The Ontological Fraud of Silicon Valley’s Monk Mode
Across social media and the wellness economy, “Monk Mode” mutates a metaphor into a product line. Monk Mode hashtags command over 76 million views on TikTok, fueled by productivity influencers like Iman Gadzhi, who markets the concept as a high-performance “protocol” for financial dominance.
Apps like Freedom (claiming to gain 2.5 hours of productivity daily), Cold Turkey (which “blocks” your computer) and Opal (purporting to reclaim an average of “6 years” of life) now sell the capacity to disconnect. Gadzhi himself bundles “Monk Mode” tracking into high-ticket courses — selling for as much as $1,500 — that promise to help young men launch six-figure agencies.
Standing inside the Aladzha Monastery, a 13th-century complex gouged directly into a limestone cliff near Varna, Bulgaria, I realized that historic monks pursued something closer to its opposite. Medieval Hesychasts inhabited Aladzha’s cells not to optimize work, but to dismantle the self through exposure, vigilance and sustained attention. Their silence demanded endurance rather than recovery.
The battery myth
Why should anyone care? The robust hollowness and historical inaccuracy of the “Monk Mode” promise underwrite a booming market. A $6.8 trillion wellness industry now profits by pathologizing ordinary effort, boredom and quiet. Then it sells technological protection from the myth it perpetuates. Marketing strips the aesthetic from the monastery, and it categorically inverts the logic. Contemporary “Monk Mode” borrows monastic aesthetics yet rests on a fundamental logical error: the battery myth. The $6.8 trillion wellness industry views the mind as a battery.
Apps like Calm, Headspace and the various “Monk Mode” blockers share an almost identical premise. This narrative insists that modern life drains us, willpower is a finite resource and we must “plug in” to their digital quietude to recharge. It treats focus, labor and stress as forms of “toxicity” that deplete your health bar, and implies that the only way to function is to pay for a tool that helps you recover.
For decades, psychology validated this mythology. Roy Baumeister formalized it in the late 1990s as the “Ego Depletion” theory. This theory argues that self-control burns a limited biological fuel, analogous to glucose. Resist a cookie now, and you lack the energy to solve a puzzle later.
One problem remains: the theory crumbled under replication.
Beyond the battery: the mind as an antifragile system
In 2016, a massive international effort involving 23 laboratories attempted to replicate the original ego depletion effects. They found no significant evidence to support the theory. The biological reality of a “depleted” mind turned out to be less a physiological fact than a psychological suggestion. Under scrutiny, the “battery” model collapsed.
If the battery isn’t real, why do we feel drained? Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck offered a different answer: we feel depleted because we believe we are depleted.
In her landmark study on “implicit theories of willpower,” Dweck found that depletion occurred primarily in participants who viewed willpower as a limited resource. Those who viewed willpower as self-generating — where focus begets focus — showed no performance decline. In fact, under high load, their performance often improved. Similarly, Alia Crum’s work on “stress mindsets” shows that viewing stress as a signal of engagement rather than damage changes the body’s hormonal response, turning a catabolic (breakdown) event into an anabolic (growth) one.
This reveals the profound danger of the “Monk Mode” ecosystem. By selling us tools to protect our attention from the slightest friction, these platforms calcify the belief that our will is fragile and finite. These apps train us to be helpless without a timer and put our attention in a cast.
Nassim Taleb offers a better metaphor: the mind is not a battery; it is an antifragile system. Batteries degrade with use. Biological systems — muscles, bones, neurons — strengthen with resistance. Taleb distinguishes the resilient, which withstands stress, from the antifragile, which feeds on stress. The monks of Aladzha grasped this without theory. They dove into silence to approach God. Modern “Monk Mode” inverts this entirely.
Instrumental vs. terminal silence
If science disproves the battery myth, history exposes a deeper forgery: the pretense that “Monk Mode” and monasticism aim at the same horizon. They do not. They point in opposite directions.
For the app user, silence functions as a tactic. You tap “start” to clear a backlog or grind through a code sprint. The quiet operates strictly as a pit stop on the productivity circuit. Its meaning remains forever deferred: I disconnect so that I can return sharper; I rest so that I can produce. The market tolerates stillness only as long as it pays for itself in future output.
The Hesychasts who carved cells into Aladzha’s cliff played a different game. They did not retreat to the limestone to reset before rejoining the workforce. In the texts of the Philokalia, a collection of monastic writings, hesychia (stillness) names a final orientation. Silence is terminal, not instrumental.
This divergence produces a distinct texture of experience. The secular “Monk Mode” ideal actually rebrands the pursuit of Flow: the state described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, where the self dissolves into the task, time slips away and effort becomes frictionless. Much of the wellness stack — greyscale screens, ambient loops, blockers — exists to lubricate this slide into the zone, with the goal of making work feel weightless.
Hesychast practice, nepsis, operates as anti-flow. Translated as “watchfulness” or “sobriety,” nepsis appears in the Philokalia as unceasing guard duty. The monk wages invisible warfare against the assaulting thoughts and images that crowd the mind. The practitioner seeks to catch themselves in the act of every resentment, fantasy and craving rather than losing themselves in a task.
Ultimately, this clash is ontological.
Modern “Monk Mode” works through addition. It adds an app, a streak and a gamified layer to the day to build what German-based philosopher Byung-Chil Han calls the “Achievement Subject,” a self optimized for capitalism. Hesychasm works through subtraction. It strives for kenosis, or self-emptying. The monk seeks to decrease so that the Divine might increase. He dismantles the very ego that the productivity app seeks to optimize. From this vantage point, the modern interface looks less like a descendant of the monastery than its utter opposite. The app turns silence into a lubricant for reentry. The cave turns silence into a solvent for exit.
The business of fragility
This ontological error masks a financial motive. According to the Global Wellness Institute, the wellness economy reached a $6.8 trillion valuation in 2024 and is projected to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029. The broader mindfulness meditation apps market was valued at $939 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $19 billion by 2034. Subscription-based revenue models dominate the monetization strategy. In January 2025, Calm generated approximately $8 million in monthly in-app revenue, while Headspace generated around $4 million. These two apps alone hold over 43% of the global meditation app market.
This revenue model relies on a dark premise: to keep growing, the industry requires a customer who remains permanently fragile. The industry survives on leasing solutions indefinitely. Sociologist Ivan Illich termed this dynamic “social iatrogenesis” — a state where the treatment generates the disease.
In the attention economy, a resilient worker who can regulate their own focus, endure boredom and sit in silence without a paid subscription represents a failed customer. The market needs you to feel broken. It needs you to believe that your mind leaks like a battery, that silence functions as a premium feature and that you lack the capacity to face your own thoughts without a guided audio track. If an app actually taught you Hesychast discipline, you would delete it. Therefore, the app must never cure you; it must only offer temporary relief. It must sell the sensation of focus while atrophying the muscle of focus.
Originally published in The Fair Observer and edited by Kaitlyn Diana.
