimity’s power seems little more than what simple acceptance or letting go offers. These basic elements of mindfulness, along with nonjudgment and nonreactivity, may help with emotion regulation, delaying or negating our desire to attach to what is pleasant or to resist what is unpleasant. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence for this. Framing equanimity as a kind of emotional governor, however, sells it short.  

Equanimity allows for something more profound: we apprehend the intimate reciprocality or co-existence of bipolar states like pleasure and unpleasure. Under the equanimous eye, there are no opposed or separate conditions; rather, in their mutual entailment, they are in perpetual process, shifting from one state to another. The imperative to choose between extremes is now abolished. With supreme flexibility, equanimity experiences the world beyond the narrow confines of a singular point of view.

Equanimity works by freely and spontaneously relating to all experiences, beyond those dichotomously categorized as desirable or undesirable (as if, excepting laboratory conditions, any experience truly has purity of tone). As a natural way of seeing inner and outer worlds, equanimity aims at nothing. (Natural is to be distinguished from our customary or ordinary ways of seeing.) It is like opening and then moving your eyes, not out of a sense of pointed interest but simply because you are awake. Equanimity orients us to a condition in which there is nothing to try to isolate for any purpose. Keeping your emotions around or turning away from them, all that matters is relief from the imperative to do either.

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In this way, equanimity hangs on nothing. Its purposelessness means that it is inherently choiceless, unintentional, untechnical. Of course, equanimity can be intentional; it is taught and learned as a skill cultivated, for example, in the context of mindfulness training or contemplative practice. Yet we follow steps or rules only in order to end up somewhere else. And we use methods to produce things that do not yet exist. Within the scope of equanimity, however, there is nowhere to go. It does nothing except characterize what already exists—our relation to the present in its fluid plenitude.

If we insist on calling equanimity a method, then we might point to the ways that this “method” frees us from all methods. Equanimity permits consciousness and its faculties to work together spontaneously and unimpededly through an intimacy with the world and its unfolding mysteries. Need it be stressed, however, that, in the deepest moments of intimacy, methods are not welcome or useful?

To master equanimity intentionally, in a technical manner, puts it at odds with the world. Minimally, it narrows the world, and, maximally, spoils it by utterly disenchanting it. To encounter the wondrous world, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us, is only possible when reflection does no more than “step […] back to watch,” and thereby “slacken […] the intentional threads which attach us to the world.” Intentionality blunts the capacity for wonder. When equanimity devolves into a strict method, executed without fault, it annuls surprise and the spontaneous amazement it generates. The very emptiness and unintentionality of equanimity allow for the unexpected, the uncalculated. Nothing goes uncalculated in the experimental laboratory or clinic, even if specific results are unanticipated.

Equanimity is not the object of mastery but a fugitive subject, evading pursuit driven by methodical, intentional searching. A dao, not a doctrine. Focus fades in favor of continual motion, ceaseless flight, inaugurating positions that are positionless. Consider a passage from the Aṭṭhakavagga (“Chapter of Eights”), a small collection of suttas within the earliest stratum of the Pāli Canon of Theravāda Buddhism. Here, the “priest without borders” is described, the kind of sage whose image is often reflected in Daoism and Zen Buddhism:

Not passionate, not dispassionate,

he doesn’t posit anything as “ultimate.”

He lets go of one position without taking another—

he’s not defined by what he knows.

Nor does he join a dissenting faction—

he assumes no view at all.

He’s not lured into the blind alleys

of is and is not, this world and the next—

for he lacks those commitments

that make people ponder and seize hold of teachings.

To assume “no view at all” is to elude the fixity of any view at all. This is far more than pure neutrality. The sage embodies the originative axis of existence, an imaginary center point unaffected by the rigor mortis of dogma. Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri describes the originative axis as “Life at the pivot of nothingness [that] is nothing but motion and process.” In relation to this nothingness, equanimity’s value is found. To be at the pivot, to keep to the center, is to occupy the zero point from which all process originates and flows. In this way, equanimity transcends the bipolar extremes of what is misrecognized as separate: existence and nonexistence, pleasure and pain. Nothing congeals into dualisms. Everything becomes possible.

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If equanimity did not offer reprieve from instrumentality, it would hardly be as compelling an attitude as it is.

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The zero point of equanimity represents freedom from the tension of change and stasis, process and form. The most profound dimension of acceptance, the state often synonymized with equanimity, is not its characteristic openness, but rather the free play of openness and closure it sets in motion. As Hilary Lawson reminds us, “openness is not a thing, it is infinitely dense with possibility” (p. 4). Interanimating with being, nothing, or the void points to meaning that resides in encounters with reality, not the fixed perspective. From absence, a new presence may be anticipated.

Equanimity marks the play of energies transcending the strictly measurable, the bounded, the programmatic. In its sheer intensity, it opens possibilities, and thus is truly utopic (ou ‘not’ + topos ‘place’).

Along these lines, consider the traditional Japanese house. Its basic architecture integrates opposed existential categories such as structure and flow, interior and exterior. Such houses present multiple options, with portable folding screens (byōbu) and sliding partitions (fusuma) functioning as room dividers, along with sliding exterior wall panels (shōji) serving as doors or windows. Several rooms, for instance, can be transformed into one with the removal or opening of partitions, just as shōji can be thrown back partly or completely to open up the entire house to the garden. In marked contrast to stationary walls, the built-in provisional nature of the Japanese house allows for ongoing combinations of the bounded and the boundless. Japanese houses, as loci of possible events, afford and reflect the generative subjectivity of their inhabitants. Like the self, the house is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships.

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In attempting to chase equanimity, it becomes a means to manage and close our experience of the world; we lose it as a mode of openness.

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Equanimity entails the possibility of replacing one reality with another. Elsewhere, I suggest that its essence is ceaseless questioning, the primary means through which the world presents its possibilities. Questioning is not the same thing as suspending judgment, and, against the grain of much current writing on equanimity, it is clear that nonjudgment is simply one possible dimension of the methodless process of equanimity, not its primary condition, certainly not its telos. If equanimity did not offer reprieve from instrumentality, it would hardly be as compelling an attitude as it is and historically has been. Indeed, to focus on instrumentalizing equanimity deprives it of its richness as a multifaceted approach to the world.

Equanimity is, after all, immeasurable. Perhaps another way to put that: it occupies a kind of positionless position between having everything to do with nothing and having nothing to do with everything.

However it is approached, it remains a many-sided concept. Indeed, in my own work I highlight different facets of equanimity for different audiences. For my psychotherapist colleagues and patients, for example, equanimity is basically, with caveats, what research psychology now declares it is: it reduces the frequency, intensity, and duration of negative emotions; it is associated with reduced reactivity on subjective and neurophysiological indices; it ameliorates negative valuations of emotional experiences, increasing the threshold at which the need to regulate is identified, and so on.

Defending the usefulness of equanimity, however, carries a risk: namely, evacuating its essence as the disposition calling upon us to abandon exclusive and limited viewpoints. In attempting to chase equanimity, it becomes a means to manage and close our experience of the world; we lose it as a mode of openness.

Equanimity brings us through to the raw flux of things, sweeping away wishes for something recoverable, something lasting. Instead of presence, equanimity delivers emptiness, instead of limits the unbounded, instead of bias the bland. We may commend blandness (Chinese 淡 dàn) to the extent it expresses, as it did for the ancient Chinese who acclaimed it, the inner detachment (same word: dàn) that lends the world its variety and process. A bland attitude, seeking nothing as it apprehends the flavorless, is recognizable as the potentiality prior to all distinction-making. Here, in nothing, resides a possible path for awakening to the contingency of our link to the world in its interdependent richness and shambolic flux.