“To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. In order to uncover his true visage he must shatter his own substance with heavy blows of his hammer.” – Alexis Carrel
Monk mode is a self-improvement framework for improving your worth, and in turn, increasing the quality of person you are. Many people fail to integrate self-improving habits into their life because they have psychological hurdles they struggle to overcome and are easily distracted by nonsense that confers them no benefit.
Monk mode is about mitigating distraction and focusing solely on self-betterment by filling up your time with activities that improve you as a human-being. Naturally, such an endeavour is going to demand sacrifice. However, the rewards you reap, the sense of direction you gain and the power you feel from the self-control you’ll exercise will feed your growth immeasurably, in turn passively increasing your self-esteem and outward confidence.
The sacrifice: you’re going to be minimising your time contribution to social obligations and junk activities. The reason for this is because these activities consume much of your time whilst yielding little to negligible increase towards your social market value. Monk mode is a serious commitment that is not to be half-assed. You’re either doing it, or you’re not. It’ll be a struggle in the beginning, but once you’re fully engaged it becomes a beneficial, productive and dare I say even addictive lifestyle.
When I talk about “junk activities”, this is the kind of thing I’m referring to:
Going out for coffee or sitting around idly.
Playing video games.
Watching marathons of television series/movies.
Watching porn.
Constantly refreshing social media and internet forums.
Being out of action with a hangover/come down from alcohol/drug consumption.
All these activities are distractive or masturbatory; they confer no benefit in the long run, but are fleetingly pleasing in the short-term. Entertainment is necessary to cool off from periods of hard work, but leading a life of continuous instant gratification leads to nowhere but a path of regret and failure.
If all you do is distract yourself by spending your time on junk activities, there’ll be no time left for the things that really matter: activities that build long-term value. One cannot hope to have high social value without investing in themselves, and this is exactly what Monk Mode is – a commitment to maximise your capabilities to whatever esoteric limit it is they’re capped at.
Cutting your social time to a bare minimum is incredibly important, more important than you may think. It’s nigh impossible to lead a productive life when people are telling you their problems, gossiping, and introducing otherwise vapid and unimportant nonsense into your life. It’s all too easy to get caught up in a whirlwind of banality, because let’s face it, if you’re low value, the people you know will be too, winners don’t hang out with losers.
If you accept you’re a low value human-being, but you want to rectify this and become better, cutting off mundane people is crucial. Mundane people, also known as average people, don’t share your ambition and will jealously deride you every step of the way on your path to self-betterment.
Minimising distractions is crucial, low quality people, low quality media, you need to quarantine yourself from all of it – and it is only then you’ll be able to focus on channelling your desire to be better into real life gains. Because instead of walking around in a half-sentient stupor, you’ll have a rough plan for productive living, and execute it to the best of your ability.
A brief but relevant tangential interjection on self-respect: If you hate yourself or do not value yourself, it’s because you’ve not given yourself a reason to value yourself. We don’t just disrespect others who are low value, we disrespect ourselves for it too. The exception to this is those with narcissistic personality disorders that make the individual delusional about their own value. If the bulk of your time goes on junk activities, you will be directionless. There will be no feedback loops in your life to give you self-esteem. There will be an absence of activity where you push yourself, see a small gain, get validated by your small gain and then feel the resulting pride that comes from being better at something and seeing yourself grow in some small way. As humans, we are meant to grow, to flourish, to actualise. We desire growth and live for growth, for without growth we feel purposeless. In the absence of growth, we flounder. When junk activities start to comprise the majority of your time expenditure you rob yourself of the opportunity to grow. The higher your social value, the more you will come to value your time by merit of recognising your abilities and possessing a resulting self-respect as such. High value or not, we all have a finite amount of time until we die and every second wasted is a missed opportunity feeding into a sense of lethargy and mediocrity.
Now back on topic to monk mode, the core structure of monk mode is based on the three I’s: introspection, isolation and improvement. Monk mode is a temporary form of MGTOW, by cutting yourself off from the rest of the world for a while you can fine-tune your focus, calibrate your direction and confront yourself. You’ll be acknowledging your weaknesses and then formulating a plan of action to deal with them. For the things that can’t be fixed, such as being born ugly, mitigate them with damage control: work out, get stylish haircuts, dress well and etc.
Introspection is to look inward, to evaluate one’s self. You’re going to be identifying your weaknesses, making yourself aware of them and then accepting them. Rather than hide, begrudgingly co-exist with or deny your weaknesses you must acknowledge them and accept them. Only by doing this can you gain the power to rid yourself of such afflictions. Accepting your weaknesses allows you to own your flaws rather than permitting them to imprison you within a negative mental feedback loop of helplessness. The most unintelligible thing a person can do, and “the average person” does this all the time, is to ignore one’s weaknesses. Weaknesses are ignored out of ego, out of emotion, to sustain your sense of being, and whatever shaky foundation of self-confidence it is that you have. However, it is this wilful ignorance of such weakness that amounts to nothing more than a shoddy farcical fabrication of confidence. It’s not pure, rational confidence, but delusional, narcissistic confidence. By not addressing your weaknesses you allow them to take control of you in whatever manner it is they manifest. Rather than patch up the hole in your armour, you are pretending there is no hole there at all. And thus by ignoring the problem, you only grant it the opportunity to extend its foothold within your psyche, damaging your chances at success and happiness.
A conscious denial of an accepted truth for the sake of one’s ego leaves you vulnerable to the potency of the truth. A core part of red pill philosophy is to be harmonious with the truth so that the truth is fighting on your side rather than against you at the side of your enemies. Whoever is congruent with the truth, can monopolise the truth and expose liars. Those who are reliant upon fabrications must expend massive energy on maintaining their façade. As someone who lives harmoniously with the truth, you need not expend such energy, giving you a further edge. When a person tries to use one of your weaknesses against you, aware of the truth, the power of embarrassment will be absent and you will be able to keep composure (hold frame) rather than let a scrupulous detractor rob you of your power within the primacy of the moment.
You need to be honest with yourself so that you know what you’re working with, without awareness you cannot hope to achieve success. On a Machiavellian tangent, nobody lucks into success contrary to what they may have led you to believe about their accomplishments.
Isolation is necessary to encourage an amplification of focus and a fortification of one’s personal direction. Handling social politics such as relationships, logistics, people’s feelings and yadda yadda is burdensome on one who is looking to mitigate or otherwise eradicate their weaknesses whilst working to enhance their strengths. You have a certain number of things you can contend with at one time, social obligations will quickly obliterate your workload and leave you feeling overwhelmed when you’re looking to achieve loftier goals. It is important that one has their own space and the freedom to self-govern and direct their desires, and a modicum of solitude is necessary to achieve this. With awareness of one’s weaknesses comes the clarity of self-determination. With a clearer and more lucid mind the path to accomplishing higher desires becomes more obvious and self-evident. Confusion is an affliction which causes many to float along in life, lost, without any real purpose or goals. You do not want to be one of these people, the “average person.” In order to achieve greatness you need clearly obtainable goals, an awareness of your position and the peace, space and freedom to determine your self-governance independent of undue external manipulatory influence.
Without the conflict of social obligation or the dissent of outside opinion, you are free in isolation to forge yourself into the very thing that you want to be. What you want for yourself is more important than what anybody else wants you to be. Through introspection should you not already know it, you will deliberate until you know exactly what it is you want to achieve. Ultimately you’re the one who is stuck with yourself for the rest of your days, forced to endure whatever weaknesses or failures that you may or will have due to inaction. It is thus up to you to be responsible for your own happiness and dictate to yourself what needs to be done to actualise your desires. The influence of others has the potential to be beneficial, but for the sake of monk mode we will assume the precedent that the majority of external influence is absent in value and thus incongruent with the diction of your planning. Others can aid you in your goals (such as a personal trainer or should you be still undecided of your direction despite much introspection, trusted advisors.) However, nobody should be dictating what those goals are and making decisions on your behalf (such as your parents, or people who have a vested interest in you not improving yourself.) You shall be your own planner and you shall plan diligently. Do not underestimate the importance of isolation if you are a social animal, for it is most necessary in order to ensure success.
Introspection and isolation make up what are the psychological components of monk mode, they are the processes which when successfully enacted allow a man of procrastination to forcefully impose his will upon the world, to take action where others merely theorise. You must become a doer, a mover, a player. You must become a man of action rather than allow yourself to be one of inaction.
Improvement: (...)
There are some interesting points in the article, but for one who should see clearly that the only reasonable plan is to understand Dhamma, and the only important improvement is connected with the reduction of the greed, hate and delusion, no need to read it further. Entire article:
MONK MODE: STRONGER, SMARTER, MORE REFINED
IllimitableMan
https://illimitableman.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/monk-mode/
By the he same author:
Truth & IQ – Street Smarts & Book Smarts
process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest – but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
— Ayn Rand
The reason many otherwise intelligent people often seem to behave foolishly, is because they have inaccurate maps of human nature, and the reason they have inaccurate maps of human nature is because they are not psychologically strong enough to handle the consequences of their own intelligence. Imagine analysing your environment and working out a number of things which horrify you so much you do not wish to believe they are real – do you continue to go down the rabbit hole exploring them, or do you use your mighty intelligence to build walls to protect yourself from the darkness?
When intelligent people are mentally fragile, they misuse their intelligence to build ever more elaborate delusions which reject reality with a coherent but untrue logic set. Meaning they self-construct or buy into a framework which is coherent within its own closed system, but does not survive contact with reality because it is foolish and thereby untrue. Ergo they are logical (a sign of intelligence), but not accurate in the application of that logic (and thus foolish).
You need to stop thinking of intelligence and wisdom as the same thing, when wisdom can be absent in very intelligent people, just as it can be present in not so intelligent people. Because it is truth preference which determines the level of wisdom a person has, not intelligence, although of course a high truth preference high intelligence person will have higher resolution maps that grasp reality with a greater degree of nuance, a high truth preference low intelligence person will understand reality better than a low truth preference high intelligence person simply because their maps are more accurate.
Laymen refer to these differences in a fuzzy and unrefined way as book smarts and street smarts, but street smarts is really just a crude way of saying wisdom, whilst book smarts simply means inherent intellectual horsepower, cognitive ability and the capacity to parse higher order abstraction and complexity.
What determines the level of wisdom a person possesses is more a combination of how their character has parsed their experiences and observations rather than their intellect – that is to say, their truth preference – meaning their desire to know the truth, and their ability to embrace it and endure it and accept it rather than reject it because they do not like it.
Arguably, a mid curve person with high truth preference is going to be wiser than a right curve person with low true preference, which is why, for example, high IQ women tend to be more delusional than mid IQ men – and so women often find themselves in the amusing situation of being led by men less biologically intelligent than they are, simply because they are less delusional than they are, and thus by extension, wiser, more reasonable and more mentally stable than they are.
Truth preference is the apex governing trait which determines how wise someone will be, and therefore how accurate their maps of reality are. And the trait which determines the likelihood of being high truth preference is neuroticism – that is to say, the more neurotic you are, the more delusional you become to cope with reality, and the less neurotic you are, the more accepting you are of reality.
A common trait both women and narcissists share is their intolerance to even the most well intentioned of criticism about themselves. This is because high neurotics see truth as the enemy rather than as an ally (because it hurts them) and so they habitually lie to themselves to make themselves feel better about things. They actively choose delusion over reality to cope with the harshness of reality, so for example, the narcissistic man will tell himself he’s a strong and powerful man even though he has meltdowns when someone insults him, whilst the average woman will tell herself she’s a good person even if she’s just been very cruel and unfair to someone because she convinces herself she’s a victim defending herself.
This is why I consider women and narcissists to share many overlapping traits – although I want to express quite emphatically I am not saying all women are narcissists (I know some of you will be quick to make that leap and misunderstand me) – what I am saying is that there are certain traits inherent to the neurotic, and that neuroticism arrests psychological development at an early stage which discourages truth preference, ergo the neurotic are immature and it’s this ego driven immaturity which is the basis of much of the overlap.
Neurotic people experience negative emotion more intensely, and therefore are less able to see past that emotion whenever it is triggered, even if the thing that triggers it is truthful and unmalicious. This is why women are on aggregate more delusional than men are, and also why narcissists are more delusional than everybody – those who are governed by neuroticism are most intolerant to truth – especially the unflattering truths which make them look bad, and feel bad about themselves.
Generally speaking if someone is not capable of introspection, it is because they are too neurotic to handle it and are thus at a lower level of human mental development (aka less psychologically mature). Same way you don’t tell a child hurtful things or you tip-toe around a narcissist as not to elicit their rage, you likewise self-censor around women for the same reason.
Ego is there to protect you from predators and give you the spine to stand up for yourself, but in doing so also blinds you to the truth of whatever it’s protecting you from when it’s overactive and employed injudiciously as a consequence of fragility. This is why the most neurotic people tend to be the most egotistical people, who are in turn the least mature and least mentally stable people.
If you are introspective enough and mentally stable enough to handle the truth without rejecting it because you do not like it, or going crazy because you have accepted it – you can count yourself amongst the ranks of those rare and special humans that have high truth preference, and for your efforts and suffering wisdom will make itself available to you, raising you above the majority who lack it, in turn positioning you to lead them as you embrace the information asymmetries truth empowers you with to make more effective decisions whilst they nestle in their ignorance to derive comfort in escape from reality’s brutal and unforgiving harshness.
In the bible it is stated:
“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow”.
And not everyone can bear that burden – which is why truth preference is more a reflection of the character and strength of a soul, than it is of one’s biological intelligence. And it is this my friends which distinguishes book smarts from street smarts, or more elegantly put: intelligence from wisdom.
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