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Perhaps, as you sit down to read this, you find yourself distracted. You open The Revealer on your computer browser or your phone, but you instantly feel tugged toward another wormhole of information or entertainment. You glance at Instagram or the Social Media Site Formerly Known as Twitter and it is as though time folds in on itself. You open another tab or another app or another device entirely, and suddenly hours have passed in which you never made it past this introduction.

If that is the case, then you are not alone. We are all distracted and seemingly more pained than ever by that distraction. Seventy-five percent of us say that digital notifications make us distracted and unfocused both at home and at work, 57% of Americans feel addicted to their smartphone, and the average user (i.e., you and me) spends more than 10% of their day on social media.

But fear not! The Internet—arguably the source of this dissatisfaction—has a solution. Several solutions, actually, almost none of which involve logging off or putting down your phone for any substantive amount of time. No, the Internet’s trendiest solution to our distractive woes is a productivity hack titled “Monk Mode.”

Monk Mode is a practice (available as an app, a browser extension, or just as a personal exercise) that gamifies mindful concentration by aiding users in limiting or turning off digital distractions for “sprints”—discrete amounts of time lasting from minutes to months—to develop productive habits and improve focus. The practice trades on the idea that today, as one article puts it, “the average human finds themselves pushed around like a ragdoll by various stimuli”—such as texts, emails, social media posts, and breaking news announcements—and the only way to take back one’s attention is by silencing this literal and figurative virtual cacophony.

The term Monk Mode is a reference to the abstemious lifestyle monks live, which are presumably free from the mental strain of hyperconnectivity. In the Monk Mode influencer universe, “mode” means imitating Christian and Buddhist monastic lifestyles, both of which are considered equally fertile ground for this sincerest form of flattery. While the moniker (so to speak) dates back to the early 2000s, “monk mode as practice” got a lift from former Vedic monastic seeker Jay Shetty’s 2020 book, Think Like a Monk, and TikTok, where the hashtag “monk mode” has over 76 million views.

The exercise itself is predicated on what another article sums up in a catchy mnemonic as the “three i’s: introspection, isolation, and improvement,” where introspection means “fine-tuning your focus,” isolation is “giving yourself some space and freedom,” and improvement requires “formulating a plan of action.” Or, as the website for the web- and app-blocking software Freedom (which I employed while writing this article, by the way) puts it, “Monk Mode is, in essence, a deliberate practice of intense focus, self-discipline and a dash of isolation to spearhead one’s productivity and personal development.” Monk Mode can help users build the focused attention required to achieve individual goals such as weight loss, starting a business, or “finally mastering the art of homemade sourdough.”

Setting aside for now the idea that monastic living is about “fine-tuning focus” and “a dash of isolation” (I imagine this would be news to most monks), the ubiquity of this relatively new practice is also surprising. Beyond its coveted status as a popular social media hashtag, Monk Mode is available as an app or extension that can mute notifications, block specific websites, and track a user’s progress in beating back distraction. One iPhone app titled Monk Mode advertises itself as a means to, “Find Focus, Find Peace.” On the Apple Store, the app is described as “your ultimate companion for developing daily discipline and motivation…Monk Mode will help you cultivate the habits you need to live a healthier, more productive life.” Another app called Monk Mode Official describes itself as a method to “achieve your goals faster” and describes itself as “THE app to use for tracking your Monk Mode sprints.”

As TikTok trends go, Monk Mode is fairly innocuous. It doesn’t result in the kind of headlines that have plagued more dubious social media fads, like consuming toxic cleaning fluids for fun or conscripting grandparents into dance videos. Yet none of this—productivity optimization, self-enhancement, creating a “Zen” atmosphere—is the goal of either historical or contemporary monastic living. While what is contained in the suggestive title “monk mode” is a way of navigating our modern world, what is left out is the spiritual and ethical core of monastic experience: seeking enlightenment or finding salvation.

But to understand this phenomenon we need to think briefly about what, exactly, the point of this ersatz monasticism is. To understand this “why”—as in “why playact being a monk?”—it is useful to think through the elements of monastic living marshalled into the project of developing self-control and retraining attention. With this in mind, let us consider the ways—and the possible whys—of how Monk Mode co-opts three trans-religious elements of monastic life: solitude, asceticism, and discipline, which effectively map onto Monk Mode’s “three i’s” of isolation, improvement, and introspection.

The element of monastic experience most conspicuously adapted by Monk Mode is solitude, a concept whose appeal in our aggressively networked society is probably obvious. From monasticism’s earliest origins in Christian and Buddhist traditions, being solitary was a requisite for practice; one could not meditate on the meaning of life amidst the noise of civilization. Because of that, monastic solitude involves withdrawal. Both the Buddha and Jesus modeled the value of withdrawal, retreating to the forest and the desert (respectively) to meditate, to listen, and to finally transcend human existence itself. Like solitude, withdrawal has always been both metaphorical and literal, as with the early Christian desert fathers or the Tibetan Rongbuk Monastery nestled at 16,434 feet (5,009 meters) in the Dzakar Chu valley, just below Mount Everest.

(Image source: Simplish)

Withdrawal from the world today is less straightforward than previous eras, however, as physical solitude has increasingly become a luxury. A 2023 Vogue article titled, “Why Solitude Is Now the Most Coveted Commodity in Travel” explains that the “desire for solitude, coupled with the last few years of disrupted travel plans, health concerns, and a staggering increase in connectivity, [could] be leading to a desire for travelers to venture to more remote places.” But the travel experiences highlighted in the article—a beachside house in Mexico, a four-star mountain lodge in New Zealand, an extravagant villa in Chile’s Atacama Desert—range from $300 to $12,000 U.S.D. for a single night’s stay. Suffice to say, the Chilean villa is a far cry from the early Christians’ desert accommodations and an excursion most of us could not afford.

Being physically alone—literal solitude—is thus increasingly a function of finances, transportation, and access. And living in an era of never-ending pings, dings, and rings means we are tethered to our digital devices. These combined factors make our modern, secular solitude almost entirely metaphorical; today, being solitary means severing our connectivity.

In a viral speech titled “Solitude and Leadership,” literary scholar William Deresiewicz noted to an incoming plebe class at West Point Academy that modern solitude is as much about concentration as retreat from the world, because both require “gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input.” It stands to reason, then, that the average person, economically shut out from the physical solitude provided by posh resorts and remote beach houses, will try the metaphorical type of solitude—using quiet concentration to go “Monk Mode in the midst of chaos”—to combat this electronic scattering of the self.

Monk Mode also attempts to imitate another of monasticism’s most recognizable values: asceticism, the renouncing of physical pleasures. From ancient Vedic ascetics to Christian holy orders centered on living in imitation of Christ, one element many monastic communities have in common is a practice of intense abstention. As scholar of religion Stephen J. Davis writes, asceticism is “a term used even before the rise of formalized monastic communities to refer to individuals who engaged in rigorous practices of renunciation pertaining to money, food, sex, and other worldly attachments.”

The term asceticism comes from the Greek askesis, which literally means “exercise” or “training.” Christian monastic communities put this training to work by following Christ’s command to give away their earthly possessions and live in faithful poverty, while Buddhist monks adhere to exacting dietary restrictions. Monk Mode sprints also require asceticism, although often of a worldlier kind. Rather than an exercise in spiritual growth, Monk Mode ascetic sprints seek self-improvement through eliminating social media, improving physical health, or developing interpersonal skills. As one user writes of his half-year-long Monk Mode sprint, “I went celibate, joined the gym and did a lot of inner work. It was for 6 months, and man the growth was insane.” The Monk Moder explains that he “was eating right…I got rid of addictions, I stopped smoking and took a break from alcohol…My confidence after monk mode was through the roof, a lot of girls liked me…Got my dream job because of how much I was focused in improving my skills.”

This inward turn of asceticism and withdrawal in a Monk Mode sprint stands in stark contrast to real monastic life. Unlike monastic precepts that last an entire lifetime, when the sprint comes to an end the Monk Mode practitioner might find themselves back at square one. The same user writes that after his six-month sprint everything went sideways, culminating in losing his girlfriend and gaining weight. The solution, he writes, is to “go in another monk mode to get my life back on track, for a year this time.” With the main goal of “getting [his] confidence back,” this practitioner writes that “better versions of ourselves will take sacrifices but it will be worth it in the end.”

Finally, another common denominator in monastic communities around the world is self-discipline, which can include scholarly study and intense intellectual work. But Monk Mode is not necessarily concerned with the deep reflection we associate with monks scribbling away in their cells on theological treatises or contemplating Zen koans that help focus meditation and introspection. Instead, Monk Mode is frequently promoted as a “productivity hack”—a means of increasing an individual’s contributions to the modern workforce.

The term productivity, however, merits a brief definition, because while it gets tossed around a lot its actual meaning isn’t always clear. In simplest terms, productivity is, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “a ratio of output over input [where] the more we increase output relative to input, the more productivity increases.” Productivity is, generally speaking, a measure of economic performance—and represents the leveraging of a capitalist system. So, what do the purveyors of Monk Mode mean when they insist that the practice is good for productivity? And, perhaps most saliently, productivity for whom?

In Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, authors Jeremy R. Carrette and Richard King suggest reflecting on “the socio-political effects of the decision to classify specific practices or philosophies as ‘spiritual’” and ask “who benefits from such constructions?” Troublingly, they find that what “is being sold to us as radical, trendy, and transformative spirituality, in fact, produces little in the way of a significant change in one’s lifestyle or fundamental behavior patterns (with the possible exception of motivating the individual to be more efficient and productive at work).” In other words, these so-called “spiritual” trends that proliferate on social media prey on peoples’ (usually economic) fears and sell self-optimization for the literal profit of a capitalist system.

Similarly, Ronald Purser writes in McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality that mindfulness (a practice that anchors Monk Mode) might actually “be making things worse.” “Instead of encouraging radical action,” Purser writes, mindfulness “says the causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live.” As a practicing Buddhist himself, Purser believes that any version of meditation proffered as mindfulness—including Monk Mode—is “nothing more than basic concentration training. Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings. What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help.” Rather than mindfulness and other quasi-spiritual practices “setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems.” Instead of reproaching the exploitive system of capitalism that benefits from our (distracted) labor and (anxious) self-optimization, participating in these self-improvement ventures perpetuates the notion that the problem is us.

But at the end of the day we might ask, well, what’s the harm? If Monk Mode makes people feel better, then why is all this shade thrown at a harmless self-improvement trend? But perhaps a more generative question is whether this practice is one of modern life’s most vilified and practiced arts: appropriation? If it is just a metaphor—“monk mode” as a casual description of a state of mind—then we can think of it as a kind of branding. Instead of using a tissue, I blow my nose with a Kleenex. Instead of concentrating by silencing my phone, I’m practicing Monk Mode. But what if the name of this practice is more than a metaphor? What if monasticism’s native lifestyle of discipline, meditative focus and deep study is about to go the way of yoga: stripped of both history and sacredness and put in the service of capitalism?

It’s probably too early to say, but the interesting fact remains that there are several important elements of monastic life completely left out—if not altogether rejected—by this contemporary simulation. For example, one element that unites monastic experiences across time and religion is community. With few exceptions, modern monastic communities live and practice together, sharing their lives and delegating duties amongst one another. They are a brotherhood, a sisterhood, and a shelter from the larger world. But aside from comments on TikTok and Reddit, Monk Mode does not seem to cultivate either virtual or real community.

Monasticism also represents service. There is the active service of the Jesuits—a monastic order in the Roman Catholic Church—who are known for their devotion to education and to social justice. There is also the quieter service of the Buddhist monks of the Sravasti Abbey in Washington state, who explain that because their monastic life is committed to voluntarily following “the Buddha’s guidelines to pacify body, speech and mind,” they are creating “peace in a chaotic world.” In either case, the service orientation of monastic communities is a telling contrast to a Monk Mode practice devoted to self-optimization. Monk Mode is intrinsically inward-looking and is therefore the diametric opposite of a life lived in service to others.

Finally, the richest irony in the branding and dissemination of Monk Mode as a productivity hack in our modern capitalist society is that monks themselves famously contemplated—and agonized over—their own distraction all the time. The “noonday demon” of distraction and self-doubt has always been an intimate part of monastic life. In her 2023 book, The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction, historian Jaimie Blank writes that medieval Christian monks worried about distraction not because they were “simply trying to get more work done.” Rather, these “women and men were trying to align themselves with the ethics of salvation. The stakes could not have been more serious.” Concentration and attention were a way of life because they were the groundwork for redemption, not because they increased an individual’s self-control or productivity.

A central irony of Monk Mode—and there are many more than what I’ve highlighted here—is that it is premised on the seemingly unique attentional abilities of the monks of yore. But that focus and discipline, it turns out, are just as much of a fantasy as “going monk mode”—the monks are in on the joke. Monks perfected their attentive abilities because they have known for centuries that they—like every other human—are really bad at paying attention.

While monks have always known they were susceptible to distraction, they also understood that attention is one of our most valuable resources. As William James wrote in the chapter titled “Attention” in his classic The Principles of Psychology, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Monks choose a lifestyle in pursuit of sustained attention, even while recognizing how impossible a task it represents. For monks—and for all people living in monastic communities or who have taken holy orders—the power of their experience is what they have agreed to attend to for the rest of their lives: the divine, enlightenment, the cultivation of a luminous mind, spiritual liberation, care for their community, and ultimate concern.

With that in mind (as it were), it’s worth reflecting on what Monk Mode is cultivating with its casual appropriation of attentive and reflexive practices in the name of personal growth. What are we attending to when we practice Monk Mode in a capitalist system? Is it—as the Monk Mode app sells itself—helping us “adopt a new habit” because “Monk Mode has everything you need to stay on track”? Is it breaking our addictions to our phones and social media so we can concentrate better at work?

Or could Monk Mode be an expression of sublimated religious desire and a longing for the things our society seems to have lost, like community, peace of mind, and lovingkindness?

Catherine L. Newell is an associate professor of religion and science at the University of Miami. She is the author of the books Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier and Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating.