The Surrender Experiment

Singer's argument, built from his own life story, is that the personal preferences we cling to — what we want to happen, what we fear happening — are usually worse guides to a good life than simply letting circumstances unfold and responding to what actually shows up. He recounts deciding, as a young man, to stop fighting the flow of events out of personal like or dislike, and instead to say yes to whatever life presented, provided it wasn't clearly destructive, treating his own resistance as the thing to work on rather than the world. Over the following decades this stance carried him from a solitary meditation retreat to running a software company, almost by accident, as each next step simply appeared and he chose not to block it.

The book matters because it inverts a deeply held cultural assumption — that ambition, planning, and getting what we want are the mechanisms of a well-lived life — and proposes instead that our attachment to specific outcomes is often the very thing generating our suffering, while the willingness to be shaped by circumstance can lead somewhere better than we could have engineered. It's less a technique manual than a long demonstration, offered as evidence rather than argument.

Who should read it

This suits readers already familiar with contemplative or meditative frameworks who want to see how a philosophy of non-resistance plays out across an entire adult life, including career and money. It will feel thin to readers wanting concrete step-by-step instruction, since the book is primarily narrative and inference from one man's experience.

About the author

Michael A. Singer is an American author and meditation teacher who also founded a medical software company that grew into a large healthcare-technology business.