On Mental Monasteries

2026.08.09

CLXIV

[Beyond Deep Work; Blobs on a Screen; Phone Pickups; What do you Think in the Shower?; Jet Skiing to Work; Coding on Naxos & in a Viennese Penthouse; Statues in the Mountains; A Cloister in the City; Inertia; Romanticizing the Net; The Lindy Net; Politics & Hacker Houses; Discipline as a Cookbook]

Thesis: Focus isn't just about quantity of work, it's about what your brain solves when you’re not paying attention. Environment has an incredible impact on this.

[Beyond Deep Work]

I've spent the last 13 days on a beach in Greece and a hacker house in Vienna.

While there, I was thinking a lot about focus. Not just focus in the sense of 'how much are you working,' but focus in the sense of what problems is your brain trying to solve when you're not paying attention.

I was worried before I left that I would maybe not get quite as much work done. The change of scenery has proved fruitful, and I've actually completed some quite impactful and complex work here.

I also have been reading a lot, receiving quite a bit of novelty, and spending exceedingly little time on social media, even LinkedIn.

Most interestingly, I've had the clarity of thought to catch myself thinking about some bullshit and redirect the mental energy to productive pursuits. Perhaps, when staying in one place for a while, it becomes more challenging to see those patterns.

I've written about ‘monk mode’ & focus & deep work a lot before (here, here, here), but I think I'm beginning to understand another layer to focus that I haven't quite grasped in the past. Or maybe I grasped, but didn't realize the importance of it.

Forcing yourself to complete work undisturbed and with a high degree of focus and limiting distractions are powerful ways to take back your brain.

But it's not just a one time thing, it's a muscle you build that enables you to constantly decide what you want to think about and focus on.

Practicing exercising this muscle while I've been traveling has given me a glimpse into how much of a decision where your thoughts go can actually be.

Perhaps it’s that I’m reading Anathem, or have learned a little bit more about HF0 recently, but I’ve been pondering about a monastic environment where people are able to focus on complex problems and nothing else. Other people have figured it out before, I'm maybe just beginning to appreciate the concept.

This post will read a lot more like loosely connected anecdotes than you might be used to, but it's a more accurate representation of how (un)formulated my thoughts are now.

[Blobs on a Screen]

Sitting on a train, writing part of this, peeking over the shoulder of the man in front of me, through the seats.

He's looking at a little glowing rectangle in his hands. It's playing a video with an overweight man's face in the top half of the screen, and some game being played in the bottom half. The game involves some blobs that consume one another to get bigger. I played something like this when I was younger.

The video man's face has these extreme emotes, as if he's witnessing something shocking, something of gravity. His friend being assaulted or chased by a bear, or a rock coming tumbling off a mountain nearly missing his home.

Meanwhile, the blob on the screen keeps getting bigger as it rolls over the other blobs. Is this what is exciting him so?

I wonder, if I asked the man sitting in front of me if any part of him wanted to watch that particular video, what he would say. His gut reaction might be yes. What if he truly thought of it, though? And considered the space of everything else he could be doing during that train ride? Felt what it would be like to be doing something else... would he still say that he wanted to watch that thing?

[Phone Pickups]

Watch yourself when you deal with some challenging problem. Unless you've been practicing, I bet you'll notice that your compulsion to pick up your phone or go into your inbox or check Slack is strongest when you've gotten to the actual hardest part of the issue.

When your brain has to work to figure something out.

Oh, it'd be so much easier to just check email than to finish this thing.

Or, if something bad and confusing happens… checking your phone and finding some quasi warranted distraction would be such a relief, wouldn't?

Sit with your thoughts instead, or keep solving the problem. That moment when you want to look away is the very moment that not looking away matters most.

[What do you Think in the Shower?]

When I venture on to my own little lighted rectangle, it tends to show me videos of men claiming to be richer than I yelling advice at me.

Once such stream of bytes I consumed lately was from a man named Alex Becker, who allegedly has a business doing $40M ARR, bootstrapped. The way he talks and the things he says make me want to believe he's not lying, and perhaps he's not.

In one video with a particularly bombastic thumbnail, he talks about locking yourself in a room in a cheap, boring place, like Kansas City, with nothing to do except read, workout, and work on your business.

The point isn't just about the quantity of hours worked; you don't need this kind of isolation to 'work a lot.’

The point is focus... where does your brain go when you’re taking a shower? Or maybe when you're on a walk, or staring at a wall?

Does it go to that thing the person said the other day that actually doesn't matter but for some reason you're still workshopping a response to it? Does it go to your anime girlfriend or is spent loathing someone you hardly know just because of something they did or said on the internet?

Or does it goes to solving the biggest problem facing your business, or whatever it is you do?

In a way, I think he is talking about creating a monastery of one with your brain. He’s talking about you controlling your own thoughts.

[Jet Skiing to Work]

Another video the math being run on some silicon in a big, well cooled room showed me recently was a clip of the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, being interviewed by two tech bro nerds.

Travis says he jet skis to work. One of the pair says something like, "Ah does it help you think more?"

Travis looks at him with utter confusion on his face. Immediately says ‘No.’ He kind of looks confused, and goes on to explain that he basically does it because no one else does and it’s cool and fun.

The look on Travis' face says that everything in life isn't a fucking optimization problem: you don't need some theoretical justification to do something awesome.

It's easy to become so obsessed with trying to get the optimal solve that you never actually do anything interesting. This, in itself, can make the 'cure' become worse than the disease.

[Coding on Naxos & in a Viennese Penthouse]

I did a lot of good work on Naxos and in Vienna.

Most days, I had more caffeine than a bio hacker would say is healthy. Some days, I had a very light breakfast and forgot to eat until dinner. Other days, I did the Greek thing of eating too big of a lunch and then taking a 40 minute nap. The bricks of fried feta cheese covered in honey had and have my heart.

Still, I got a lot of important, high leverage items done. Removed some major backend bottle necks, 3x'd our coverage of jobs, and pushed a bunch of other moderately important items.

Interestingly enough, I spent more time than usual watching and catching my thoughts.

"Oh, that's stupid and not interesting and you don't actually want to think about that."

Then, I'd move on to the next thing.

You can do all of the optimizations in the world, and have the perfect environment, and even sit down like you're going to work, and get nothing meaningful done.

Or, you can catch your thoughts and lock in anywhere.

[Statues in the Mountains]

Friday afternoon in Greece, I signed up for a 7 hour boat tour for Saturday. I felt like since I was there, I was 'supposed' to go and do something touristy like that.

I woke up the next day, sat for a bit, and decided not to go, even though I'd lose the money I had already paid. I spent the next 7 hours working on some challenging engineering problems we were facing at WhiteWhale. I'm so glad I did; they were pretty critical, solving them shored up some issues that let me focus on higher leverage items.

After that, there were some statues 6 miles away in the mountains I wanted to see. Considered renting an ATV to do it. First place I went to was out of ATV's, second place was closed.

I took it as an omen and said fuck the ATVs. I started running towards the statues.

I stopped at a grocery store near the start, bought water, honey, and salt. The whole thing was impulsive, but not reckless; I did recognize it was the hottest part of the day on a Mediterranean Island.

On my first break, I made an energy drink out of these, but turns out the water was carbonated, because I can't fucking read Greek, and can't be bothered to look at pictograms to interpret these things. Still worked fine.

When I finished my run / walk and made it the statues, there were a lot of friendly cats. A younger girl looked at one affectionately, then saw it stalk over to a bird carcass to smell and lick it; the girl's affection gave way to disgust.

I tried getting a taxi back, but the taxi company couldn't be bothered to send for me along some winding mountain road during what was rush hour. And I didn't care enough to do the American thing of multiplying the sticker price to get what I wanted.

So I ran back instead.

Kind of like jet skiing to work, or something.

[A Cloister in the City]

I'm fascinated by the hacker house in Vienna I stayed at this week.

I was viewing it sort of like a cloister or a monastery for building companies.

It's on the fourth floor of a building in the 10th district, which doesn't really have much to do.

The activation energy to leave is kind of high - the city center, for instance, is 30 minutes away by transit. It was my first time in Vienna, and for four days, I didn't go. I'm sure it didn't help that I arrived in the midst of a heat wave. The day I got there, it was actually the single hottest day in the city in recorded history.

The hacker house was almost like a castle in the sky, a floating cloister: it had a garden on the roof for the sun, a pool inside, spacious co working areas, a sauna (when I was there, one needed just go outside for a similar experience), plenty of windows, a 3D printer, books, a maze of rooms sort of like you might expect carved into a mountain monastery, and, most importantly, other people building.

I didn't really have a reason to leave, especially with food delivery being so cheap in the city.

This made it different than my hacker house in Cambridge. There, people come and go to school, or to their offices, or sometimes to events. In Vienna, you could tell that quite a few of the residents spent a lot more time in the house itself, working there.

And since there was this very open floor plan in the main area between two floors, sort of like an open tower, that was contrasted by the sort of cells everyone could retreat into for isolation, I could see information flowing pretty easily when needed and absolute focus also being easy to obtain.

The feeling that everyone stayed there was giving what I perceived as a sort of monastic energy.

Kudos to Constantin & those who run it.

[Inertia]

So, what do I think about in the shower?

In some ways, I've controlled my vices more than many men I know.

Yet, I don't always think enjoyable or productive or meaningful thoughts in the shower or on walks or when staring at a wall.

And to be clear, I'm not arguing that you should always think high complexity things, I doubt if that's possible. I'm more so even just talking about NOT thinking bullshit thoughts: percolating on low value drama, wondering about celebrities, or what someone thinks of you, etc etc.

Again, I've been catching myself thinking about some similar things, and fighting it off. Thinking about things I WANT to think about instead.

The interesting part is if you already have some level of discipline and impulse control, I've found it shockingly easy to apply, as long as you're aware of what’s happening.

It certainly has something to do with inertia and just taking that one instance to set your mind in the right direction. Then, if the environment is right, it's easier to run with it.

I drew a diagram of a refactor I was considering while pacing around an apartment in Vienna.

Took me about 40 minutes to map it out and realize it was bullshit - it'd add more complexity than was worth it. The idea was so good in my head before I put it on paper, though.

The great news is that by mapping it out, and just thinking and planning, I found the one element of the refactor that would give me 80% of the benefit I actually wanted for maybe 10% of the work.

All it took was 40 minutes.

I'd rather think about that then whether or not she maybe likes me or judging someone else's silly business model. Funny, because thinking about the really interesting problem probably makes her like me more, too, and increases the odds I have a better outcome than their allegedly silly business model.

[Romanticizing the Net]

I’ve been reading sci fi books from the 90s or early 2000s, written when the internet was still in this nascent stage that I'm now romanticizing.

These author's predictions for the net were less 'brave new world' dopamine trap and more of a super powerful, decentralized, information gathering and dissemination tool.

One such book calls it "The Net of a Million Lies," and treats it like this super powerful web that you can sift through to find truth, as long as your are guarded against abundant misinformation (A Fire Upon the Deep).

To me, this is romantic - it makes going on the internet some active exercise of the mind.

Now, it's this enshittified, sloppified, passive activity that feels like you're being force fed machine generated garbage in exchange for dopamine and being told exactly what you need to hear to feel connected and excited and angry all at once.

If you're not actively using it, it's so easy to fall into the passive trap.

[The Lindy Net]

I'm dreaming of another version of the internet, a subset of it, with no machine generated content. A strong, unified reputation system for each poster. Sacred spaces where the only writing or data that can be contributed is more than 5 years old.

Sure, there will be junk and slop, but it'll be limited by man's ability to produce it and remember it over years.

Also, no javascript, no fancy designs, just text. Maybe a separate space for photos and videos, maybe not. I'm starting to sound like IG, but probably lightweight duckdb or something embedded, make the whole thing portable and yankable by any one.

Maybe even written in lisp, no ai code allowed, for one of the reasons a church might have a service in Latin - filtering mechanism. The dedicated needing to commit to learning and practice to contribute.

[Politics & Hacker Houses]

Politics are spawned when there are more than 2 people. 2 people can argue and fight and gridlock, but when there's 3 or more, we're introducing jockeying and positioning and cornering and alliances and a higher probability of betrayals and all these things.

The very nature of any co living space means that this is a risk.

If you are thinking about politics, you are not thinking about more interesting and useful problems.

But god, politics are so fucking fun. Perhaps it's my own perversion, or perhaps it's a product of us being so wired for drama and competition and violence and tribalism. Regardless, few things get me as excited as a little game of politics against another party, logical warfare, and absolutely smashing their position.

Fun, but I can't imagine it's very good or productive. In a moral system with a high value on human flourishing and scientific progress, I'd think politics would be a necessary evil at best.

No solution yet, just an observation. Perhaps a powerful executive function with a baked in democratic release valve in case the executive really did go off the rails might work at small scales.

[Discipline as a Cookbook]

So, where's all this going?

I'm really just wondering what a sort of modern monastery would look like, if it's even needed. It seems that the internet is a particularly challenging modern opponent to focus and working on interesting problems, but is also so powerful when wielded correctly.

The tangent on politics happened, well, because politics can get in the way of that work, too.

All of the other reflections on where I'm performing my best work, because do you even need a monastery? Or is the monastery of one's mind enough?

In the past, Monasteries got us through Dark Ages.

I finally saw that computer I've written about, the Antikythera Mechanism.

We couldn't make this piece of hardware any where in the world for over 1500 years after the technology was lost.

What would the world be like if the secrets of antiquity weren't preserved through the dark ages in Monasteries? What other items do we have now that would have taken another thousand years if this or that manuscript wasn't written down? And if people hadn’t worked tirelessly to preserve, and then improve the art?

I know what great expense my own ability to focus in different conditions has come at. I understand why Disciplines that systematize that process would exist; not to make it any easier to unlock focus, but to make it more systematic, repeatable, scalable, and persistent.

All that said, I don't necessarily think the West is falling tomorrow; neither did the Romans, perhaps even after the Visigoths sacked the city proper.

It doesn't have to be about that, or even that grand, though. I'm just aware that there are environments and ways of thought significantly more conducive to solving important, challenging problems. I don't think that SF, with it's monoculture and bubble inducing behavior, is inherently that, nor do I think academia, bereft with politics and tenures and personal agendas, is that either.

I think each of us can cultivate our inner mental monasteries each day.

I just wonder how it becomes more repeatable and scalable and sustainable?

Some hacker houses already have an outsized impact on the world. I can take no credit for it, but C House has had pretty impressive results. Much more impressive, Nick has done amazing things with the Residency at some scale, and I don’t know if I’ve seen anything with such an incredible set of outcomes as HF0.

I wonder what system could spawn out of these things that could take the best of the modern world while lasting for decades, centuries, or millennia, as monasteries have?

Live Deeply,

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