Struggling with a 'bad thought'

Acedia can manifest as either extreme lethargy or hyperactivity, but it is not merely an individual spiritual problem. It affects communities as well. And it was this aspect of acedia that my audiences wanted to discuss.

They raised questions about addictions to the Internet and "virtual reality," about fractured families who are so hyper-scheduled that they no longer spend much time together, about the dissonance of living in a society that is the wealthiest in history but whose citizens remain dissatisfied, gobbling up drugs for anxiety, depression and sleep disorders at an alarming rate.

In hard economic times, we can lose faith in ourselves and others, and acedia offers a false sense of complacency and security. We can care about celebrities or online "friends" more than our neighbors; we can treat rampant homelessness as just "the way things are," and that relieves us from having to do anything about it.

We can keep ourselves so busy that we don't have time to care, or we can simply drop out of the fight. Acedia feeds on "compassion fatigue" and assures us that the world's problems are so big that we need not trouble ourselves about them. It's useless to try to change things.