monk mode

The phrase dates to the early 2000s (opens in a new window), but its manual is a 2014 post on Illimitable Men (opens in a new window), which set it down as “a self-improvement framework for improving your worth,” built on “the three I’s: introspection, isolation and improvement,” and called it “a temporary form of MGTOW.” What gets cut is “junk activities,” because they add little to “your social market value,” and company, which “should not feature prominently within your calendar until you reach the top 10% of men.” No end date is given. A man leaves when improvement is his “factory setting,” and meanwhile watches his investments flourish “much like a stock portfolio.”

The hashtag passed 73 million views (opens in a new window) on TikTok in 2023, by which time office coverage had it as working on one task with notifications off, and no women anywhere in it. The men’s version kept them out on purpose. One guide lists six commandments as absolutely mandatory (opens in a new window), among them no conversation for the sake of conversation and a “conscious withdrawal from social obligations,” and a critic’s summary of the genre reads “Cut out women from your life! Focus only on yourself!”

Under load, it is a withdrawal from the market conducted in the market’s units. The isolation is booked as an investment, and the return is to be collected later, at a better price, from the people it withdrew from. Its exit is a rank, the top 10%, and a rank is set by the people it tells a man to avoid, so he cannot read it from inside the room. A man in monk mode is alone and still keeping score of how he looks to everyone else.

This file has two stretches of 16 days apart, and neither was monk mode. I left for the first on July 4, having spent 7 hours and $84.51 on 16 cards, 1 for each day apart, and the texting ran daily throughout. The second began on August 18, when the first account closed. In it I filed no form and published 5 entries about dating, which is isolation and introspection with the improvement left out. It ended on September 3, by accident, when a friend started a conversation at a bar. The one retreat on file was not scheduled, and it lasted until somebody else spoke first.