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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

The Christian monastic life is nothing like living in farming community. The monasteries rules every detail of your life. There are rules about what and when you can do, say, eat, wear, everything. On the extreme end, you have monks who can see other people for like 1 hour a day or did wow of silence. Oh, and they dont get to pick person they will be with during that 1 hour of socialization. The rest of time is in isolation and activities for every minute are prescribed.

And even in more moderate monasteries, you still have whole day prescribed. Who you socialize with is controlled too. You don't get to voice opinion about rules. You don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening.

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> There are rules about what and when you can do, say, eat, wear, everything.

How long have you been in the workforce and what sort of places have your worked? I have personal experience with employers that had rules on one or more of these.

Also, I lived in a monastery, as a monk, for a while. Don't discount the article. Your whole day is not prescribed, you can socialize outside the community, and there are discussions around rules. You even get some evenings off to go out and about.

I am well into my career- I am not young. I worked ever since I finished college and during summer. I did manual/simple jobs (which I fact included uniform and employer provided housing) shortly and then white collars jobs.

Frankly, you are full of it. Your personal experience with employers don't mean much in forum where almost everyone is employed. There is nothing special about having experience with employers.

Given how you write about being employed, it is safe to say you don't mind twisting situation. You also try to argue by implying insults, which is not convincing. It just seeks emotional response.

> You also try to argue by implying insults

I'm sorry for anything I've written that comes off as insulting. Can you point to anything specific that can help me be sure I avoid doing so again?

I agree with everything you said, except your last centence:

"You don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening."

At some point in my youth I visited a monastery on weekends, because I was friends with some seminarians studying there. People knew how to have fun. Perhaps not every day, only on some days of the week, but you certainly could hang out with friends. There was at least one or two people in the group with a car, and there were favorite spots people liked to go to.

I'm sure there are a lot stricter places, but for what it's worth, I know more than one person from this group (class?) that went on to become priests, working at churches today.

Priest and monk are operate under two massively different rule sets. The "you don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening" is something I got from reading rules of various monasteries (both male and female).

First, having friend, as in favorite person you spend more time with and prioritize, was literally against the rules. You are not supposed to do that. Second, evening was not free recreation time. You eat dinner, you pray, you have chores, you study etc.

> something I got from reading rules

You read some books but you want to argue with someone who literally socialized with a monk? How about this: I was a monk. What you're saying is wrong. You do get evenings off at times. Yes, there are some orders that are very strict and isolated, but there are also mendicant and missionary orders.

I know it's tempting to feel we are smart thus we can speak to things of which we have only read, but (and I'm assuming you're in software development because you're here) if a consultant with no actual experience came along and told you how to do your job because "these are best practices", wouldn't you be a bit skeptical?

They say they read some rulebooks that sounded extremely strict, you say there are some monasteries that are extremely strict; you're both agreeing with the language of disagreement.

Except that GP asserted that reading the rulebooks was a substitute for, you know, actually having been there and that people who had were wrong.

I didn’t see where they asserted it was a substitute.

Would be interesting to hear what countries you all are talking about. I mean, what "Catholic" means in Italy, Ireland, Mexico and the Philippines varies to some degree, for instance.

In my case, this was in New York.

This was a Christian monastery, but not Catholic.

I argued with someone who socialized with people in seminars. Those are not monks. Priests are not monks either. There is also difference between monk and brother, nun and sister.

What you are saying is that cloistered somehow don't count. Maybe you was in freest order there is, but the rest of them count too.

You also argue absurdly aggressive and arrogant way for a monk.

You are not the only ex-monk out there and in fact, ex-monks or those who gave that up during formation do talk about these rules.

For nearly every monastic rule, there's centuries that people have spent coming up with ways to perhaps break the spirit of, but not the letter. For example, St. Benedict says no speaking during meal time? There's a whole sign language specific to christian monks during mealtime.

At the end of the day you choose to be in the monastary and adhere to certain rules. It’s not a prison, and you can leave at any time.

Does not make it the same is farming community tho.

This has been like, a lovely digression, but the actual point I was trying to make was about the sense of living and working in a community.

The office-, factory-, shop-worker leaves their home each day to go to their work, and leaves their work each night to return to their home. They live in two worlds that may overlap but are frequently quite separate.

A farmer lives in one world, the farm. The work on the farm never really ends; you may not be working 16-hour days from birth to death, but it isn't contained with a 9-5 M-F schedule. You also don't really leave your home to go to work. You work with your parents, your children, your siblings, and you are always near them. Your neighbors are also farmers, and if you don't occasionally help each other out, you at least will talk shop with them. Your entire life blends into one big sphere rather than bouncing between two.

A monk in the monastery leads that same sort of singular existence: they are always a monk, and never not a monk. They may have an hour here or there between worship or material labors to do as they will, but they never clock out from being a monk. Meanwhile, while they may have left their birth-family, they are always with their brothers. They worship with their brothers, eat with their brothers, work with their brothers.

Working from home doesn't feel like a unified existence, in the same way; it feels like I leave my family for approximately 8 hours each day, less lunch, and go nowhere. I may be able to work productively enough, but it is a third thing, to me, not like being either an office-worker moving between two worlds or a farmer living in one.

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