Cults, Community, and a New Recipe for Happiness

The Monastery Series (Part 1)

The zendo at the Monastic Academy (MAPLE) in northern Vermont

Darkness and dampness confronted me as I pushed through the heavy wooden doors. The grass, the pond, and the surrounding mountains were shades of black and gray, and shrouded in a blanket of dense fog. The first hints of daylight — a dark purple hue — were beginning to illuminate the eastern sky. 

It was 4am, the earliest I’d woken up in years, and the landscape seemed like a mirror for my own mind. My new roommate had graced me with an orchestra of sleep-apnea-induced snoring the night before, so a late night had transitioned into an early morning. As I shuffled toward the zendo (meditation hall), each step felt like a cold plunge as my bare feet met the wet stones beneath them. Shoes, I had observed, were purely ornamental here. Stacks of untouched boots and sandals neatly adorned each entrance, like an exhibit at an art museum. 

I tried to recite the rules I was given the night before. No loud breathing, sniffling, or talking in the zendo. No moving around or falling asleep during meditations in the zendo. No leaving the zendo without asking for permission first. I was missing at least five more.

As I entered the circular-shaped room, I noticed a large wooden sign sitting on the opposite end. It read:

Abandon All Hope
Ye Who Enter Here.
This place will not support you.
Abandon hope and fear.

“Yikes,” I thought, “What a welcome.” 

I considered the irony of the association between the word “zen” and spa-like serenity. It was only day one, but it was already clear that this monastery, steeped in Zen Buddhism and nestled on a hillside in Northern Vermont, was no spa.

I grabbed my chant sheets and took my seat along the perimeter of the room. I looked around and noticed that, of the 30 available cushions, only one was still empty. We waited silently. As soon as the clock hit 4:40am, the woman next to me jumped to her feet and stormed out of the room. Five minutes later, she returned with a haggard-looking figure behind her. The man shambled over to the one open cushion, still half-asleep. 

“We do NOT tolerate tardiness.” The woman commanded into the silence, as she returned next to me. My back straightened.

“Poor bastard,” I thought, feeling glad it wasn’t me. 

For the next hour, we chanted in Japanese, Pali, and English, followed by an hour of silent meditation. By the time we were finished, sunlight was streaming in through the windows. 

Later that evening, we reclaimed our cushions for another two hours of meditation and chanting. This schedule was rinse-and-repeat every day for the ten days that I was there (except Sundays, which were free). 

I felt like I had accidentally left my meditation practice at home. My brief journal entries speak for themselves: 

Day 5 - “My concentration is still pretty shit overall - 3/10.”

Day 8 - “Haven’t felt this sleep-deprived since high school. Meditations have been rough. Meeting great people.”

I started to dread my pre-dawn pilgrimage to the zendo. Yet, even though my meditations weren't great, I realized the monastery offered something far more interesting: the opportunity to experience a radically new worldview.

Monastic Life

Of the 20 residents living at the monastery (10 of us were just visiting), there were farmers, dharma bums, a college student, software engineers, product managers, and a startup IPO millionaire. There was a tech-bent to the group, and the college student, of course, went to Berkeley. 

Everyone there seemed to be searching for something. For a few residents, the outside world had proven to be a bizarre and unforgiving place, and the monastery was a refuge. It provided a home and a community that aligned with their values, so they decided to stay. For others, the monastery was a bardo, a transitional state between two lives. They had achieved their idea of success — the respected job, a strong relationship, financial independence — and still felt unfulfilled, so they let it all go and were starting anew. And for others, their mission was enlightenment or bust. They believed whole-heartedly in the power of the dharma to heal the world, and they were determined to be its agent in doing so. 

The lifestyle at the monastery was, in some ways, the opposite of modern life. 

In a world of abundance, the name of the game at the monastery was simplicity. Everything inessential was stripped away. Residents ate the same meals every day: oatmeal and fruit for breakfast, vegetables and rice for lunch, and optional leftovers for dinner. They wore plain earth-toned T-shirts. They slept on twin beds in shared dorm-style rooms. They spent four-to-five hours each day performing responsibilities and communal chores, like cooking, cleaning, and manual labor. They followed the same rigid schedule six days a week and rarely left the property. Monastic life, though challenging, was simple.

In a world of rugged individualism, residents were expected to put the community first. Being on time was critical - the entire group had to be present before a meal, meeting, or meditation could begin. Candid, real-time, and often public feedback was part of the group's social norms, as I saw with our tardy friend on the first morning. Every month, residents make commitments, like an extra hour of daily meditation, and are expected to share their success or failure with the group. And responsibilities and chores were always performed with the welfare of the community in mind. Service to others was the highest virtue. 

The Zen-inspired rigidity of the monastery contributed to the strong sense of community. The shared narrative was that residents are spiritual warriors in training, and the intensity, austerity, and difficulty of their days attested to that fact. The lifestyle demands total commitment, and that commitment is rewarded with mutual respect. This provides fertile ground for building close friendships.

During the two hours of scheduled free time each day, the rules and rigidity of the monastery fell away, and a relaxed hippie vibe took its place. Residents sipped tea and chatted on the porch or went for hikes together in the surrounding woods. 

The quality of conversation struck me the most. People talked for hours without interruption or distraction. Conversations skipped the conventional topics — work, travel, weekend plans, television shows — because they weren’t relevant. Instead, they tended to focus on spirituality (meditation, Buddhism, psychedelics) or economic policy (capitalism, crypto, climate change) or general well-being (relationships, happiness, fulfillment). 

I’m not sure if it was all the meditation or their mud-caked feet, but people had abandoned their emotional and psychological walls. They were honest and nonjudgmental with each other. They listened attentively and rarely interrupted. They readily shared thoughts and emotions that people usually keep closely guarded. In this environment, I noticed how quickly people got to know one another. After just a few days, it became clear that the residents knew each other more deeply than I know some of my closest friends.

Yet, I couldn’t help but notice the surface-level similarities to a prison. Residents had voluntarily relinquished the autonomy and the abundance of modern life, and they seemed to be happy.

My mind swirled in trying to make sense of this place — its mission, its rules, its rigidity, its surprising effectiveness. Was it a cult, a commune, a prison, a utopia? 

A New Worldview

As I stirred in my confusion, I could feel my mental model for happiness start to fracture under the weight of this new experience. It reminded me why it’s so important to immerse ourselves in different worldviews: it stress-tests our models of understanding. 

I’ve grown up in a culture where autonomy and abundance are among the highest values. The “isms” predicated on these values — individualism, consumerism, materialism — are so baked into my day-to-day life that I hardly notice them. It’s the air we breathe. 

The implicit assumption behind these values is that they will bring us happiness and satisfaction, which is why we dedicate decades of our lives toward securing them. In comparison, a tight knit community is merely a nice-to-have, and service is a luxury that can follow once we’ve achieved sufficient autonomy and abundance. 

The monastery, however, inverted these values. Instead of prioritizing autonomy and abundance, it replaced them with community and service. And the residents seemed just as happy as people in the outside world. So what gives?

In my next post, I’ll discuss how my stay at the monastery shifted my understanding of these four values and explore the latest research on how each of them really impacts our happiness. 

I hope you’ll join me for it. And if you’re curious, check out Wild, Wild Country on Netflix to hear the story of an actual cult that lived in Oregon. There’s sabotage, attempted murder, arson, poisoning. All that good stuff. But there’s an equally compelling subplot: do the people living there seem happy?

Thanks for reading. It’s good to be back,

Mark

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Thanks to Dan Koslow, Kayla and Gigi Falk, Soryu Forall, and the Wayfinder crew (Harris Brown, Shivani Shah, Lyle McKeany) for their help editing this piece.