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.
The 2023 #monkmode TikTokers (28.3m views) are mainly men, urging us to apply monastic discipline to our working lives: routine and focusing on a single task with no technological or other distractions. Beyond that, it varies. One instructs me to meditate, cut out alcohol and “sleep eight hours every single night” – if I could do that, mate, I wouldn’t need #monkmode. Another sets out three pillars of TikTok monasticism – isolation, introspection and improvement – but then explains: “I really craved movement so I went to starbs [that’s Starbucks] for two hours, scheduling chats.” Basically, monk mode seems to be whatever you can sell with sufficient conviction in 45 seconds. It seems melancholy, all this joyless solo self-optimising, but who am I, a woman trying to remove her own skin tags, to judge? I’m a big fan of silence, and while I have all the spirituality of a Twix, if monasticism can up my godless productivity, I’m in.
I’m good with the kind of monks I vaguely know about from my history degree: western, pre-Reformation ones. I ask my friend F, who is writing a novel featuring a medieval contemplative order, for advice. “Write longhand in a ‘scriptorium’,” she orders me, before she gets distracted by aesthetics, telling me I need a tonsure (“Take your wig off!”), and to “wear something floaty with nothing underneath” (she’s never experienced a Yorkshire spring). Another friend asks what kind of monk I’m emulating. I fall deep into a Wikipedia monk hole comparing various orders, neatly illustrating exactly why I need #monkmode.
I wrench myself offline and try to write longhand. It’s fast, but I can’t tell if what I’m producing is any good and hate not seeing my word count (when I type it up, there’s way too much). Then I want a break, but don’t know what to do. Without Instagram to stare at, I practise a 16th-century mass we’re singing in choir – it seems appropriate – and illuminate my article with some monastic marginalia: a heron with a human face in a “fashionable hat” as doodled by 14th-century Worcester monks on Aristotle’s Physics.
By lunchtime I’m also “really craving movement”, so I head to the ruins of the local Benedictine order, St Mary’s Abbey. I wander round, imagining how cold and unpleasant it would have been to live there with 50 men. Then I sit on a stone, put my wig on backwards and take a tonsure-adjacent selfie to amuse F. Obviously I have to turn the internet back on to send it, which causes me to fall off the wagon entirely, scrolling feverishly amid the ancient stones, gorging on internet arguments and pictures of cakes. This one-woman monastery is corrupt and lax; just dissolve me already.
I return home chastened and get back offline, replacing Twitter with staring out of the window at birds, which I expect bored monks did too, without the ability to Google: “Chiffchaff or willow warbler?” My mind, I find, fights terribly against just doing a single thing until it’s done. I already knew I hated multitasking, but I seem to be incapable of monotasking too. What’s left? Become a TikTok guru, I suppose.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
