Is the Monastic Life the Ultimate Deep Life?

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00:00:04.640 | This one comes from EA. EA says, "Is the monastic life the ultimate deep life, and

00:00:12.160 | what can we learn and implement from it?" EA elaborates, "Lately I have been studying

00:00:18.920 | monasticism, especially the Benedictine order and their rule. Their motto is 'Ora

00:00:26.240 | e labora' - pray and work. Traditionally they focus on everything they do, often in

00:00:30.600 | silence, and utilize the lessons learned in the 1500 plus years of their

00:00:34.040 | existence." And so she elaborates, "Is the need for deep work so old, and can we

00:00:41.680 | learn from these traditions in a way that is useful to us in the outside

00:00:44.360 | world?" I think we can, EA. This is an idea that I have been developing recently. When

00:00:53.900 | there are work-related fantasies or stories, specific stories of, "Yeah, here's

00:01:01.040 | a monk in the Benedictine order in a monastery," or "Here's this person I knew

00:01:04.880 | who moved to Maine and they built this cabin by a lake and they just write all

00:01:09.240 | day," or whatever it is. When we come across these concrete instantiations of

00:01:14.040 | a working life that really resonates with us, these escape fantasies, what do

00:01:20.200 | we do with that? And the theory that I'm working on right now is that

00:01:25.320 | they're not meant to be taken literally, right? In the sense that

00:01:29.360 | this is not a roadmap that you are now considering, "Should I follow this path

00:01:33.160 | or not? Oh, maybe I should become a monk. Maybe I should move to a cabin in Maine."

00:01:38.360 | In fact, I opened my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, with the story of

00:01:42.160 | someone who actually did that. It was the story of someone who had become so

00:01:46.520 | attached to the fantasy of becoming a monk that he actually went to this

00:01:51.280 | monastic center where he got accepted in it, you live the simple life,

00:01:55.600 | you...I think it was a Buddhist center, and you meditate and you have these

00:02:00.360 | sort of simple jobs, and through the repetition you gain insight. I mean, he had built

00:02:05.040 | this up in his head so long, these images of these monks had resonated so

00:02:10.400 | much that it just became in his mind, "This must be the path to having meaning

00:02:17.480 | in life." So you can imagine how the story unfolded in that opening chapter, So Good

00:02:21.720 | He Went, he joined, and within a few weeks he broke down because he realized this

00:02:27.600 | wasn't a magic transformation, and that there was still stuff that was annoying,

00:02:32.560 | and he still had the same anxieties, and it had failed to transform his life, right?

00:02:36.840 | So the things that resonate aren't necessarily meant to be roadmaps. So what

00:02:41.740 | should we do with them? Well, I think we should take a mythological approach to

00:02:45.960 | understanding these professional work fantasies that resonate so much. And by

00:02:53.000 | mythological, I mean in a Jungian framework, right? We should actually come

00:02:56.720 | at this and try to understand what are the archetypical elements of this story

00:03:01.680 | that are creating that resonance. We isolate those from the actual details of

00:03:08.120 | the story. So when we look at the monks, what is it about this order that I just

00:03:12.200 | get that information that there's something right or appealing or

00:03:14.840 | aspirational about what they're doing? You strip away the fact that they're a

00:03:17.560 | Benedictine order, and it's a Christian order, and they go to these type of

00:03:20.360 | buildings, and they pray every morning, and you extract from it what is the

00:03:23.480 | underlying element here that's really catching my attention. In this case, maybe

00:03:28.240 | it's the slowness, the not having a really big load of things that you have

00:03:34.920 | to do, that your life is simpler, and you can move from one thing to another,

00:03:39.440 | and there's presence. You pull out the non-work content-specific underlying

00:03:45.400 | archetypical elements, and you isolate them, and you clarify them, and you

00:03:48.360 | realize these deep elements, which could apply to any different type of field, it

00:03:53.720 | can apply to many different types of jobs, this is what really resonates to me.

00:03:57.120 | All right, so once you pulled out these are the deeper elements that resonate

00:04:00.680 | with me, now you can actually start to do some blueprinting. Now you can start to

00:04:05.680 | say, "Okay, given my context, my circumstances, what opportunities are

00:04:10.960 | available to me? What are my constraints? What are my abilities? What is the

00:04:15.040 | landscape surrounding me of where I could feasibly get in my career?" And

00:04:19.600 | start using these isolated elements as the lodestone that guides you. All right,

00:04:26.360 | if slowness, having less to do, moving from one thing to another, presence with

00:04:32.760 | each type, if this is what's really important to me, and yet I am a, you know,

00:04:37.360 | I work for a think tank in Washington DC or something, you look around, okay, given

00:04:42.160 | my career capital, given my skills, given the different possibilities here, how

00:04:46.600 | could I craft a career that gets that thing in it? And the career you craft

00:04:50.680 | might have nothing to do with being a monk, but everything to do with what it

00:04:54.120 | was about the monks that appealed to you. And maybe as that think tank director in

00:04:58.680 | DC, you end up shifting to, "Let me use the the capital I had developed there to

00:05:04.200 | do a consultant-based work," and I'm really just thinking off the top of my head here,

00:05:08.360 | "but consultant-based work where I help put together white papers, and I do it

00:05:14.920 | six months out of the year, and I could do it remote. I'm gonna move to this

00:05:20.760 | different location where life is a little bit slower. I'm going to move

00:05:24.560 | out of DC, and I'm moving to wherever, Chestertown, on the eastern shore or

00:05:31.160 | something like that, and I'm gonna have a slower life out there, and I'm gonna buy

00:05:34.400 | some property that's cheaper out there, I'm gonna have a huge garden that I'm gonna

00:05:37.280 | work on, and really the work I do, I do it during six months a year, and it's, I

00:05:40.640 | do it in my gazebo, I do it during the warmer months, and I do it in the morning,

00:05:44.400 | and you could kind of craft the whole life that has that element that you care

00:05:48.360 | about. The content of this life may have nothing to do with the content of the

00:05:52.240 | story that first told you about this element." So I'm a big believer in this

00:05:55.360 | now, a mythological interpretation of career fantasies. Extract the underlying

00:06:00.080 | archetypical elements that are driving your aspiration, purify them, isolate them

00:06:05.280 | from the specifics of that job, and then look at your landscape and say, "What could

00:06:11.280 | I feasibly do that is going to give me more of this thing that's really

00:06:14.720 | resonating with me?" And I think people have a lot of options. In other words, you

00:06:18.840 | can get a lot of guidance from these concrete stories, just like you can get a

00:06:22.320 | lot of guidance from the great myths of the past, without actually having to take

00:06:28.280 | them literally, without having to say, "I guess I have to go into Grendel's Den to

00:06:33.560 | find, you know, meaning in my life. I guess I have to kill a literal dragon and save

00:06:38.600 | the Virgin Princess in order to find drive in my life." Right? We don't actually

00:06:43.000 | have to take the myths literally to extract a lot of high-impact value into

00:06:49.680 | our life. Let's treat these career stories that resonate the same way. At

00:06:52.680 | least that's the idea that I'm working on recently.

00:06:58.080 | (upbeat music)

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Is the Monastic Life the Ultimate Deep Life?

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