On Boredom
The Noonday Demon and the Possibility of Creation
Last week, I wrote, Creating Amidst the Machine, it seems this bit about boredom resonated. In that essay, I asked:
What happens when we’re never presented with silence or boredom or even joy — but instead are habituated to receive noise and only a numbness of overindulgence of pixels?
It’s when we’re bored we might pick up a good book, or learn how to draw, or discover how things fit together, or as my kids did during Covid — make a fort in some trees and bushes. Boredom can push us past distraction into creation. But if, when we’re bored, we can always open up another app to scroll or another tab for more information, we may never get to the goodness on the other side of boredom. The challenge of creating amidst the machine is the machine can always steal away the shy seeds of creation. (They’re so apt to curl their heads back into the soil and get absorbed).
But is goodness always the result of boredom?
In a recent article in The Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg also credits boredom with destruction, not creation. He writes:
“You might say we’re all dying from boredom poisoning. Boredom is like a lethal invisible background radiation that will be held back by action. We don’t talk about this omnipresent threat in the same way that fish don’t talk about wetness.”1
Boredom can bring us along to find or create meaning; but boredom can also bring destruction (or deconstruction) as a way to stake claim to meaning. Goldberg concludes (and it’s worth quoting in full for the sheer conglomeration of it all) that our common human urge to both run from and fill up boredom with meaning whether we are:
…the right-wing keyboard warriors wish-casting about civil war and secession and winking about “what time it is,” the more literal warriors who found it necessary to beat up cops with flagpoles in service to a lie, the privileged idjit kids who throw paint on works of art, the federal workers who stage meaningless one-day hunger strikes (skipping lunch for justice!), the postliberal scriveners of the left and right thumping their dog-eared Marcuse or Schmitt into a drumbeat of war against the rule of law and the liberal order, the Instagram tradwives who find happiness not in matrimony but in likes, the testicle-tanning roid ragers, the trustafarian maroons who compensate for their inadequacy in the face of luxury by purchasing political activism wholesale, the Putin apologists drunk on his nonsense, the “white supremacy” obsessives, and the conspiracy theorists and fantasists of oppression of all stripes: they all want to live in a world where they are heroes struggling in a just cause. Lacking one, they struggle against the just and call it oppression all the same. [emphasis mine] Anything to keep the silent fog at bay.
It’s worth pausing: Are you ever bored? What happens when you are? Where do you go when a bit of boredom strikes, and what does it feel like?
While our technological distraction moves at breakneck speed, the malaise of boredom is nothing new. Whether we struggle against it to create a story where there maybe isn’t one, or we curl inwards in apathy or distraction, both are active or passive ways to get at meaning.
Both take the reins and ultimately say that the human individual is the nexus of meaning making. And this pressure to curate a self, to make meaning, to find it or fashion it, is simply the latest mechanized version of the “noonday demon” acedia.
Acedia, one of the classical vices, is often given to the word sloth or depression. But it gets at a spiritual reality that Goldberg is harkening towards (though he doesn’t engage with the concept). Acedia is a spiritual restlessness, a non-placedness, a sense of either sloth or restless energy — the sort of internal feeling you may have had on a summer day as a child, wanting to scream, or run into a wall, or do a million things or none because there was no direction or particularly clear desire. You were a peson and you didn’t know how you fit. You just didn’t know what to do or feel or think, or felt like you must do all at once.
My friend, Laura Fabrycky, writes of acedia in her book, The Keys to Bonhoeffer Haus (which is excellent by the way): “A soul suffering from acedia constantly looks else where, no matter where it is, to escape the overwhelming tedium of now, until the heart hardens into a stony numbness.”2 And, looking at the spiritual malaise of acedia, the philosopher Rebecca DeYoung gets at acedia’s heart — as a resistance to the demands of love:
“At its core, acedia is aversion to our relationship to God because of the transforming demands of his love. God wants to kick down the whole door to our hearts and flood us with his life; we want to keep the door partway shut so that a few lingering treasures remain untouched…”3
Acedia finds its twenty-first century home in the dopamine loop of doomscrolling.
But grace, well grace is altogether childlike and new.
***
Our church book club just finished meeting; we read James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store this time. It’s a story of the margins, of great evil and great hope, of a conglomeration of a million people and a million choices that make a nation, make a people, and make virtue or vice.
The main agent of grace dies halfway through. Unspeakable evil coexists with unspeakable grace. You wonder as you read, How does McBride not make grace and mercy out to be fools? How does goodness not get wrapped up in sugar-coated cotton candy cloying cliches? How can anyone, in 2024, write so hopefully?
And so, I suppose this fine moment of art and the thoughtful conversation brought us to this question: What does this good book make you want to do?
Those of us most prone to acedia will think that our only options are to opt out or to come out with guns blazing — neither of which feels like the right answer to either boredom or our sad human condition. There is another way, the “comedy of grace.” “The comedy of grace is that is so often comes to us as loss, sorrow and foul-smelling waste” writes Kathleen Norris in Acedia & Me; “if it came as gain, gladness and sweetly scented flowers, we would not be grateful. We would, as we are wont to do, take personal credit for the unwarranted gifts of God.”
Loss is perhaps the only language that can deliver us an unadulterated joy.
Flannery O’Connor too spoke of joy only emerging from the other end of sorrow. Of grace having to shake us lose from the grip of acedia into a violent upending of all we thought we knew. For the only cure for acedia is a total refashioning of our loves: a rebirth from death to life.
Where does this leave those of us who are interested in creation? Whether we are creating meals, or little humans, or books or paintings, or a garden in the backyard?
(Permit me a small sidebar; I promise it’ll connect). As I’ve been reading and thinking about this middle agedness before old-agedness, I’m hit again with the word, regret. Middle age feels like regret begins to be strewn about with the same willy-nilly abandon with which toddlers and teenagers leave wrappers about themselves with no regard to the appropriateness of time or place. There is grief for the past and also there is a preemptive grief; there is the reckoning in new ways with finitude and sore hips and backs and all that we will not be able to get over or move past. There is a sense of having gotten it all wrong and not being able to find words or a rewind button.
And yet. DeYoung reminds us that love demands transformation. Acedia digs in one’s heels and refuses change; it is a lazy love. But — and in the Christian story there is always a but — grace can meet us in our noonday demon, in our boredom, in despair, in our hiding. Grace meets us right smack in the middle of regret. And love demands our transformation.
That means then, that if grace is the bedrock story, then acedia is just a poor shadow of the real story. The doomscrolling, the tribalism, the failure to decide anything, the laziness, the fear of failure and therefore the subsequent inaction, or the overproduction, the looking-over-the-shoulder for the next thing/person/accomplishment, are all just distractions.
If the bedrock story is one of grace, we’re free to finally renounce the demon of acedia and learn how to practice — with fear and trembling — the great adventure of being bored.
Who knows what goodness might be on the other side.
This is a part of a new weekly series on creativity and a generative life, based off my reading. Earlier pieces include: "On Generative Work” and “Creating Amidst the Machine.”
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Jonah Goldberg, “How Boredom Kills,” The Dispatch, https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/how-boredom-kills/
There’s lots of interesting bits in this newsletter especially about how boredom can flatten out what and where we find meaning to the same horseshoe effect: whether you’re a tradwife on IG or a Putin supporter, all want to live in a world of meaning.
Laura Fabrycky, The Keys to Bonhoeffer Haus, 119.
Rebecca DeYoung, “Resistance to the Demands of Love” Christian Reflection, Baylor University. Thanks to my friend Jen Michel for pointing me to this essay.
'Acedia finds its twenty-first century home in the dopamine loop of doomscrolling.'
Wow. How terribly true.
Thanks for another wonderful bit of writing. I am amazed how much goodness is packed in here. Much to chew on, perhaps this afternoon if I get bored!