When I leave the convent to pass on a fruit or two of my contemplation, I find that I often end up learning a new bit of contemporary vocabulary along the way. Usually these new words and phrases are things which everybody else has been using for at least five to seven years. I try not to discover them while actually in the middle of preaching, but this is not always possible. And that is how I recently came to learn the phrase “monk mode,” at the very same time as being asked if I had any thoughts on it.

I was sitting on a panel in front of a large audience at a church in central London, at the end of a day’s conference exploring the relevance of monastic experience for lay Christian life. My fellow panelists were a Trappist monk, a priest of the Community of the Beatitudes, and a fellow sister from my own Dominican community. Among us, we represented three distinct strands of consecrated religious life and spirituality. But we were united in our skepticism of “monk mode.” As one panelist put it, “I think we need to protect the brand.”

Monk mode, for the uninitiated, is a self-development strategy in which a person commits himself to cutting out all time-wasting distractions from his life in pursuit of a particular personal goal. It’s a way of getting your act together—or getting something else together, for those with more robust vocabularies—by emulating the kind of highly structured, intensely disciplined life undertaken (supposedly) by monks. The world of wellbeing and self-optimization from which “monk mode” springs certainly has some vocabulary in common with the Christian tradition. But look a little closer, and it quickly becomes apparent that it is, in fact, gloomily heretical. Its goal is not so much arrival at a state of human flourishing, but a graceless Google calendar of thirty-minute increments, stretching onwards unto death. As somebody who is in something approximating an actual monk mode—having entered it when I professed lifelong obedience to my superior and her successors—the secular notion of monk mode chilled me to the bone.

Our discussion (and, in my case, real-time discovery) of monk mode raised a deeper question: what actually is it that defines a monk? Is it truly the efficacy of his time management and the rigidity of his timetable, as monk-moding optimizers appear to believe? Or is it something else entirely?

Saint Augustine of Hippo offered his own answer to this question in his commentary on the one hundred thirty-third Psalm. “Since the Psalm says, Behold, how good and how pleasant is it, that brethren should dwell together in one, why then should we not call monks so? For monos is one,” he explains. “Not one in any manner, for a man in a crowd is one, but though he can be called one along with others, he cannot be monos, that is, alone, for monos means one alone. They then who thus live together as to make one man, so that they really possess what is written, one mind and one heart, many bodies, but not many minds; many bodies, but not many hearts; can rightly be called monos, that is, one alone.”

Father Emmanuel-Marie le Fébure de Bus offers us an explanation of this passage. “In designating a canon regular or an Augustinian religious by the name of ‘monk,’ we understand that it is not in the same way as a Benedictine monk or a Carthusian,” he writes in his book Desire and Unity: Augustinian Spirituality for Today. “With Augustine, the perspective becomes ecclesial, marked by the desire for unity. Not fusion . . . but truly unity in the diversity of temperaments, origins, talents.”

For Augustine, then, a monk is not defined by the disciplines with which he orders his day but rather by the people with whom he shares it: those with whom he is growing into that loving union of heart and mind which Augustine identifies as the ultimate goal of the monastic life. Augustinian “monk mode” has little in common with a path of relentless, regulated optimization. In fact, it strikes me—speaking from the experience of living it—more as an invitation to chaos. It is that particular form of chaos which charges through our lives when we allow the reality of other people, be they divine or human, to repeatedly and relentlessly shatter our self-illusion, and when we place the demands of self-giving above the fragility of self-regard.

What advice might Augustine give, then, for those wanting to enter the optimizers’ monk mode? He would probably suggest putting aside your morning routine and your digital calendar, and instead paying a bit more attention to the disorganized, unoptimized, but infinitely dignified human beings with whom God has chosen to surround you.