You can read more about these monks here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fathers?useskin=vector
And here is a famous quote from Saint Anthony: “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.”
This is relevant because a lot of the things in this book have to do with removing distractions. The monks were doing it to pray.
Okay that said:
Something I've been noticing about myself lately, which could just be reading comprehension decline?
I tend to skim what people write heavily. So much of what people write seems completely pointless. ChatGPT and other LLMs have really laid this bare. You can take a simple statement like "tell this person that I can't make it to dinner", and it will expand it into several paragraphs of niceties, but the actual information is the same.
I've noticed that it makes it difficult to switch back to information-dense reading, and to actually read all of it instead of reflexively skimming it to try and glean out the seed.