Some monks and nuns seem to have found great satisfaction in being monks and nuns, while others were chafed by the expectations of poverty, chastity, and obedience. It's hard to say if many or most monks enjoyed their lot more than they would have enjoyed another occupation -- how comfortable monastic life was could vary with the material resources of a particular monastery and the individual monk's tolerance for his working conditions, which isn’t that different from the varying conditions of an agricultural calling. But there was more job security in the monastic life than in other trades, and an assurance of housing and support that men and women of other occupations and classes couldn't necessarily expect. We can look at one group of people to see what recourse was available to monastics who didn't enjoy or consent to monastic life -- oblates, individuals who were given to monasteries as children. This process was flourishing by the early Middle Ages; 4th century bishop Basil of Caesarea supported the practice but recommended that it not be taken as effectively binding until the child in question was old enough to understand the implications of a vow of virginity, that is, after the age of sixteen or seventeen. But as soon as the 6th century the idea of children given as oblates to monasteries deciding they didn't want to be perpetually virginal monastics after all raised strenuous objections -- women who left monasteries, either ones joined of their own accord or ones they were donated to as children, were to be excommunicated and any marriages they entered into were to be considered void. The 7th-century Fourth Council of Toledo extended this to male oblates; to leave one's religious order, even if one never voluntarily chose to join it, was equivalent to apostasy.

At its most sublime, child oblation was an act of religious devotion for both parent and child, a way to set one's children out on a path to spiritual greatness; at its most cynical, it was a great way to rid yourself of the responsibility of an unwanted son or daughter, one who might be disabled, disliked, or simply financially inconvenient. The lives of oblates were more rigorous even than the lives of adult monks. Judging from cases that stipulate the punishment for monks who left their cloisters, monks ex-oblate and non-oblate alike clearly were seeking to escape their monastic orders, even if this was frowned upon. In many cases of runaway monks and escapee nuns, the structure of subservience and the financial limitations of monastic life -- the obedience and poverty parts -- weren't necessarily the only problem. The problem was also the chastity aspect, which became more pressing after puberty rather than less, and the fact was that these oblate children could hardly be said to have voluntarily chosen celibacy with a full awareness of what they were renouncing even if they were inclined otherwise to virtue. Many of these escapees, when their monasteries caught up with them, had already taken husbands or wives. At the same time, many of child oblation's strongest proponents had themselves been child oblates, and many child oblates grew up to achieve distinction in their monastic careers, so some of them were not necessarily straining against the church's yoke.

In the 9th century there were a number of cases of former child oblates resisting their fate in the church and seeking legal recourse -- individuals like Gottschalk of Orbais, who petitioned the Council of Mainz for his release from the Benedictine monastery at Fulda in 829. But defenses of the oblate system must have seemed persuasive -- the practice had scriptural precedent, it was a privilege to become a monk and serve God, it was beneficial for the oblate's soul to be removed from even the possibility of temptation to sin, and furthermore parents had absolute ownership of their children, so why not? Gottschalk lost his case and remained a monk and theologian for the rest of his life, but the idea had at least finally emerged that maybe you couldn't make somebody become a monk against their will. This idea, that monastic life must be taken on voluntarily wouldn't really reach its full height until the 12th century, much too late to be any good for Gottschalk himself -- sealed by a number of other high-profile contentious cases of child oblates wishing to leave their monasteries. Ultimately, Pope Celestine III would rule that any dedication to the church made prior to the age of reason was non-binding. (What, exactly, the age of reason was -- twelve, fourteen, fifteen, eighteen -- and whether it varied by gender was the subject of a lot of bickering.) Child oblates who no longer wished to be monks by a certain age (say, fifteen) could re-enter the secular world, claim inheritances, and marry. And with that cleared up, nobody ever sent their children away to monasteries to get rid of them ever again. Just kidding, people kept sending their children away to be raised in monasteries with the formal or informal intent of having them take vows to remain clergy permanently until well into the Early Modern period. But the idea that you had to be a certain age to fully and lawfully consent to a major life decision like joining a monastery, and that there were circumstances where one could leave a monastery without renouncing Christian faith and becoming an outlaw, was a pretty massive step for the rights of monks.

Did regular monks like being monks? Did they ever get lonely? The writings of monks attest to a range of tender emotions -- fatherly feeling toward younger monks, filial devotion to their spiritual fathers, romantic and erotic love between clergy both of same and opposite sexes. (Sometimes culminating in sex, sometimes with very unhappy results - a lot of my outline of the predicament of unwilling oblates comes from Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers, which outlines the unhappy life of the Nun of Watton,, one vision of what could happen to unwilling monastics who sought sexual fulfillment.) Some of those same oblates whose predicament I described identified the monks who took care of them in their exile from their families as effectively a whole new family, one defined by mutual love and dedication rather than ties of blood. There were no broad comprehensive surveys of monastic satisfaction and well-being, so our understanding of how monks got by must be based on their own writings. Monks laughed, monks wept, monks found fulfillment and satisfaction as well as exhaustion and frustration in their day-to-day work, monks found friendship and companionship with people who shared their love for certain aspects of monastic life as well as hating the same stuff. It's hard to say if the quality and intensity of their friendships surpassed what was going on among laypeople, but despite isolation from their birth families and formal commitment to celibacy, monks found ways to achieve emotional bonds anyway.

There were monks who felt certain in their religious vocation, but were nonetheless deeply unhappy, as well as monks who were deeply pious as well as deeply emotionally disturbed. There were monks who felt profound doubts about their religious convictions, without fleeing their monasteries:

The case of Otloh of St. Emmeram offers a different perspective on medieval emotional responses surrounding suicide. Otloh wrote his Liber de temptatione cuiusdam monachi (“Book of the Temptation of a Certain Monk”) around 1070. He declares that he is writing it because in the course of his monastic profession he has suffered diabolic temptations leading to despair and doubt, and he believes his personal experience can function as an example for others enduring the same torments (Liber de temptatione 246; 12–14). The level of doubt Otloh confesses to having endured is debilitating for a medieval monk — it is the conceptually devastating doubt that goes to the heart of both the individual Christian and monastic enterprises: “I was compelled to doubt utterly both about the wisdom of the Holy Scriptures and about the being of God himself” (256; 1–2; “et de scripture sacre scientia, et ipsius dei essentia prorsus dubitare compellebar”).

• “Unlocking the Silences of the Self-Murdered: Textual Approaches to Suicidal Emotions in the Middle Ages”, Rebecca F. McNamara and Juanita Feros Ruys

Some monks killed themselves. (Did they kill themselves at higher rates than the non-monastic population? Did they kill themselves because of conditions in their monasteries, or would they have killed themselves if they were in another social context? It’s hard for me to say.) In general the idea of the unhappy, disordered, disorderly monk (or nun) haunts the whole monastic tradition in Europe —monks themselves were concerned with this phenomenon and how to prevent it. Disciplinary guidelines like the Ancrene Wisse, a rather overbearing collection of advice and recommendations for 13th century women anchorites, suggest the concerns of other clergy regarding physically isolated monastics ——anchorites in theory weren’t even supposed to leave their cells, let alone their monastery, but this didn’t render them incapable of temptation and sin. The Ancrene Wisse also gives a non-comprehensive list of the benefits of monastic isolation — physical and spiritual safety from the tumult and danger of the world, spiritual nobility and distinction, assurance of personal salvation, greater intimacy with God. To an extent these benefits apply even to non-anchorites, and they all rely on the conditions of seclusion from the outside world that make monastic life what it is, the same conditions that might have made it lonely.