Depressed during the Pandemic? You May Be Experiencing Acedia

This pandemic is hard on everyone. Many are feeling listless, sad or depressed. So much has been lost! It's hard to muster enthusiasm much care about anything. And now it appears the pandemic will drag on for many more months to come. 

Thinking about the effects of the pandemic reminded me of my 2009 column about acedia, a spiritual affliction that means the absence of care. Acedia has been known for over a thousand years; it was the bane of early monastics. And it may well be back now for many during this time of COVID-19. Fortunately, there may also be a cure, as Kathleen Norris says.

Do you sometimes wonder whether your life has amounted to much? Are there times when you just don't care what happens to you, or the world? 

You’ve worked hard, helped others, loved God, gone to worship services on a regular basis, prayed, read the scriptures, lived a decent life. But it all seems so pointless now—why bother trying to be faithful, anyway?

It doesn’t seem to make any difference; the world is in as terrible a shape as it ever was, and nothing you can do will make it better. 

I sometimes feel that way. Am I depressed? Maybe not, says Kathleen Norris. Maybe what I'm experiencing is acedia.

Acedia is an old spiritual affliction. At its Greek root, it means the absence of care. In personal terms, it means refusing to care, or even that you can't care.

Acedia was a bane to ancient monks and hermits, who considered it one of the greatest threats to monastic living. Once a monk succumbed to the notion that his efforts at daily prayer and contemplation were futile, life loomed like a prison sentence, day after day of nothingness.

Evagrius, who lived in the fourth century, experienced acedia. It “makes it seem that the sun hardly moves, if at all, and that the day is 50 hours long," he wrote. 

I'm not a monk, but I can relate to times when God feels a million miles away and it's just too hard to keep going. I want to pray, worship or just carry on normal daily activities, but I am filled filled with apathy, torpor and despair. 

Life, it seems, just doesn’t feel worth living. Maybe I have acedia, too.

In her new book, Acedia& Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life, Norris writes about her own struggles with the affliction, which left her listless and apathetic. 

“I think of acedia as the great disconnector,” she says, adding that, for her, it was the “profound indifference” that was really debilitating.

The terrible thing about acedia is that even though you know you have it, you can’t stop it.

“You know the pain is there, yet can't rouse yourself to give a damn,” she says.

Acedia makes people feel disconnected from people, relationships and communities. 

"Anything that helps you connect with the human race somehow is stripped away," says Norris. "Anything you can think of to do to help you get out of it, you go, ‘Nah, I don’t want to do that.’”

It’s not just religious people who can suffer from acedia. “Anyone whose work is self-motivated, and that would be any writer or artist,” can experience it, she says.

How can people overcome acedia? For Norris, author of books such as The Cloister Walk, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, writing a book about acedia was a way out.

She also turns to the Lord's Prayer when she feels it approaching. It reminds her that “the life in which we ought to be interested is daily life . . .  our Lord tells us to pray for today, and so he prevents us from tormenting ourselves about tomorrow."

Other ways to deal with it, she says, include going to worship services, connecting with others, or just carrying on with the normal things of life—even when those are the last things you really want to do.

“The ancient remedies are prayer and psalmody,” she says. “Prayer, fasting, tears. That sounds kind of weird to modern people, but I think refusing to disconnect and maybe staying in this place that you have chosen: your job, a marriage, a monastery, whatever it is.

“Saying, ‘No, I’m going to stay here. This is where I’ve made my stand. The grass is not greener. I am going to remain faithful to my commitments.’”

For a long time, the concept of acedia was lost to western culture. But today the ancient wisdom about acedia seems to be making a comeback.

For Norris, this is a welcome turn of events; if people understand what is happening to them, they can identify it and combat it.

"I am convinced that the word returned to us because we needed it again," she says.