The modern world bombards women with messages: Buy this skin care, try that wellness trend, hustle harder, glow up, level up, show up. It’s an exhausting chorus of demands disguised as empowerment. But a quiet fantasy is rising: Instead of yearning for hustle, connection, or glow-ups, the women I know want to do less. And instead of isolating themselves on the homestead, they’re dreaming of the monastery — desiring shared rituals and quiet routines and searching for spiritual structure that offers refuge from the noise of individual optimization.
In the past few months, I’ve seen this trend manifest across pop culture. On TikTok and Instagram, #MonkMode trends and “monk mode room inspo” posts proliferate, featuring single beds, open windows overlooking tranquil gardens, books, and conspicuously few belongings. Writer Hadas Knox declared “Tudor Monastery May,” filling feeds with images of stone cells. My favorite post on #NunTok is a video of Roman nuns “in the wild,” which shows nuns sweeping, selecting yarn from a stall, and sitting in pairs by the river. “They look so peaceful,” reads the first comment. “I wanna be a nun :(,” reads the second. Life, I think, could be different.
Even prestige television is in on the trend, although perhaps poking a little fun at it: On The White Lotus, Piper Ratliff secretly harbors a longing to spend a gap year at a Buddhist monastery, so she lures her hypercapitalist family to a luxury vacation in Thailand only to realize she’s too spoiled to live a simple life. Meanwhile, on And Just Like That …, the usually otherwise-prudent Miranda sleeps with a virgin nun.
@monksmindset Nuns in the wild (in Rome)
@monksmindset Comment which one you’re living in!
It’s a curious contradiction, the fantasy of stillness and spiritual retreat being aestheticized on platforms built to keep us engaged, visible, and optimized. The urge to disappear must now perform itself. Last year, Catherine Coldstream published Cloistered, a memoir recounting the 12 years she spent cut off from the world as a Carmelite nun. Monastic serenity and simplicity are also prominent in the world of interior design, where designers now embrace what’s been called “luxe-monastic” style. These social-media images of monastery living promise detachment, but they circulate through the same feedback loops that monetize our longing for peace. In trying to escape the algorithm, we romanticize what the algorithm is serving us. And even if Piper Ratliff ultimately couldn’t hang, we’re still encouraged to idealize a monastic way of life when the monastery is presented on television and online as a site where everyone embraces minimalism. As Coldstream describes her own cell, “the beauty of it was its bareness — a sacred space made lovely by its peacefulness, an aid to purity of heart.” The appeal lies not in acquiring more beautiful objects, but in the cleanliness and reduction in possessions that promotes focus and mental clarity.
A desire for monastic living is less about finding yourself and more about losing the anxious, performing self that is demanded of you in a greedy, materialistic world. But what I find even more beautiful about the monastery is how it recognizes that true sanctuary requires community — that healing happens not in isolation but in chosen interdependence. The cottagecore movement rose to prominence at the height of COVID isolation and tempted women to stay connected by romanticizing our isolation and self-dependence, but as retreat centers now promoting the monastery aesthetic remind us, “We emphasize community practice so that we can support each other and benefit from each other’s presence.”
In a culture where community is built through networking and personal branding, the monastery can offer belonging through shared purpose rather than shared interests. Those #MonkMode posts on TikTok may be aimed mostly at men, telling them that they’ll need to drastically change everything about your life if you want to lock in, but when I scroll through monastery aesthetics online, I am reminded that there are already existing structures that make a contemplative life possible: Communal meals where cooking and cleanup are shared responsibilities rather than falling to one person; child care that rotates among community members instead of isolated mothers; shared gardens and food production that reduce individual grocery bills and decision fatigue; collective decision-making processes that distribute emotional labor; and mutual-aid networks where financial and practical support flow freely without the transactional nature of modern friendships.
These structures are particularly appealing to women who often bear disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care work, meal planning, and emotional labor in their families and social circles. Institutions are crumbling, and the weight of being expected to bootstrap everything alone is unbearable. Who wouldn’t want to dream about a life where these burdens are shared, where care is communal rather than privatized, and where daily survival doesn’t depend on individual optimization but collective support? Who wouldn’t want a life where your value isn’t your output, where days are shaped by bells and shared meals rather than notifications and metrics? The monastery vision is really a vision of time that belongs to you — or, rather, to a collective you — instead of to capital.
Offline, two friends and I have been trying to coordinate a silent retreat at a hermitage in Big Sur after reading Pico Iyer’s 2025 memoir, Aflame, about his journey finding spiritual meaning in the silence of his communion with the monks and pilgrims at the same sanctuary. Also among my friends, I watch the slow, devotional care with which they arrange their tinctures and grow herbs, building tiny, tending rituals into their lives. We imagine a monastery as a place where doing less isn’t failure but wisdom, where contemplation isn’t procrastination but practice. We know that the endlessly optimized life we’ve been sold isn’t sustainable, and that community isn’t just comforting — it’s essential for our survival. In our overconsuming, overproducing, overstimulated culture, the monastery fantasy is a blueprint for a different kind of life, one where we make meaning from how we tend to ourselves — and to one another.
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