Urban Monk, aka Secular Ascetic Options

Just got my copy of Adbusters end of year edition, and they 3 top identities of 2006. This one caught my eye...

Urban Monk, aka Secular Ascetic.

Not to be confused with the hedonistic urban hippy, urban monsk thrive on the underrated pleasures of self-denial. Taking a cue from the Stoics, Puritans, Sadhus, Spartans and Jains, this eminently sustainable though largely secular creature excels at saying no: no to the accumulation of wealth, no to conveniences, no to cars, no to television, no to meat. Possibly owns a laptop, but harbors deep-seated guilt about that fact. Thrills at issuing personal challenges like 100-mil, raw, vegan, calerie-restricted diets. Some adherents even dabble in the mortification of the flesh, renouncing hot water and room temperature above 15C. They do, however, tend to draw the line at sewing thorns into their underwear.

This seems to describe me quite well (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif)

I'm not interested in making lots of money.
I stopped watching TV a year ago.
I drive a Smart car.
I own an iBook (but have no guilt about it).
I am giving up meat for 2006.
My room is heated to 17C.

Any other Urban Monks out there?

Money has no meaning to me - it seems a pointlessly ritualised commodity.

I don't know when I stopped being interested in TV, I do occasionally watch it, but unlike the rest of my family I'm not compulsive. I much prefer to read.

I don't drive - I catch buses. I use it to help remind myself that rushing is as pointless as dawdling. I will get there when I get there, and that's the whole of any journey's tempo.

I own an Athlon XP 2800 (put it together myself), a Zire 72 palm pilot, and an iBook G4, and I see no reason not to. Information flows are just as important for stretching the mind as meditation... and in fact, I find the action of constructing and upgrading a computer to be almost the same as meditation. Honestly, I look forward to the day when someone combines electronic paper with RedTacton and wireless internet so that way I can connect to the internet from anywhere.

For me, I never really enjoyed any meat other than bacon. I generally eat meats masked by other flavours, and even then, reheat it, and I cannot touch it.

My room is like a sauna (PC continuously on, combined with continuously down curtains and closed door, plus heating causes it to be nicely toasty).

However, Med, I have to disagree on your reasoning. I find the rise of the urban monk minority to be an extension of the ritualised nature of society. To quote Richard Mills:

People are becoming automated.  Take my father.  Get up, 7.30 breakfast, out at 8; get the 8.30 train to Charing Cross, gets on the tube, off at Oxford Circus, walk along to Hanover Square.  He goes upstairs, he sits there all day; he goes out for lunch - gets himself a beer and sandwich, comes back, carries on work, 5.30 he packs in, gets the tube back to Charing Cross, train home.  I mean what a life!  Where does it get you?

Even before we deal with the impossibility to keep up with the ever expanding "needs" society "provides" you, we find ourselves continuously facing a more and more ritualised society. Historically we've "overcome" this by standing outside ourselves and saying "I am not this automaton... I do these things, but I'm something higher". This kind of meta-consciousness though winds up enforcing the rituals even more. And even worse, we can use meta-meta-conscious - "Look at us being so aloof from our actions", and meta-meta-meta-conscious... in an ever towering spiral. It winds up nowhere.

So western culture is dead. We spend the majority of our lives going out to earn bits of paper and metal so that way we can swap them for all the things we're meant to want, and then denying that this is all there is to ourselves, all the way to death. Whoop-dee-do. It's hardly any wonder then that people turn away from the repetition and start looking deeply into what can be described as modern ascetism. It's also hardly any wonder that people have mid-life crises.

However, there is an inverse point to be made from this. There is also an increasing faction (who I would say is in the majority) who cannot step outside this dead cultural frame. I regularly deal with one particular person who cannot deal with the idea of anything other than the capitalist-consumerist society he lives in.