I think it specifically applies to implementing standards that are known to be more difficult to implement and easily break.

I'm sorry, but this is such an extreme example. You should not overdo anything, be it meditation, gaming, playing, reading, any sport, even drugs. Drugs also give you a state of mind that, when taken to the extreme, can harm your social life and well-being. That is not a problem specifically of meditation.

You can safely do anything up to the point that it benefits you. The moment your well-being suffers, or you neglect important parts of life, like friendship, you should stop.

That's what I did. I mean, my story is quite unique in that I never knew what meditation was (or religion, to be honest) and it just fell into my lap.

I think, looking back I can safely say that it did help me address a lot of emotional trauma. I didn't exactly have a gentle upbringing and I somehow entangled myself into all those memories.

Meditation helped me to clear the air, but as you say - it blindly became a somewhat of an addiction. So I stopped and started focusing on other things. And I still have a long way to go.

20 minutes twice a day for 5 years is not at all extreme

Absolutely, and this is the fallacy with tautological arguments like "You should not overdo anything".

The real question is how much is considered "overdoing", and then the argument falls back to a common-sense fallacy (until it doesn't work)...

From the article, it sounds like the author was spending more than just 40 minutes a day on their spiritual pursuits. They also didn't describe their actual practice.

This thread seems to be full of people trying to debunk meditation as some kind of dangerous dark art.

ReactOS has nothing to do with ReactJS.

> it was just that no matter how much I tried I couldn't predict a future where I weren't constantly in agony

That's a great way to put it. I had a few depressive episodes in my life, I know that these thoughts and feelings are symptoms. The inability to feel, even the hopelessness are symptoms of the disease. Usually, I can even pinpoint the cause of the episode. But another symptom is the inability to imagine a state of mind without depression. And no matter how rational you are, it is very difficult to believe in something that you cannot imagine.

My x86-assembly has become very rusty, but couldn't it work like this, not using a branch:

(with eax being the unsigned 32-bit input word)

  xor ebx, ebx
  test al, 7
  stnz bl
  shr eax, 3
  add eax, ebx

(edit: replaced a movzx with an xor)