On day four, it poured buckets all through the morning. I was barefoot in the lounge with tall windows shining onto uncomfortable wooden chairs, intensive reading and writing interrupted not by Youtube rabbit holes but by spurts of push-ups and dips. For the first time in what felt like years, I read for multiple hours on end. I was slightly sleep-deprived and slightly hungry, but those sensations were bodily, transcendible.
Three days prior.
Ahmet picks me up. Rain smacks the window, slinking down the tinted glass. He asks where I’m coming from & I tell him New York. He laughs. I love New York, he says.
This highway, like most highways, is indistinct. No characteristics identify the grey-green objects as of the South. My hands rest in my lap, thumbs drumming a metronomic rhythm across my knuckles. Like an old friend, a burbling anxiety asks me to choose between uneasy reflection or mollifying distraction. I’m glad Ahmet knows where we’re going.
He drops me off at the large, abandoned-looking visitor center. Like the Abbey and its accommodations, the visitor center's grandiose austerity appears hollowed out, in the shadow of an ongoing extinction. I follow a brick path laden with memorialized names and dates carved into the clay to the imposing grey-stone church.
Brother Philip meets me at the retreat house. He shakes flour from his hands before raising them in an offering of welcome. Buzzed grey hair and his shapeless habit underline a gaunt, sharp handsomeness. His high cheekbones crease into a wide smile as he ushers me into the retreat house.
Though signs lining the walls submit guests to the necessity of silence, Brother Philip whispers, the monks are allowed to cheat, chuckling softly. A brief tour shows reading nooks, a refectory offering coffee and cereal, and a series of dorm rooms, or as they are called in the monastery, cells. Cell might be a more accurate identifier; other than the Bible warming my pillow & a crucified Jesus ornament hanging from the door, the room is destitute of color and life.
Brother Philip leaves me to shower and settle in, reminding me to be at Vespers, the next prayer in the Divine Office (4th of 5 daily prayers) at 5:35 pm. With two hours to spare, I text my girlfriend and parents that I’ll be signing off from reachability for a couple days then switch my phone to Airplane mode.
Immediately the silence grows.
I was hoping, praying, that proximity to spiritual devotion might cure my contracting attention-span. Multi-tasking had become a default setting; no runs without music, cooking without sports radio, work without 18 tabs open. Decoupling my focus from the secondary stimuli that background it became both imperative and unimaginable. Beneath this layered construction of activity burbled the all-too familiar nervous twitch, incessantly opening and closing Instagram, then web browser, then messages, a childlike dependency on headphones, an instinct to skim, and most of all, a conditioned impatience which claws its way from silence towards stimulation.
According to the popular literature (self-help-y, grindset oriented) on what is essentially widespread ADD, our attention is detached, impersonal, a muscle that can be strengthened or left to atrophy. Paternal influencers preach crash-courses in attention-span remediation like 30-Day ab-workouts. We are rusty machines waiting to be lubricated with pseudo-psychology videos like Andrew Huberman’s Tools to Enhance Working Memory & Attention.
The language tends toward optimization, maximization, clouded in a thin veneer of wellness and health, behavior identifiable as valuable or useful. Your action is distilled into buckets: productive or unproductive, work or chores or exercise or relaxation. Chilling/vibing is allowed, but only after you hit x, y, and z markers.
For years I’ve stepped in and out of this mangled web of ideas, adopting and forgetting prophylactic measures like hastily-binned antibiotics. Meditation, digital abstinence, not jerking off, obsessive exercise, all tried and tested. Like a relapsing addict we externalize our collective-disease as a symptom of a corrosive environment and attempt to cure through behavior change.
Much as an alcoholic might view drinking, our digital-dependency and tweaky fidgeting appear to buoy our social life. But beneath this inconsistent surface you might, as I did, find a deeper set of ailments: an unrelenting, even spiritual, impatience which lurches toward instantaneous relief within arms reach, the gratification of which only feeds a resistance to confront our own dependency on disconnection.
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At 5:25 I crack open the tall wooden doors and enter the abbey. This church, it is immediately clear, was made for sunset. West-facing stained glass windows refract blue-orange light through the Virgin Mary’s body onto concrete blocks reaching aspirationally upwards. Ethereal hues bounce off the walls like the DVD-Video Screensaver on an old TV. Skinny white candlesticks illuminate 22 monks standing before wooden benches made for 80 monks, facing toward the altar recessed into the apse. Behind the altar hangs a mysterious red velvet curtain. I imagine God, hiding, waiting to peek out and say boo.
Brother Philip stands with closed posture solemn in reflection. I find my way to the creaky wooden pews, scantily occupied by a few faithful Georgians and six nuns visiting from Venezuela. I nudge for extended eye-contact with the nuns, prodding for sexual tension to spice up the service. I don’t know why their modesty is sexy, but it unfortunately is. I briefly apologize to God for my intrusive thoughts but also think He might find them funny.
If Sunday services are a joyous rendez-vous of prayer and food and fellowship, off-day services are hermetic, visitations often inspired by a reflective loneliness. On these days you’ll find middle-aged wives, shoulders shaking with heads in their hands, a lone teenager praying about lord knows what, the devout corralled by their deference to regimen. The bell chimes and the last few monks arrive. Brother Methodius (97 y.o.) shuffles in on his walker, feet staggering behind like a dog on two legs.
In my first service, I struggled to shut out a wandering inner-monologue. Fleeting moments of spiritual congruence with my environment were interrupted by a flip through the rolodex of distraction. I couldn’t help but curse my own weakness, an inability to surrender to the moment even when deprived of all stimulus (phone, friends, logistics). The monks, I quickly learned, would offer no spiritual salve to reform anxious fidgeting. But I’m no monk. I still need behavioral remedies.
Intellectualizing my distaste for habitual binging/scrolling/searching has failed to combat it. Rather, abstracting brain-rot only serves to rationalize further descent into depravity, self-disgust (for more on this read the Harpers gooning article). If relief was readily accessible, I’d always abuse it. Curbing access was the only route forward.
I feel impatience in my fingers first. Torqued over the keyboard, they prepare to pounce upon awaiting sites like 10 cats on 104 mice. (ctrl)(t)(y)(enter-ing) my way to youtube.com offers videos of dweebs playing League of Legends, compilations of Lebron lying, baddies that also play chess. I find my first digital contraceptive in BlockSite, a browser extension that disables access to chosen sites. I’m so braindead that I still (ctrl(t)(y)(enter) every day, but find only shame waiting for me at the blocked URL. I prefer pre-emptive shame, though, to retrospective guilt.
Next, I castrate my digital fluidity. In lieu of Chrome, I turn to DuckDuckGo. Popularized because it does not track users, it also fails at its basic function: finding what you are searching for. Chrome is crack, it is dopamine injected into your butthole. It is a luxury, first-class airplane with an attendant who rides your shit, it seamlessly transports you on a direct flight from hyperlink to hyperlink. DuckDuckGo is Spirit Airlines, checking your bag costs $380, they barely know where you’re flying, the flight attendant spits in your gin-and-tonic before turbulence spills it into your lap. I say, fly Spirit. Choose pain. It literally makes me not want to go on the internet.
Also, get AdBlock, it blocks your Ads. Sometimes when I mention AdBlock people convey a fear of computer viruses. To that I say, grow up. If you're under the age of 40 and still getting viruses you have some serious reflecting to do.
Unless you’re a monk (a la Brother Philip), you are likely addicted to your phone. When I see people twitchily opening and closing apps like a baby reaching for a binky, it feels like someone is using the Cruciatus curse on me.
Pacifying your smart phone could mean one of two things: 1) incapacitate it to its bare necessities (e.g. set time limits on every app, go black and white, put it in your backpack) or 2) get a dumb phone. I took path 2 and got the CAT-S22 Flip. It runs an Android OS so I can theoretically download and use apps but, like DuckDuckGo, is sufficiently unyielding that it's grating to fidget with. When I do reach out in need of distraction, it's to call everyone on my contact list until someone answers, which is a habit that produces not a counterfeited-pleasure, but the genuine article.
By impeding access to entertainment, the ensuing boredom will hamper your propensity to say no to activities. It’s good to go do things, it's almost always worth it, and when it’s not then at least you learned that there are a lot of incels at chess club. If you disagree, watch Yes Man or Liar Liar, they are basically the same movie, but were both Comedy Central classics during the three year span when my parents got cable between 2007 and 2010 (my dad wanted to watch Obama pop off on MSNBC).
Essentially, Jim Carrey fucks over everyone around him by lying and cheating before imbibing the pill of honesty and optimism and deciding that life is not about being a rationally-calculating actor but about giving yourself over to the people around you, relinquishing your perverted sense of transactional fairness in favor of spontaneous goodwill.
–--
The next morning, I woke at 3:45 am for Vigils at 4. I pulled on a purple sweater and green trousers and walked out into what I hoped would be warm southern sunlight. The stars, as it turned out, showed no sign day would ever come, moon was at full blast. Monks shuffled into the dark abbey. I found myself somewhere between dream and reality. How do they do this every day, week after week, year after year? How do they stay so singularly focused?
Later that afternoon, I sat down with Brother Philip. I asked him, how does he separate his spiritual life from his practical one, ensure he's not in church worried about overbaked biscotti? (Baking is the church vocation.) We sat across from each other, backs erect in plush, green chairs nestled into one of the retreat house’s nooks. He leaned back into his chair and looked upwards, pausing as if lost in thought.
There’s no difference, he answered.
No difference? Between what?
Between work and prayer, between my practical life and spiritual life. Work is prayer, prayer is work. Time does not stutter like a river scarred with dams and locks, it's continuous, fluid.
Minimizing the devotion of Monastic brotherhood to a single aphorism, we get the simple logic: how you do one thing is how you do everything. How you smile is how you make love is how you play tennis.
In my conversation with Brother Philip, I recognized a drive not towards self-actualization, but something more foreign. There was no egoic compensation for the monastic renunciation of worldly pleasures. Why deprive yourself of the pleasures and possibilities of a first kiss, riding a bike through the park, licking batter off the spoon? Why reduce the explosive possibilities of the ego to a paltry vessel of obedience? Didn’t he know what he was missing out on?
His asceticism brimmed with humility, his ego subject to something greater. In his words and lifestyle, I saw my own prideful pursuits reflected back towards me 一 my childlike hope for a perfected attention span, transcendence through optimization.
But we’re not the composite of the places we distribute our attention. Taking out the trash isn’t a distraction, so why does it sometimes feel like it? Fully diagnosing chronic impatience would be laborious and lowkey you’re probably already thinking about going on instagram instead of reading more, idiot. But I’ll briefly reflect on how the internet fucks us (me) up, psychologically.
The hyperlink is the central highway of the web. A book can make references, point to other information, but the words can only direct, not transport. The hyperlink ensures that nothing is static; pages are daisy-chained, wrapped, spiraled, around each other into a knotted mess. Attachment to any one site or image or idea is tenuous, provisional. Each link is placed in competition with another, and the promise of novelty is always more seductive than the triviality of the essential. The internet provides steady nourishment for our insatiable diet for new information, where nothing is given or constant. Information, here, lies somewhere between permanence and impermanence: scrupulously stored but infinitely malleable, always in contention.
Everyone and everything competes for our attention. I hate talking to people who have an AirPod in or hand clutching their phone. Whatever dumb shit we’re chatting about is going to lose the battle to whatever is happening on your phone. Small-talk can never beat porn, death, a streamer talking about the Maduro trial while speed-running Pokemon Emerald.
Our phones promise to solve the problem they’ve ultimately intensified. If we feel disconnected, abstracted from the people and things around us, we’re just not using the technology correctly. How could you possibly feel lonely, the whole world is constantly in view? You’re trapped in a purgatory where intimacy is always, and at the same time never, possible. Meta recently reported that just 7% of time spent on Instagram in 2025 was spent viewing content from friends. Genuine social pleasure is promised, to be met only with anonymous relief.
I continue to confront my own limits on a daily basis, both spiritually and behaviorally. I usually lose both battles. The world, as it turned out, is not as conducive to mental quiet as the monastery. But if there is one thing I learned, it's that even in deep silence you can find considerable pleasure.
–--
During the four hours of my morning which preceded breakfast, I underwent intense bouts of exhaustion and hunger. Waking three hours before the sun is como se dice disorienting. By 4:30 I was famished, stomach grumbling in the abbey like a de-muffled car.
But by 7 am mass (2nd of 5 prayers) I had transcended bodily need. Never again, I thought, would I need food or sleep. By breakfast at 8, though, I was once again starved for food and sleep. I devoured 3 bowls of cereal and 3 cups of coffee. (The coffee was perfunctory; what I was feeling internally at that point was irresolvable with uppers. Any level-headedness had been replaced with a slight mania.)
After breakfast I had a few hours of free time before Sext (3rd of 5 prayers). On that fateful fourth day of my sentence, distraction had been relinquished for my first period of prolonged focus. Following Sext I decided to explore the Monastery’s 1300 acres of cypress and maple trees. The rain showed no sign of slowing but movement felt vital, so I pulled on my long underwear and zipped up my reflective blue rain jacket and pushed outside. From the abbey, footpaths led into the woods in every direction.
I put my feet on auto-pilot and started out. I blinked, and realized I’d been walking and whistling for what must have been an hour. My jaw was sore, like I’d been chewing gum for days, but the pain felt somehow external. I was a few miles from the monastery and had long lost sight of any tread path. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Overhead, reaching boughs sheltered my hooded head like an umbrella. For the first time in a long time, I felt truly, truly alone.
Having long lost any inner monologue, my mind turned, strangely, to an episode of Mr. Bean, but instead of Rowan Atkinson, I was in the brown tweed suit and trousers. Arriving at the abbey, the Brothers welcomed me in. I imagined a series of Mr. Bean-like slap–stickeries; spitting out gross soup, making weird faces during mass, farting at inopportune times. You get the shtick.
Playing these bits out in my head, I started laughing out loud. They were hilarious. Then I zoomed out and saw myself, in the woods in Georgia, walking alone, rain gracing my cheeks, surrounded by beauty, laughing about Mr. Bean, and I started really, really laughing. I was bent over, hands on stomach, unable to inhale. Tears fell down my cheeks. It was obvious to me, even in the moment, that I was having a religious experience, euphoric not in the presence of God, but Mr. Bean. For five minutes I laughed, then stopped before redoubling over. That, my friends, is what true pleasure feels like. No Reel will ever be funnier to me than that.
END