On TikTok, thousands of men suggest monasticism will make us more effective human beings. But there is something melancholy about all the self-optimising
They’re hard at work in the TikTok productivity mines, which is more than can be said for me. Among the things I have done that were not my intended work recently, I listened to a podcast where I discovered a colleague writes more in a “bad week” than I manage in a month. It didn’t make me work harder, but my inner critic redoubled its attacks: “[Nameless colleague] would have written 4,000 words in the time it took you to Google ‘DIY skin tag removal’, you dolt.”
Time to dip back into Hack-tok, where the fire-emoji bros have rediscovered “monk mode”. It’s not a new idea – apparently people have been Googling it since 2004 – but got a boost in 2020 from Jay Shetty’s How to Think Like a Monk, which applied the principles Shetty learned in his time as a novice monk in an ashram (meditation, visualisation, “transformational forgiveness”) to contemporary capitalism.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist