> the lack of daydreaming

I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity.

With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit.

The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.

As an avid consumer of Western Buddhism, this is pretty standard understanding. Concentration and insight, another complementary aspect of practice, like the dichotomy between sitting alone and sitting in a group, or between a steady daily practice and a deep intense retreat.

The linear story is that increased awareness of focus teaches the sitter that there are no real borders in reality, it is a seamless whole, and as the sitting continues, awareness naturally opens up to include the full current moment - seeing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions, sore knees as sore knees, twitchy neighbor as a twitchy neighbor, etc thru the myriad things all showing the way, bright and clear.

But they are mutually reinforcing partners that appear as distinct.