The Unspoken Pain Most Men Carry In Silence - Hamza Ahmed

Talk to me about the dangers of monk mode that you've discovered.

Mm. So monk mode is an intensive period of self-improvement that loads of young guys have been on recently. It's where basically you'll cut off everyone, even you will start spending less time with your family, your friends, and you'll go hard on self-improvement, going to the gym, meditating, eating clean, journaling. You can grow a lot during that time, but the danger is that then self-improvements becomes detached from social skills, and then you become what I call a self-improvement autist, which is these guys who are, you know, doing the Huberman morning sunlight routine, and they're meditating 15 minutes a day, and they're doing the zone two cardio, but they're just fucking weird. They don't know how to interact with other people, they can't hold eye contact, they can't h- shake a hand, they've got weird body language when they're stood next to people. And I- I've realized how many guys I had actually led to that point because I had been doing those intensive monk mode periods myself, but the caveat was that I had already been like a party boy, and I had those years of social experiences first, whereas many young men have never actually had an intensive social experience like university, college before. So these days, I don't actually recommend monk mode to most young guys, because I think that being able to navigate your relationships with other people, family, friends, being able to be in the middle of like a social event, party, date, whatever, and actually navigate that in a way where you're present and charming is so important. So I recommend something which I- I created instead, which is what I call the Adonis Protocol, which is kinda like monk mode, but we add in at least one social event per week, and if you want to as well, one date with a woman as well.

Yeah. I think, uh, monk mode is a very good excuse for people that are introverted to feel-

Mm.

... noble in their introversion.

Mm.

And it turns something which is like an aversion to going out into the world, an aversion to making friends or putting yourself in uncomfortable social situations, it turns that from something which is a flaw to something which is a virtue, and you begin to get prestige for actually not doing that thing.

Mm-hmm.

And so many people... Uh, there's this idea called The Inner Citadel by Isiah Berlin, and it basically t- says that if you can't get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get.

Mm-hmm.

Um, so, you injure your leg in battle, and if you try and fix it, when it doesn't work, you chop the leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and-

Mm-hmm.

... must be subdued. So, so many people reverse engineer a life that puts them on a pedestal, the same thing as... How many people that are polyamorous here in Austin, uh, that have tried to make a, um, a monogamous relationship work a couple of times, got their hearts broken, and then gone, "Oh, well, this is because we're not designed to be that way." So people retreat into their inner citadels all the time, and, uh, I think monk mode in- in many ways is that. And you're right. The goal of monk mode is to be better as a human, so the retreat from distraction, from social life, or... And I've done... I did 1,000 days sober, 500 days without caffeine, 1,500 sessions of meditate... Like, I did the things, right? Very, very intensively. But that was with the goal of then reintegrating.