I think I approximately understand monads, but I find the "wrap the entire external universe" type of explanation to confuse me a bit. It's just the result of one IO computation + a way of handling / unwrapping it!

When trying to map (or bind :) a monad to OOP/imperative programming, it strikes me as more straightforward to think that, e.g., the IO monad is an object that encapsulates the result of a network operation, together with some utility functions for dealing with the result and not having to deal with the unwrapping of the result. Kind of like Futures or Promises.

(Now, here the real FPers will say that the comparison is flawed because of certain FP desiderata like referential transparency, but that's beyond the extent to which I've internalized monads.)