The Monks to Money Continuum

Or how you're stuck between capitalism and monasticism

Sometimes I feel like my psyche is frayed—it’s the beaten down tread of a tank, in desperate need of retirement or repair, yet it marches forward mechanically because the operator tells it to. It may last until the end of the war or perhaps an outside force will stick a grenade in its proverbial spokes and pop! The whole tank will come to a grinding halt.

In short, I feel on a spiritual level that I’m between a rock and hard place. And to simplify to an embarrassing level—that rock is buddhism, monasticism, asceticism, or maybe even stoicism and that hard place is capitalism, career, or success.

This is the Monks to Money continuum.

To me, the two seem and feel entirely incompatible…but of course that doesn’t mean they actually are.

I grew up being spoon fed the Money. I grew up naively believing in the infallibility of the mythical American Dream; in its upward mobility and in its endless opportunity. I grew up with the same poison F. Scott Fitzgerald liked to feed himself—we are two Minnesotans with a bitter envy for those who had more.* I grew up by measuring my own worth with almost exclusively by external metrics. I grew up believing that validation was around the corner of my next achievement.

*Apologies for comparing myself to F. Scott.

Now, as I barrel toward my 30th birthday, I’m becoming increasingly interested in the Monks—more from necessity than from any sort of enlightened growth.

But the world of the Monks is foreign to me—it is foreign to most Americans. It is the path that cares not for cars, status, degrees, nicer wines, fancier food, fame, and fortune. It forsakes earthly pleasures because pleasures are a bandaid laid over life’s innate suffering, and when those bandaids come off the suffering gets worse. This Money cycle repeats itself over and over again, whispering in your ear like the devil on your shoulder, telling you the next hit of dopamine is the one that will solve all your problems.

You should never say never but I’ll never be a Monk. At least not in my current iteration. Not only do I believe that I lack the discipline, but I know in my heart that I don’t want to be one. I like cars. I like fancy food. Fortune doesn’t sound so bad. Most of all I like America—and even if the American Dream is now perverted or dead or was always just a myth—it’s (sadly?) the closest concept I have to God—and Gods are not so easily replaced.

In fact, I believe Money is somewhat programmed into our DNA. It’s a far cry from what it once was. It’s much more impure and much more frivolous. But the Money end of the continuum is what we used to call Survival. Our evolution instilled in us the will to adapt to and mold the world around us, and at some point we got so good at it that we had to channel that primitive energy into something else and voilà: Money and everything that comes with it.

I’m an oil man.

You could even argue that we are more instinctually inclined to Money than to Monasticism. For isn’t the existence of our expansive consciousness, which is brutally aware of its own mortality and consequentially must imbue its existence with meaning—a sign that we are built for ambition and aspiration and calculation?

If we were built to be monks, would we not be more like the dog? Would we not be content to eat, to sleep, to find infinite joy in a bouncing tennis ball?

Even if we all had the discipline and the desire to become Monks… would that work? Do you know how to grow food? Do you know how to exist without incessant entertainment? When’s the last time you sat still for 10 minutes and did nothing?

Aren’t we a little bit too far up the Tower of Babylon to turn back now?

I have to return some video tapes.

So there lies the crux of it all. How do you exist in our society—how do you feed that ancient desire to be ever pushing forward without becoming Patrick Bateman or Daniel Plainview? How do you prevent yourself from becoming a creature entirely devoid of soul? How do you seek “success” without being defined by it?

Or better yet, as my good friend Augustus Britton put it:

Can you be a monk in the marketplace?

He seems to think it’s possible. I’m not entirely convinced—but I have little choice but to believe. Belief in that center is all I have left…it’s the only ground I can find where my God of external validation can still live and yet be far enough away not to kill me with its dastardly and awesome power.

That belief is the sole force preventing the pop! of my tank tread.

Can I be a monk in the marketplace?

I don’t know.

But I can sure as hell try.

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