I was surfing the information superhighway earlier this year when the following babble crossed my screen:
Yes, dear reader, we’ve reached that point in the singularity. Monks have been drafted into the great productivity wars as the patron saints of the corner office, giving us the Monk Manual™. A divine apparition.
After I screamed into the void, I did some digging into the company. It’s whelming and milky! The Manual itself is a 90-day planner, and it’s hard to tell how it differs aesthetically from, say, a Moleskine. The company’s founder, Steve Lawson, disagrees: “The Monk Manual looks different because it is different.”
Lawson sermonizes in an informational video about the spiritual journey that led him to peddle $38 planners. Stressed out as a young father, overworked and burnt out, Lawson realized:
I needed a change. It was around this time that through studying best practices in productivity, psychology, and spiritual growth I had a realization: all three were in complete agreement on the fundamental principles that lead to human thriving. So I set out to find the people who were best in the world at living these principles and discovered, to my surprise, monks!
The result is the Monk Manual™. Thousands of years of wisdom condensed down into a practical system so that you can experience the same full living of the monks.
Elsewhere, website copy clarifies:
Monks are the most productive people in the world. They know that productivity isn't about doing more things, it's about doing the most important things well.
Monks live by a system that enables clarity of action, as well as habits necessary to support full living. Habits including gratitude, awareness, intentional action, presence, personal growth, giving, listening and loving.
But the Monk Manual™ is careful to note that it doesn’t love productivity culture as it exists today. We Live In A Society™ where “we often confuse busyness with productivity,” it expounds. Since life is about the journey, not the destination™, the Monk Manual™ helps us enjoy life beyond the spreadsheet. Buy a Monk Manual™, touch some grass!
The Manual makes me itchy, inducing the very spiritual unease it’s meant to alleviate. First of all, which monks? Name them! Specify a religion, region, vibe! And if they’re #girlbossing for God, then which god(s)? Are we about to rank the religions, Steve?
The Monk Manual is far from the first product to position itself as a consumerist balm for intractable malaise. And it’s probably not the last to leverage orientalist/frontierist aesthetics (like the image above—is that Shangri-La or Utah?) for pseudo-guru-dom. Shitty aura alert!
I’ve previously reviewed a different Buddh-ish techno-solution to the travails of capitalism: Headspace Guide to Meditation, a Netflix animated series on mindfulness. Narrated by ex-Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe, founder of meditation app Headspace, the show provides 20-minute lessons on various mindfulness techniques like body scans and deep breathing. It distils the Buddhist origins of these practices into scientific steps. “My hope is when you meditate, you meditate with the confidence that this is something that’s been around, in R&D essentially, for thousands of years,” Puddicombe says.
Through more explicit marketing channels, Headspace frames workplace mindfulness programs in terms of their productive benefits. The company claims real and quantifiable returns on investment: employees are 27% less irritable and 12% more productive.
Religious practices have been turned into little more than another torturous capitalistic venue through native ads like Headspace Guide to Meditation. Things can get even weirder:
Stretched to absurd but logical ends, mindfulness and monk-y traditions have resulted in ghoulish products like the “AmaZen” mindfulness booths installed at Amazon warehouses. Oh, you’re treated like fodder by a centibillionaire’s company and things are unbearable? Go do some deep breathing exercises in the despair closet and you’ll be fine, sweetie :)
To make sense of these initiatives, we may actually turn to the Monk Manual™ for guidance. Its page-by-page design is particularly informative: it places work to-do lists next to relationship goals, creating a unified professional and personal self.
Though less obviously bullet-pointed, Headspace and AmaZen also collapse the boundary between work and private life—swallow workplace exploitation through spiritualism to boost your boss’s bottom line.
The HR-endorsed invitation to bring our “full selves” to work is simply not it! Full(er) personhood requires material support, not glossy dogma. I don’t need to circle-dump emotional baggage with my employer—especially if I don’t get benefits!
If anything, we need a battle royale between these spiritualist avatars and Scabby the Rat. With a growing exodus of workers from shitty jobs, and a stronger recognition of what unions can do, these spiritual-ish tools may soon be left in the dust. Control/alt/delete!!
Sendoff time: this issue is shorter than usual, soz—my pomodoro timer tells me we’ve g2g onto our next task!
Divine Innovation is a somewhat cheeky newsletter on spirituality and technology. Published once every three weeks, it’s written by Adam Willems and edited by Vanessa Rae Haughton. Find the full archive here.