Paralysis of the Will
Lately I’ve noticed I think about what I want to achieve for significantly more time than I spend doing the things necessary to achieve it. Am I lazy? No– I complete all my work on time, have plenty of hobbies, goals, side hustles, spend time with friends and family. By all objective standards, you could say I’m “productive.” In spite of this, I struggle to go to bed with the assurance I was everything I could have been over the course of each day. The feeling can only be described as a constant, ambient unease that says “you are not where you should be” without any evidence to verify itself or action that might dispel it.
The feeling is subtle and contradictory– sloth feels too reductive a label, because the feeling is not simply laziness. Again, if anything, my state is more related to restlessness than laziness; constant flitting between one distraction to the next with no throughline or unifying purpose to my action.
I began reading ancient Christian monastic texts for the same reason I began to copy bodybuilding workout splits. If you can identify someone light-years ahead of you in a given field, and you only copy a fraction of their protocol, you’ll land somewhere far above the mean. Texts like The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the Philokalia, and Sayings of the Desert Fathers scare most people. While difficult at points, I hope readers won’t be too frightened to attempt them, as avoiding a challenge guarantees defeat. But in these texts which, by all accounts, are purposed to offer a science of mind for monks living in communities utterly separate from the world we know, I found an insight into my own condition as a modern person which, if applied with wholeheartedness, I believe is able to remedy the feeling described above.
Acedia is the name given to this condition throughout the monastic literature. Motion and stillness characterize acedia, so neither laziness nor restlessness capture it alone. Acedia slips between both of these. When you’re working you feel tired, when you’re in bed you feel wide awake. It could be described succinctly as not attending to the proper thing at the proper time.
Monastic literature acts as an early psychology manual in many ways; it details the progress of one ailment, its symptoms, and the other conditions that tend to spring from its root. Why would it matter to attack the cause, rather than the symptoms? If I struggle to tend to my work, always flitting from one distraction to the next, ought I just hunker down and focus? Well, yes, but if it were that simple then the problem wouldn’t be so persistent. Attacking the cause of acedia can be one way to starve it of its force.
It primarily affects those living in solitude (monks, or in my case remote workers). In Evagrius’s list of eight passions (gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, pride), acedia sits at the turning point. Gabriel Bunge, summarizing Evagrius, puts it this way: despondency comes in about the middle, since it is both the endpoint of the baser passions and the beginning of the more subtle ones. The baser passions are tied to the body and to things, and the subtler ones (vainglory and pride) attack a man who has already made progress. Acedia is a simultaneous, long-lasting movement of anger and desire, where anger rages at what is at hand and desire yearns for what is absent, hence its complexity as both something promoting action and inaction. Talking without purpose, anger, unchecked desire find themselves listed as various fuels for acedia. Why should I be surprised? So much of our days are eaten up by the cycle of: boredom seeking distraction, scrolling or chatting (communication without purpose) to pass the time, outrage and irritation based on what we see (every algorithm is designed to get you to react), on and on and on.
And so we set the phone down in our better moments, we make a vow to recommit ourselves to a life more faithfully lived, and what happens? We are faced with the complete freedom to apply ourselves to all of the manifold struggles that lie in front of us. Again, these struggles tempt us to retreat into avoidance (in other words, acedia). If we are brave enough to commit to something, we find laboring at it difficult– we see our neighbor and his work, and foolishly assume his grass is greener and so we ought to abandon the task in front of us.
Fantasizing about what life could be– this is another fuel for acedia. I already said I spend a great deal of time thinking about all I’d like to accomplish, but when it comes to setting myself to work on it, I sigh and wonder if there’s some shortcut to accomplishing it. What is this except to guarantee I will not only fail to achieve a portion of my dreams, but every bit of them? I am learning that I have to make peace with my limitations if I am to make any progress whatsoever. G.K. Chesterton put it well;
Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses.
Do I think this means you should give up on trying to be everything you’re trying to be? What a sad conclusion! No, I think there is some hope, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered writing this. See, I believe it is possible, like the courageous and industrious men of the past, to become exceptional in almost all areas of life through considerable effort. Obviously if you achieve this, you will later have to confront the struggle of pride, but my approach has been to try and attack the most obvious, biggest passion in my way at the moment and that has been, without a doubt, acedia. In my own case, the only way to make progress in a well-rounded way as stated above, is to develop a clear hierarchy of values within your own identity. Multiple goals are going to detract from one another to the extent that they are out of alignment. Simply put, your goals must be rigorously prioritized according to how important they are and where they land in terms of your self-identity. The reason why is precisely because of the above stated limitedness. You only have so much time and energy to invest in becoming who you want to be. Spread yourself too thin, and you stay in the same place. Constantly switch out the most important goal, and you’re stuck with the same acedia that has been telling you to switch lanes as soon as you’re bored.
When your identity hierarchy is well-founded, then decisions about how to spend your time take no thought, and your temptation to lane switch comes with the painful awareness that you are betraying yourself.
In the monastic literature, there are a few remedies to acedia beyond reducing the fueling passions like idle talk, anger, etc. These involve how to attack acedia head on, once it’s been weakened but still persists nevertheless. Abba Moses says “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” For someone working from home, the cell is your desk. Evagrius Ponticus says “Perseverance is the cure for acedia, along with the execution of all tasks with great attention.” John Cassian, my personal favorite, says “an onslaught of acedia must not be avoided by flight but overcome through resistance.” For each of these, we must understand that all of my talk of self-improvement, identity hierarchy, etc., is relatively meaningless unless it is directed toward something that ultimately transcends yourself. Within my own hierarchy, I’ve placed my faith and family as first and second most important priorities. Why? Because self-love is itself a source of acedia. If our goals for ourselves are ultimately only for ourselves, then they become self-referential and meaningless, or at any rate arbitrary. You have to find a way to relate yourself and your becoming to something that sits outside of yourself– family, community, the well-being of others, etc. Except even then, all of those relationships are changeable, which means your purpose is unfixed and highly changeable, lapsing back into the lack of focus in which acedia persists. Which is why, if you haven’t noticed by now, in my own ideal hierarchy and in the prescription of the monastics, devotion to God must become the central aim, as God is the source of all strength, energy, life, discipline, and unchanging purpose. Until this can be realized, the individual will remain helplessly divided against himself.
A commenter once asked me, “how do I complete a task I’ve been avoiding for a long time?” He blocked me shortly after I said “by doing it.” The truth is, we want all manner of techniques and hacks and tricks to creatively continue indulging in what is essentially acedia. As someone who has struggled with this incessantly for years now, you have to hear me when I say, you are not clever enough to outwit acedia. If anything, it is preying on your unwillingness to truly look at yourself. The only way to soothe the unease is to understand it for what it is and to struggle with all your might to overcome it. How? By the implementation of some of what is described in this letter, with the assistance of brute force.
We often lull ourselves to sleep in the routine of habit, living on autopilot and waiting for something or someone to shake us awake. Walking never fully awake, lying down never fully asleep. Every so often we’re jolted awake and realize we’ve been sleepwalking, and the temptation then is to panic and try to make up for all the lost time at once. But the psalmist has a better prayer: “My soul hath slumbered from despondency; strengthen Thou me with Thy words.” The word he uses there is akedia, the same thing I’ve been describing this whole time. He doesn’t resolve to fix everything by tomorrow. He asks for strength, and then, I imagine, he gets up and does the next thing. Perhaps that’s all there is to do.
