A field guide to the emotional shape of meditation communities online.

MindSpace OS is a visual analysis of 2,899 meditation posts and comments on Reddit from January 2024 – June 2025. It maps the emotional vocabulary the community actually uses, the response patterns between posters and repliers, the mood weather across topics, and the way theme connections drift over time.

The surprising finding: the dominant emotion of Reddit posts is struggle wrapped around curiosity. Joy ranks 25th of 28 emotions in the GoEmotions classification. Amusement is dead last. The vocabulary that dominates is "I'm trying again."

Each post and comment is classified by Google Research's GoEmotions model (Demszky et al. 2020), which scores text against a 27-emotion taxonomy plus neutral. Embeddings from the classifier are projected to two dimensions via UMAP (McInnes et al. 2018) and clustered with a Gaussian Mixture Model into the five emotional archetypes shown on the Emotion Pulse page.

Posts were also clustered separately into seven theme families to surface how themes and their sentiment evolved over time.

Source code, processed parquet artifacts, and the analysis scripts live in the GitHub repository.

• Sample bias: posters are self-selected into the platform; they're not 'all meditators.'
• Self-selection: the people who post are not the people who don't. People who never post are invisible to this dataset.
• Time window: 18 months covers a single annual cycle; longer-period seasonal effects are not visible.
• English only.

Applying GoEmotions to Reddit meditation posts and comments means part of what we see is shaped by Reddit's audience, not specifically what meditation talk looks like in general. The thesis ("struggle wrapped around curiosity") is robust to this — both struggle words and curiosity words are well-distributed in the GoEmotions training set — but specific rankings (e.g. "joy ranks 25th of 28") should be read as relative within this training set, not as a universal claim about meditation.

• What 3,000 Reddit posts on meditation actually sound like
• Meditation communities are not as calm as they look

Reddit posts are public, but using them at scale for a public visualization requires care. Specific usernames, post URLs, and identifying details are not surfaced. If you find yourself in this data and would like your post excluded, email me with a link to the post and I'll remove it from the next data refresh.

If you reference MindSpace OS in research or writing:

Shi, M. (2026). MindSpace OS: An emotion map of online meditation
  discourse from r/meditation, 2024–2025. https://mindspaceos.com

It also rests on these prior works:

• GoEmotions — Demszky, D., Movshovitz-Attias, D., Ko, J., Cowen, A., Nemade, G., & Ravi, S. (2020). GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. arXiv:2005.00547.
• UMAP — McInnes, L., Healy, J., & Melville, J. (2018). UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction. arXiv:1802.03426.

MindSpace OS is built by Minyan Shi, founder of Minyan Labs — a one-person studio doing editorial data storytelling and AI work, based in Sydney, Australia.

Past work includes audience and data strategy for McDonald's, Pfizer, Adobe, Audi, and Didi at Digitas (Publicis Group), Didi Beijing, and Newmark Knight Frank Chicago. Won SXSW Sydney AI 2024 (Build Club × National AI Centre) and the 2023 GPT Hackathon. Harvard Business School Data Privacy and Technology certificate (2024).

Available for select 2026 consulting engagements. Subscribe to the Substack for new work. Reach out at minyanshi@proton.me.