Acedia and the Cult of Productivity

In our last post, we concluded that acedia or sloth is much more than the stereotype of the lazybones. Evagrius notes that “acedia is a simultaneous, long-lasting movement of anger and desire, whereby the former is angry with what is at hand, while the latter yearns for what is not present.” As the modern monastic writer Gabriel Bunge elaborates: “Everything available to it is hateful. Everything unavailable is desirable.” Where there is anger that things are the way they are and there is an indefinite desire for something else, whatever that may be. Acedia is a restlessness that manifests in a refusal to commit to one place or purpose. In the meantime, acedia makes us lose our taste for what is significant and what is insignificant as we fail again and again to discern between demands for our attention.

Whittled down by the spectral enticements of what might be possible we grow in our disdain for what is in front of us and so we start to act as ghosts in the present moment. Doing so is very taxing, and eventually we settle into a ruminating lassitude, strung out on a deepening sense that doing anything meaningful has become impossible. At last we arrive at the so-called ‘slothful’ person, who is sunk in despair of the meaningfulness of their life. The inertia of sloth, I believe, its greatest weapon against us. By the time we arrive at utter torpor, we’ve already reached a dangerous stage of the vice. But this inability to be moved, or as Rebecca de Young puts it, this ‘resistance to the demands of love,’ is continuous with the incessant movement and even desire for good things and a worthy contribution of one’s life in earlier stages of the vice. And it is in these early stages that we can be given over to sloth while appearing to be very active, even super-active.

American Christians have for centuries been enamored with the idea of work. The Puritan Christians who founded some of the early colonies made a virtue out of industriousness, marshaling New Testament passages about work to support the arduous labor of colonization. As the pastor, John Cotton, once preached: “Faith draws the heart of a Christian to live in some warrantable calling. … Paul makes it a matter of thankfulness to God to have given him ability and put him in a place where he might serve God. As God has called every man, so let each man walk. This is the clean work of faith, that a man would have some employment to fill his head and hand with.” Christians in this culturally-formative tradition came to identify work as a significant expression that a person was among the elect of God, but also how one proved to be a meaningful participant in human society and the foundation of the American experiment itself. As Prof. Lois Eveleth observes, within a century the work-theology of Cotton had been secularized as personal ambition draped in patriotic fervor in the hands of Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries. She notes: “Ambition has become respectable. He does not look to God to judge his work; the community and posterity are the only judges who matter. Poor Richard seeks success, for this is the only goal and salvation. He knows nothing about doing God’s work. If an architect-God exists, he shall to shift for himself and politely stay out of Richard’s way.” By the birth of the United States, the conditions were set for acedia to be a problem in the religious life of American Christians. On the one hand, work was effectively piety among those like-minded with Cotton. On the other hand, work was about individual legacy and the establishment of the political and economic self within society. Neither vision eradicated the other, but together they were they became the either/or duo to keep American Christians running perpetually from each to each.

It is perhaps why, in this country, acedia has come to mean the deadly image of the sloth–the person who can’t be bothered to make his nation great, his God proud, or to pursue the American dream. We might also suggest that in the post-WWII era, the boom of postwar industry provided a ready distraction from confronting the cultural trauma that the horrors of war had inflicted on millions of citizens and immigrants seeking asylum from the ruins. Where there might have been a pause to reflect and commemorate and grieve, instead we seemed to seek a feverish pace of ‘staying busy’ to stay ahead of it all. Who had time to lament when there were technologies to master, entertainments to produce, and Communists to defeat? The trickle-down effect of this cultural trend is that Americans–especially men but increasingly women as well–are largely defined by ‘what they do for a living.’ I want to be clear: significant work and working hard are not evils. But they are as capable as anything else of becoming objects of idolatry or totems of a kind of magical thinking that promise power. As a tool of acedia, the concept of productivity turns phantasmagorical, it becomes whatever the vice needs it to be to entice us. As Henry Ford so hauntingly and prophetically put it: “Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation. Through work and work alone may health, wealth, and happiness be secured.”

A byproduct of this practical theology, however, is that productivity becomes identified with leading a meaningful life. The cult of productivity is a rigorism we inflict on ourselves as a way of striking out against a world that continues to disappoint our expectations. That bodes well for us if we have the good-fortune of being able-bodied and young: a world of opportunity is stretched before us. But as we approach middle-age that horizon begins to contract. We get the sense that there is not enough time now to do anything we would like to do–and that perhaps there never was. We look with a mix of nostalgia and disappointment on how little we have accomplished compared to our early aspirations. We didn’t become that astronaut and now we never will. We have made choices, commitments. We’ve entered marriages, had our kids, put in time to rise to middle management. Our industries have advanced in directions we did not foresee and were not trained to track. The future of our work–our potential to ‘do things’ starts to have real limits. We are at the noonday of life. As we age, this sense of dread increases. There is so little time left to do what I wanted to do. What, we ask, is still possible for me with the time left?

Acedia pounces. What indeed? On one hand, we are tempted to become indifferent. Ride out the rest of the time. Why exert ourselves on being excellent if it’s not going to advance our careers or legacy? Time to settle in and put things on cruise control. We start to develop weird hobbies through which we escape the tedium of our families and their drama, our bosses and their egos. On the other hand, we are tempted to flit about from distraction to distraction. We drop those weird hobbies for others. We get inexplicably into fantasy sports because our children are boring and needy. We surf LinkedIn for jobs we won’t actually apply to; we surf Zillow for houses we could buy in better places than here. We enjoy movies and TV shows featuring men and women who didn’t stupidly settle down like we did and who are leading much more interesting lives. We watch Eat, Pray, Love and fail to see it as a tragedy of self-absorption. We are angry that we are here. We want to be there–the place where people get it. We are worried that our days of being productive and fruitful are running out, that we need to find the place where there is not so much resistance to what I know to be the potential for my life. These diversions are expressions of burnout, but they are dressed up as forms of self-awakening, self-care, and even movements of the Spirit. In truth, they are the other side of acedia. They cannot deliver what they offer as enticements, and our inevitable frustration with them (think of that gross feeling of actually having spent consecutive hours online, watching tv, snacking, etc.) spurs our return to busyness.

The work-burnout cycle takes its toll. We snap to attention from these diversions in the terror of having lost so much time. So we throw ourselves back into the throes of activity–with greater vigor this time so that we can escape the gravity of the next burnout. Despondency cannot grab us if we’re moving too quickly, right? The cult of productivity, though, is not primarily driven from without, but from within. The hustle-culture cannot sink its hooks into someone who is not susceptible to it. The compulsive urge to be productive, as a symptom of acedia, is the hope that we can substantiate our lives and inoculate them against death and the fact that we all inevitably must detach from a sense of ultimate control over our lives. The return to frantic activity is worse when we come back than when we left it. Busyness and burnout, each time we fluctuate between them, welcome us to a deeper and darker level. Finally, we start to feel the inversion of Ford’s words: work becomes our madness, our self-hatred, and our damnation.

We are in the grips of acedia. And the only way out is by resisting ultimately that tendency to get out of the miserable moment. Rather, we have to embrace it. As the philosopher Rebecca de Young characterizes it in her masterful book Glittering Vices:

“Essentially, then, acedia is resistance to the demands of God’s love. Why? Because a love relationship marks an identity change and a corresponding call to transformation. [In] marriage . . The claims of the other that require a thousand little deaths of our old individual selfish nature—this is the work that acedia objects to, not merely the bodily effort it may or may not involve. In fact, the person with acedia may pour significant bodily effort and emotional energy into the difficult task of constant distraction and denial of her condition, so the aversion cannot be directed toward effort itself….Acedia wants the security of Christianity without the sacrifice and struggle to be made anew.”

It is precisely the opportunity to commit to some of those thousand little deaths for love’s sake that we are here today when we might be many other places. The antidote to acedia or sloth is to be diligent, to learn through sacrifice to love where we are, with whom we are, and who we are in truth and beauty and a lot of discomfort. But be forewarned. To undertake the seemingly simple task of staying put, like Anthony and his brothers in the desert, is to immediately open the door to the very annoyances, perplexities, and ambivalences that will whisper all along the way that we’ve made the stupidest choice imaginable. It is against these we must, by God’s grace, prevail, one by one. It is, after all, a fearsome thing to be a member of a church. We are not brought to the parish to escape the world but to engage those struggles in their rawest form with the knowledge that Christ is with us. Our adversary is cunning, but we have the Holy Spirit to hold our life in Christ Jesus.

This week, take some time to be deliberate with how you spend your day. Set aside a few minutes just to stay put. Try to pray continually in that time. Do not try to accomplish spiritually productive work. Set aside your agenda; sit in silence. Become aware of flitting back and forth between tasks, never committing to one. Be likewise wary of zoning out or finding even spiritual ways to slacken into passivity. Do your best to be where you are, do not distract yourself or anyone else from the difficulty of the silence. Let it get difficult. Only by letting ourselves die a bit in resisting the impulse to move about too much–on the inside or the outside–do we begin to take steps in the kind of love that will hold us in place when we want most to run away. Let us not abdicate this holy opportunity. If we accept the challenge of staying present, we will encounter the Lord, who is always with us.