> We might think we invented WFH, but for the first monks remote working was standard. After all, God, much like 4G, is omnipresent. Yet the Benedictine guide makes clear that this privileged existence is often a struggle. Some early monks wept, constantly. Many said it was a sign of their faith – but, having experienced several lockdowns, some of us might be more tempted to diagnose the depression of enforced isolation and flat days on repeat, time without end.
It seems the author does not know anything about monks, people, WFH and whole lot of other things.
The title is Hell is other people and yet in article it is said that it's better to go to office because experiencing hell through other people is better than personal hell.
WFH is not like being a monk for God's sake. In fact, you can have very active social life and you get to choose people who you spend time with. Unlike in office where you are forced to get along with people you know nothing about.
I would also note that, etymology of the term and famous examples notwithstanding, the monastic lifestyle is a fraternal one, such as rarely exists anymore: you are living and working within a community of people doing and living the same way as you. "Brother" is even the common title for a monk.
This used to be the most common way to live; a farmer with 10-40 acres finds himself in a community of other farmers, but there aren't many farmers today and industrialization has pushed them far apart.
Aside from the military, most of us just have day jobs, and go home to our separate lives at night.
Lately I’ve suspected that monasteries were just Medieval frat houses. I mean, come on, they spent all their time figuring out how to make better beer.
There were two vague time periods to medieval monastic life. By the late middle ages it had transitioned to pretty much as you say (although, every monastery was different). Centuries of donations of land from nobles had meant that they didn't really need to work anymore in order to have an extremely upper class life style. And centuries of 'donations' of second and third born male offspring (who otherwise wouldn't get an inheritance anyway) had eroded the spirit of a lot of the piety rules they operated under since a lot of these kids never really wanted to be monks in the first place.
Traditional farming in Europe and most of the world wasn't even a farmer having their own plot of land. Most farming was collaborative, fields were held in common and individuals owned certain portions of the fields mixed with others. Much of the work of weeding, plowing, etc had to be done as a community. 10-40 acres is also far more than someone would be capable of farming as an individual household before modern technology.
Correct. Most villages had one large field surround a few buildings. The split was split up some standard ways. If the village was on a road, the divisions usually fanned out from the road, making the division map look striped. I’d the village sat on a river, often the divisions would radiate out making the map look like a corner of a pie with many slices.
The Christian monastic life is nothing like living in farming community. The monasteries rules every detail of your life. There are rules about what and when you can do, say, eat, wear, everything. On the extreme end, you have monks who can see other people for like 1 hour a day or did wow of silence. Oh, and they dont get to pick person they will be with during that 1 hour of socialization. The rest of time is in isolation and activities for every minute are prescribed.
And even in more moderate monasteries, you still have whole day prescribed. Who you socialize with is controlled too. You don't get to voice opinion about rules. You don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening.
> There are rules about what and when you can do, say, eat, wear, everything.
How long have you been in the workforce and what sort of places have your worked? I have personal experience with employers that had rules on one or more of these.
Also, I lived in a monastery, as a monk, for a while. Don't discount the article. Your whole day is not prescribed, you can socialize outside the community, and there are discussions around rules. You even get some evenings off to go out and about.
I am well into my career- I am not young. I worked ever since I finished college and during summer. I did manual/simple jobs (which I fact included uniform and employer provided housing) shortly and then white collars jobs.
Frankly, you are full of it. Your personal experience with employers don't mean much in forum where almost everyone is employed. There is nothing special about having experience with employers.
Given how you write about being employed, it is safe to say you don't mind twisting situation. You also try to argue by implying insults, which is not convincing. It just seeks emotional response.
I agree with everything you said, except your last centence:
"You don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening."
At some point in my youth I visited a monastery on weekends, because I was friends with some seminarians studying there. People knew how to have fun. Perhaps not every day, only on some days of the week, but you certainly could hang out with friends. There was at least one or two people in the group with a car, and there were favorite spots people liked to go to.
I'm sure there are a lot stricter places, but for what it's worth, I know more than one person from this group (class?) that went on to become priests, working at churches today.
Priest and monk are operate under two massively different rule sets. The "you don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening" is something I got from reading rules of various monasteries (both male and female).
First, having friend, as in favorite person you spend more time with and prioritize, was literally against the rules. You are not supposed to do that. Second, evening was not free recreation time. You eat dinner, you pray, you have chores, you study etc.
You read some books but you want to argue with someone who literally socialized with a monk? How about this: I was a monk. What you're saying is wrong. You do get evenings off at times. Yes, there are some orders that are very strict and isolated, but there are also mendicant and missionary orders.
I know it's tempting to feel we are smart thus we can speak to things of which we have only read, but (and I'm assuming you're in software development because you're here) if a consultant with no actual experience came along and told you how to do your job because "these are best practices", wouldn't you be a bit skeptical?
They say they read some rulebooks that sounded extremely strict, you say there are some monasteries that are extremely strict; you're both agreeing with the language of disagreement.
Would be interesting to hear what countries you all are talking about. I mean, what "Catholic" means in Italy, Ireland, Mexico and the Philippines varies to some degree, for instance.
I argued with someone who socialized with people in seminars. Those are not monks. Priests are not monks either. There is also difference between monk and brother, nun and sister.
What you are saying is that cloistered somehow don't count. Maybe you was in freest order there is, but the rest of them count too.
You also argue absurdly aggressive and arrogant way for a monk.
You are not the only ex-monk out there and in fact, ex-monks or those who gave that up during formation do talk about these rules.
For nearly every monastic rule, there's centuries that people have spent coming up with ways to perhaps break the spirit of, but not the letter. For example, St. Benedict says no speaking during meal time? There's a whole sign language specific to christian monks during mealtime.
This has been like, a lovely digression, but the actual point I was trying to make was about the sense of living and working in a community.
The office-, factory-, shop-worker leaves their home each day to go to their work, and leaves their work each night to return to their home. They live in two worlds that may overlap but are frequently quite separate.
A farmer lives in one world, the farm. The work on the farm never really ends; you may not be working 16-hour days from birth to death, but it isn't contained with a 9-5 M-F schedule. You also don't really leave your home to go to work. You work with your parents, your children, your siblings, and you are always near them. Your neighbors are also farmers, and if you don't occasionally help each other out, you at least will talk shop with them. Your entire life blends into one big sphere rather than bouncing between two.
A monk in the monastery leads that same sort of singular existence: they are always a monk, and never not a monk. They may have an hour here or there between worship or material labors to do as they will, but they never clock out from being a monk. Meanwhile, while they may have left their birth-family, they are always with their brothers. They worship with their brothers, eat with their brothers, work with their brothers.
Working from home doesn't feel like a unified existence, in the same way; it feels like I leave my family for approximately 8 hours each day, less lunch, and go nowhere. I may be able to work productively enough, but it is a third thing, to me, not like being either an office-worker moving between two worlds or a farmer living in one.
Yeah, Hell is other people does not mean "other people suck". It's more that people perceive you one way, that you then perceive this perception of you resulting in painful dissonance between who you are viewed as, and who you are subjectively. To others you're an external object. To yourself you're the subject. Your inability to escape this dissonance is what the hell here is.
Basically, it would be less confusing if it were phrased 'hell it my perception of other people's perceptions of me'.
As the text you are quoting (!) says, the first monks were solo: stylites on pillars, hermits in caves, etc. Communal monastic living came later, and brought with it the inevitable social tensions you see in any group of people living and working together.
I for one, can't really make anything out of this article. Is it a joke or just a poor attempt at comparing monasticism with corporate life? Or is it both?
It's both! This is the style of all the pieces in Economist's year-end 1843 magazine: thought-provoking, but entertaining and not meant to taken terribly seriously.
It's not poor. It seems a lot of people on HN are dismissing the advice in the story because they have mistaken ideas about what monastic life is like and, for some reason God only knows, conclude that the author doesn't know what she's talking about.
As someone who actually lived as a monastic for a time, I can tell you that a. monastic life is not like what HN wags think it is and b. the article is insightful
Can you though? For most of mass, forced WFH experiment social activities were literally forbidden by law. To venture out the house after 8pm meant risking arrest or tear gassing by the government. In America.
In California there were lots of people walking around outside after curfew. And you were always allowed to leave your home at any time to exercise. There was often a police presence down at the beach, but they didn't enforce anything. Not even fines.
There’s a lot of video evidence to the contrary on your beach claim.
Personally I was nearly run over by a police suv and tackled off my skateboard at noon by an officer in a major American city for violating park closure.
It depends on the city. In LA people still played pickup basketball and soccer despite whatever the mayor was saying and the police only got serious about the beaches a few times. Surfers never stopped going out naturally.
There was an 8pm curfew with emergency alerts broadcast to everyone’s cellphone. You were only allowed to be out if you were heading home. I was out at the time when the alert was issued, and got gassed along with hundreds of others. There are news articles about this.
The cops were only enforcing curfew on protestors and that was only like a few blocks of the city. You could still drive around town fine in elsewhere LA at least during the curfew. Cops don't really pull people over here that often to begin with.
I think here you are mixing up pandemic-related WFH and protest-related curfews from a much shorter period of time in 2020 (under a week, where I was). WFH - what the article is about - and pandemic restrictions were much less aggressively enforced.
Ah you’re correct. There was a separate 11pm curfew that came a few weeks later from the health authorities. But the 8pm curfew was from from law enforcement. Regardless, of whether the curfew is 8pm or 11pm or enforced with rubber bullets or official letterhead, it’s still restrictive.
Mostly people peaceably assembling to protest police violence. Sometimes they were just having a vigil, not even protesting. This was big news all through 2020, so the poster probably reasonably assumed it didn't need citation.
Example: that time Capitol police tear gassed protestors so Trump could go have a photo op with a bible at a church. They weren't even out past curfew, but that was the way the police justified it.
Even people who usually defend the police were taken aback by the relatively tame response by the same police to pro-Trump protestors later on before the January 6th coup attempt.
It seems the author does not know anything about monks, people, WFH and whole lot of other things.
The title is Hell is other people and yet in article it is said that it's better to go to office because experiencing hell through other people is better than personal hell.
WFH is not like being a monk for God's sake. In fact, you can have very active social life and you get to choose people who you spend time with. Unlike in office where you are forced to get along with people you know nothing about.