Technologies of acedia

How we monetised the noonday demon

I quit smoking more than 15 years ago, which means I’ve now been an ex-smoker for longer than I was a smoker. Or am I actually an ex-smoker? In the years since, I’ve sometimes wondered if it was less the year I spent nicotine gum that helped me over the line than another, concurrent lifestyle change: getting an iPhone, and swapping my nicotine addiction for compulsive absorption in the multiverse of my phone.

Smoking and smartphones obviously aren’t identical. But there are so many parallels. Most obviously: the fact that both serve as addictive delivery mechanisms for microdosing a mild stimulant. The way the cigarette, or the phone, eases anxiety by creating a reassuring barrier between you and the world. But most of all, the way smoking and scrolling both simulate one aspect of the oldest challenges there is, namely integrating body and mind in the pursuit of eudaimonia: that is, flourishing.

To explain how this works, and why it’s so insidious, I need to borrow a term coined by the desert monks of the fourth century AD, that’s since fallen all the way out of use, but that - in our distracted age - is overdue revival: acedia. Originating in an ancient Greek term meaning “without care”, “acedia” was first used to describe one of the most insidious spiritual pitfalls faced by solitary monks. Today it’s more generally indexed to sloth or laziness, but for early Christian ascetics it was a far more profound and complex spiritual danger: one rooted in anger and desire, and posing a grave moral threat to anyone afflicted.

The fourth-century monk Evagrius of Pontus called it “the noonday demon”, a force that attacks all parts of the ascetic: body, soul, and spirit: “enveloping the entire soul and strangling the mind”. He described the effects of acedia thus:

[Acedia is] hatred of industriousness, a battle against stillness, stormy weather for psalmody, laziness in prayer, a slackening of ascesis, untimely drowsiness, revolving sleep, the oppressiveness of solitude, hatred of one’s cell, an adversary of ascetic works, an opponent of perseverance, muzzling of meditation, ignorance of the scriptures, a partaker in sorrow, a clock for hunger.

Acedia obstructs study with drowsiness, fidgetiness, or staring at the door expecting visitors. It fragments focus, encourages procrastination, and fuels dissatisfaction with the present and a longing for would could be. The ancient desert Christians took it very seriously indeed, it posed an existential threat to their hope of a life dedicated to prayerful focus on God. Today, though, we don’t have an exact modern-day equivalent term, suggesting either we don’t see it as a problem or don’t see it as one thing. And yet I’ve come to think the addictiveness of both smoking and scrolling is best explained in terms of acedia: as technologies that both surface and legitimise the restless, destructive energy of the noonday demon.

A couple of weeks ago, in a broader discussion of the slop economy and the industrialisation of thought, I hypothesised that even if too much internet rots your brain (it definitely has this effect on mine) it ought to be possible to apply something equivalent to a “Couch to 5K” interval programme for the mind. The idea, in theory, would be some kind of intentional training, with the aim of restoring cognitive capacities we associate with print reading, such as deep concentration and analytic thought, and which overwhelming evidence shows to be undermined by the dopamine engine and endless scroll.

But I just can’t bring myself to write a cheery self-help post describing how to do this. Doing so felt like it would be smug and dishonest, because if I’m going to talk about Couch to 5K, I should also talk about how I repeatedly to flunked out of those efforts, over multiple attempts, before I finally made it all the way to through the programme. Why? It was the noonday demon: the force of wilful self-sabotage, a listless, restless, excuse-making, obstacle-inventing, sliding-away-into-easier-things monster the ancient monks would have recognised instantly as acedia. And the most potent weapon in this demon’s armoury was smoking. The physiological reasons for this are obvious: smoking knackers your cardiovascular fitness. But there were subtler psychological reasons too. Smoking doesn’t just impede physical exercise; it simulates it.