Monkotopia

I expect that you’ve been lying awake at and night wondering, what is Monkotopia?

It’s really quite simple. You’ve heard of utopia — a perfect world where everything seems designed to please You. Hence ‘You’ topia. It makes ‘You’ happy to live in this kind of world.

Dystopia is the opposite. It’s when everything seems designed to please Dys other people i.e. not You. Means you’re not happy in ‘dys’ world.

So Monkotopia is when everything is designed to please monks like me. This is my favorite place. It’s cool.

A few years ago I got a glimpse of Monkopia at an event in San Francisco called Conscious Capitalism. There were a few hundred people there, all talking about how to make business more considerate of the welfare of actual humans — you know, more or less the opposite of what’s happening right now.

So there’s this panel discussion and several people are up on the stage. Impressive, important people — the CEO of some company and the Co-Founder of a big organization. Definitely not me!

So this nice CEO gets up and he mentions the benefits of meditation and admits that he doesn’t actually meditate every day himself.

Now I’m in the front row in my orange robes, just sitting there, looking all monk. I didn’t glare at the CEO guy or anything — I didn’t even know him. I’m just minding my own business and listening.

But then he looks at me and apologizes for not meditating every day. I glanced around to make sure he was really talking to me, but there weren’t any other monk dudes nearby, so it seemed like I was it. This was definitely the big shot CEO apologizing to me in front of 400 people for not meditating every day.

That’s Monkotopia!

In Monkotopia, meditating twice a day is the rule. No exceptions. Vampires, Crop-circle people, babies, I don’t care who you are. You want to eat? You meditate. You want to breath public air, you meditate! You want to make decisions affecting thousands of people? You meditate!

So when this big CEO guy apologized to me in front of the crowd, I got to thinking. If this could happen once, maybe it could happen again. I was kind of hoping this might become a trend. I could just picture it. All CEOs in Silicon Valley having to publicly apologize to a monk if they miss their morning meditation. I like it! In Monkotopia, this is definitely going to be a thing.