I feel like both this post and the Aeon article it links to (which really ought to be what HN links to, as the post just glosses over it to connect it to the themes in Newport's book) miss something important about the medieval monk's struggle against distraction: the underlying reasons for it were structural, not individual. The dynamics of medieval society made it impossible for monks to just be monks.

Monastic orders would generally be founded with the intention of following something like the ascetic lifestyle described, because it was felt that the more ascetic a monk was the closer he was to God. But it was this perceived closeness to God that would undo them, because it meant that prayers from a monk close to God were seen as more powerful than prayers from your average everyday priest.

See, it was common for rich nobles and wealthy merchants, when they contemplated their mortality, to want to better their odds of getting into heaven by using some of their wealth to set up endowments to pay clerics to pray for their souls. And of course, the richest and most powerful people in society didn't want those prayers being offered by just anybody. They wanted to buy the best prayers, the ones that packed the most spiritual wallop. And that meant they wanted prayers from those ascetic monks.

The more strict a monastic order tried to be in its self-denial, the more quickly the wealthy and powerful would beat a path to their door to dump sacks of money onto it to buy its prayers. And once an institution starts piling up money, it finds itself saddled with the need to figure out something to do with it. So your spartan monastic order would slowly begin acquiring things, buildings and employees and land and so forth -- and of course all those things require management, and the more you pile up, the more management is required. Over time, the priorities of the order slowly start to shift. Fast-forward a hundred years, and your order of self-denying monks looks more like a holding company, with its monks spending their time worrying over problems of agricultural management and looking for new tax loopholes to exploit instead of contemplating Scripture.

And eventually somebody would look at that order, and, disgusted by its worldliness, flee into the woods to start a new order -- one that would be ascetic and self-denying and pure. And the cycle would start all over again.

Our society is very different from that of medieval Europe, but I believe we can see these same cycles in operation in our lives as well. Just look at Google, for instance: a company started by two academics that loudly professed disdain for the way its main competitor, Yahoo, operated, telling everybody that their company was going to focus on Real CS Problems™ rather than grubby things like banner ads. And then the investors showed up, and investors demand a return, so they held their nose and dipped their toes into enterprises like AdWords, which were ads, yes, but, they insisted, good ads, ethical ads. Fast forward two decades later, and the inexorable logic of the structures Google operates within has led them to become the world's biggest surveillance merchant, an all-seeing eye whose unblinking gaze stares out not just from its own products but uncountable numbers of third-party apps and sites and nine-tenths of the world's phones -- all in the service of what has become its one and only real business, selling ads. Google is embedded in an economic system that can not allow things like Google-as-originally-envisioned to exist; they must either give up their aspirations toward asceticism, or be crushed by someone who will.

I wonder how much of the demand for this kind of lifestyle-hacking/"personal optimization" literature derives from an unwillingness to grapple with this. We look at the vast edifice of capitalism and, shocked by its scope, recoil instinctively from the seemingly impossible idea of changing it. So we turn instead to changing ourselves, which at least feels like something it is within our power to actually do.