secular monkhood and me/us
disclaimer - i initially engaged with this idea a couple of weeks back. now we're all enjoying our own version of secular monkhood in some respect.
I read and thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Taggart's concept of the secular monk.
It's amusing to recognise some of yourself in this concept. I do have a bit of secular monkhood within me and certainly believe in the necessity of sampling. Signing up to a creed or as I'd tend to regard it, a dogma, doesn't interest me at all. I see the ability to do so as both a great strength - I'd love to be able to have that amount of faith in something - and a ridiculous oversight - obviously what some of these creeds say is ridiculous and by their nature, you can't take some of them, you must accept the whole lot.
The description of Jack Dorsey's morning routine was very Patrick Bateman - I laughed as I do several of these things myself, if not in the same order.
Jack Dorsey, cofounder and CEO of Twitter and founder and CEO of Square, wakes up at 5 a.m. After drinking a juice made from Himalayan sea salt, water, and lemon, he takes an ice bath. He meditates for one hour each morning and one hour each evening. On weekends, he eats nothing and drinks only water. Before going to bed, he moves between a dry sauna and an ice bath. A device monitors the quality of his slumber.
For reference, here's Patrick Bateman's:
I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water activated gel cleanser. Then a honey almond body scrub. And on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub. Then apply an herb mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion.
Personally, I wake with no alarm, get out of bed and do press-ups. Then I head to the shower which I turn cold at the end, standing under the coldest setting for as long as I feel like. Recently I've added calf raises to address a long standing muscular niggle. Then I go downstairs and prepare a glass of water and some black coffee. I eat no food until later, when my fasting window is over. I don't often deviate from this.
I was amused to see Dorsey's ice bath and fasting displayed as evidence of his mania, as if his discipline and commitment to his health was a sign of psychopathy.
Anything can be a manifestation of psychopathy if taken far enough, hence Bateman's grooming routine. It's the facial equivalent of Russell Crowe's shed in A Beautiful Mind.
The idea of the secular monk is one I can see manifesting in a situation where your career, more likely you'd regard it as your calling, is your higher purpose and your mission. I interviewed for a startup last year - they were really friendly guys -and they were very keen on the idea of their mission and how driven they were to achieve it. The secular monk would go further though, jettisoning anything that hindered the pursuit of his (let's face it, it's probably a his) aims.
This is the sort of thinking that gives us Huel and various other forms of more efficient eating. No need for actual food, you can have this powder which has everything you need. Maybe not everything you'd like or that would nourish something beyond your physical body. Because to the secular monk, that wouldn't exist.
optimising life vs optimising for joy
I am a bit of a sucker for the optimisation of life. I 'work out' in an efficient way, I intermittent fast and do a couple of other forms of productivity-ness, although I'd say that as a procrastinator par excellence, I am some distance from any sort of competence or efficacy in this regard.
What I'd say though is that I tend to think of these things as ways to maximise my opportunities for joy. I eat a couple of large, satisfying meals each day that I mostly cook myself. I build opportunities for exercise or movement into my life and seize them whenever I can. I grab citibikes and walk, I park further away or even, if being mildly sweaty is acceptable at my destination, break into a small jog to get places.
For me, the productivity aspect of secular monkhood is to pursue extra joy in my life. To be able to relish the small moments in each day and rejoice in their mundanity. Not to skip past them in pursuit of some sort of fictitious mission, dictated by a god or by myself.
what is your mission? finite and infinite games
Whatever you do in life, you opt into some sort of game, with rules, regulations and possibilities. Whatever you think about what you're doing or whether you have a 'mission' or not, you are choosing something. And that something can be finite or infinite.
There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play - James Carse - Finite and Infinite Games
I played sport, an arena entirely governed by written and unwritten rules. These are some categories of finite games that apply to sports:
Spatial boundaries are necessary for every finite game. Infinite games have no boundaries.
We cannot play alone, in finite games, we must have an opponent to play against and usually teammates to play with.
A degree of self-veiling (self-deception) is necessary in all finite games, since we must forget they are optional in order to be motivated to win.
If you must play a game, you cannot play a game.
The irony of being a professional athlete is that you must play - it's your job. Therefore playtime is over - the results count and are all that you're really judged on, despite what anyone says about culture, the sanctity of the sport and so on. Sport is a giant cultural finite game where we have to forget that the whole thing is a choice in order for the results to matter. The ephemerality of 'big' sport is being exposed right now while it's the group activity, the way that it brings people together in a sort of communion that's being missed. No one is really missing the observing itself - they're missing the reasons for gathering that it provides.
Leaving sport has led me to try and choose a different game where I get to pick more of the rules - this is an ongoing challenge for me. That's the thing with infinite games though, they can go on forever, even if they consist of a series of finite games.
writing your own story
Where I'd perhaps deviate a little from Taggart is in believing in something of the power of self authorship.
So many athletes choose the meaning of their story, taking power from their origins and creating their own myth. This gives them great strength in low times and helps them explain their own triumphs and resilience. Sometimes athletes achieve transcendence through their deeds, they become part of a canon and pass into legend. They transcend who they are and the moment that they did those things.
Life doesn't follow the beats of a story exactly. Sometimes you'll have setbacks, unforeseen occurrences that challenge you and force you to change tack. Setbacks can be assimilated as part of a person's history to form part of their own hero's journey. It's an anti-fragile approach to life - where adversity strengthens rather than weakens you. Using this approach, anything is grist to the mill of your story - it's how you interpret events rather than what they do to you. This way, self-authorship becomes a constructive rather than a destructive act and one that enables you to find some meaning in otherwise meaningless or even overly harsh circumstances.
moments of transcendence
When you play sport, you are chasing small moments of transcendence where you become more than just yourself. Sometimes it's when the game comes so easily and naturally to you, 'without irritable reaching', and you achieve a state of Negative Capability. You feel and look effortless as you play. Sometimes this moment comes by being a part of a group, usually in victory but every now and again in defeat. A great victory unites you all in joy and abandon but sometimes, the empty, drained feeling of true defeat, one where you've scrapped your hearts out and put everything into it and still come up short, this is the sort of defeat that takes you out of yourself.
What I really believe is that in life, moments outside of yourself where you positively affect your environment and those around you is where meaning lies, along with some sort of belief in the collective good. The danger of self authorship is that can lead to a deep narcissism and I think this is what Taggart is positing with these tech leaders. They are attempting to achieve a sort of apotheosis - a godlike state where they have the ability to move the world - and that anything that blocks their capacity to work towards this is unnecessary. Hence their routines, aimed at an endless, joyless optimisation.
What these people find, as Taggart suggests, is the 'what next?' question that arrives when they inevitably summit the mountain they've chosen to climb. All they're really doing is picking one finite game and playing it as hard as possible. The thing is, that some of the things they choose to eschew are the infinite games of life, the ones that never end; parenting a child or risking your own emotional security to couple up with someone.
To diminish everyday life, to deny yourself joy in the small things, is to live a sorry existence where you may find yourself disappointed with what you find above the clouds.
Optimisation, self-authorship and antifragility aren't bad at all - it's just what they're wielded in service of that you should remain wary of. Rather than see them as means to an ultimately prosaic end, harness them in service of the pursuit of joy. And lasting joy it seems to me, lies largely outside of yourself.
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I'd wager that some of us have recently reconnected with the infinite games of interpersonal relationships. It's certainly a good time to reflect on how important those are.