Transcript
00:00:00I've been thinking about the dark side of monk mode. So monk mode has grown to huge popularity
00:00:06over the last few years as a self-improvement strategy, especially for men. Maybe on the
00:00:11internet, you have seen these videos about monk mode retreating from the world to focus on the
00:00:16three I's of introspection and isolation and improvement. And it's been talked about since
00:00:222014 was the first time I read of it on the Illimitable Man blog. He says monk mode is
00:00:29a temporary form of men going their own way by cutting yourself off from the rest of the
00:00:33world for a while so that you can fine tune your focus and calibrate your direction and
00:00:38confront yourself. You acknowledge your weaknesses and then you formulate a plan of action to deal
00:00:43with them. So the focus is on minimizing your time contribution to social obligations and junk
00:00:49activities because these consume so much of your time while yielding little to negligible
00:00:54increases toward your social market value, right? Monk mode is a serious commitment.
00:00:59that shouldn't be half-assed. You're either doing it or not. And it'll be a struggle in the beginning,
00:01:04but once you've fully engaged it, it becomes a beneficial, productive, and dare I say,
00:01:10even addictive lifestyle. So that's from the original blog post in 2014. And look, for all that I can
00:01:17criticize it, I've gone full monk mode tons of times throughout my life with really great success.
00:01:23All of 2017, all of 2018, mid-2019, basically straight through COVID until 2021 when I moved
00:01:31out to America. I've cut out alcohol for 2,000 days in the last eight years. I've done 500 days
00:01:38without caffeine, over 2,000 sessions of meditation, five years of daily gratitude journals, over 300
00:01:44sessions of yin yoga, 500 hours of Stu McGill's Big Three to try and rehab my back. This just sounds like
00:01:50the recipe for a very autistic breakfast, I'm aware. But this is all done as well in a bedroom in Newcastle
00:01:56upon Tyne in the UK, sat on my own, usually first thing in the morning, okay? I've done the monk mode
00:02:05thing, right? Those are my credentials. And almost all of the most important progress that I ever made
00:02:13was facilitated by a concentrated period like this. However, monk mode's reliable effectiveness,
00:02:22especially for men, especially for men that are prone to a bit of introspection and isolation,
00:02:27creates a huge problem. And the dark side is the final two words from that blog post that I read,
00:02:35addictive lifestyle. The problem is monk mode justifies a retreat from your life, a retreat
00:02:43from risk-taking and adventure, and repackages it as self-development. It makes you feel noble in
00:02:50isolation, but it does that so effectively that it can become hard to bring yourself back out.
00:02:57And that means if you already have a tendency to live a sheltered, routinized, unsocial life,
00:03:04you are encouraging yourself to sort of abscond further away from ever building a real-life support
00:03:13network, which is actually the thing that you need most in the long run. The reason that you're doing
00:03:19all of this work, the isolation, the introspection, the improvement, is to reintegrate to society and be
00:03:24effective. But it's so addicting that a lot of the time people who do monk mode just never reintegrate.
00:03:30And I saw this with a friend like 15 years ago who was competing to go into a bodybuilding
00:03:35competition. He already was introverted and socially shy. And then his upcoming fitness competition
00:03:41justified 8 p.m. bedtimes and militant routines and rejecting all social invites. And the competition
00:03:48came and went, but the routine didn't change. And it took years for him to re-venture out into
00:03:56some sense of normality. This is largely a personal reflection too, right? The allure of perpetually
00:04:05working on yourself is very high. And improvement is rewarding. But if you're not careful, you can spend
00:04:12the rest of your life focused on isolation, introspection and improvement at the expense of the
00:04:19actual reason that you did monk mode in the first place, which is to be able to show up in the world
00:04:26in a better way. Bill Perkins says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification.
00:04:34With monk mode, you practice in private so that you can perform in public. But private practice in the
00:04:42extreme results in no public performance. So basically, don't obsess for too long in solitude
00:04:48for personal growth, or you'll struggle to reintegrate. And the solution is, I think, periodize.
00:04:56Set a deadline for your monk mode to end. Three to six months is a really good sweet spot in my
00:05:01experience. You can do longer if you've never done it before. You can do shorter if you're sort of
00:05:04more developed on your journey. But yeah, man, I really fucking earned my stripes, right? Doing
00:05:10the isolation, the introspection and the improvement. The more that I did it, the harder it was to
00:05:19integrate, which I guess is the fourth eye. Isolation, improvement, introspection. But then the fourth
00:05:27one, which is the one that you're actually here, is integration. Like, how do I bring what I've learned
00:05:31in private back across into the public? I am trying to make myself a better person so that I can
00:05:36function more effectively in the world, be more successful in my business, move along in my career,
00:05:42make better friends, find a partner that I love, you know, just function in the world in a better way.
00:05:48But it does repackage isolation as nobility. And again, if you've got that predisposition,
00:05:57if you're the sort of person who tends to spend time on their own already, this is going to push
00:06:03you in a direction that you're already moving in. It's going to exaggerate your predispositions as
00:06:07opposed to correcting the imbalances. And yeah, look, I love monk mode. I think it's great. Just no one
00:06:14that's either done a video on it or tried to create a fucking course on it has talked about the challenge
00:06:20of reintegration publicly because it's way less sexy. Everybody will want to extol the virtues of
00:06:25why it's great. And it is given that I'm basically trying to dispel comforting myths about commonly
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