KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE

There is a weariness of soul that we can all have—the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix. It’s often called burnout or, more formally, acedia. 

And it’s incredibly common in modern life: a repetitive condition of emotional and spiritual exhaustion.

In our modern experience, this state is probably much more common, given that we are constantly bombarded with stimulation and a toxic concoction of traumatic video content, inane memes, vapid advertisements, and lifestyle hyperinflation. 

All of this leaves us feeling utterly disconnected from our true core and its real desires. We find ourselves confused and longing for things that don’t matter, and neglecting all of the beautiful things and people around us.

In a spiritual or formal, classical context, this is often referred to as acedia. Classically understood, acedia is an ennui and apathy we experience toward accomplishing what’s good, and perhaps most essentially, tending to our higher, truer, spiritual good. It doesn’t really mean laziness, and most of us would attest that this sense of existential fatigue is different and deeper than laziness. 

It can, in fact, accompany an even dizzying work pace and productivity rate.

Deep Fatigue Often Starts in the Body

In my full understanding of reality, body and soul are never disconnected because we only ever operate in the context of ourselves as a whole. We are never just one or the other: body or soul.

So, first it needs to be said that this deep, existential tired can have a root in our generally deplorable care of ourselves physically, especially with regard to sleep and true, meaningful, restorative leisure. 

We are rarely sleeping with the patterns of the sun and its nightly disappearance, and we are rarely taking intentional time to be deeply human and resting our nervous systems through laughter, art, thoughtful engagement, and present human relationships.

We have disoriented our bodies via electric lights and brain-hijacking screens, disrupting the natural rhythm of our biology which anticipates and produces hormones in response to light signaling. We pump ourselves full of the drugs of cortisol and adrenaline with what we choose to take in visually and sonically, and our bodies have no choice but to numb the stress response to survive, leaving us dull and lifeless.

This often leads to a much lower perception of presence and joy.

And this is still in just the realm of the physical.

What About the Directly Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual source of Exhaustion?

I referred above to the lack of restorative leisure as a physically damaging reality. And it is.

But the reality is that when all we have is either productivity or the stressful illusion of it via scrolling (few thoughtful people, which is probably you if you’re still reading this, give themselves over to what they would perceive as pure entertainment and mindlessness, convincing ourselves instead that our content is elevated, informative, and necessary in some way), we are losing our sense of time, reality, and fullness of the moment.

The days bleed into each other, and we enter into a permanent state of deep, perceived exhaustion and emotional fatigue.

To have a fuller sense of life, we must slow ourselves down, intentionally, to engage with reality and our true senses and selves. We must deliberately place ourselves into our bodies and out of our internet abstractions and dissociation, feeling ourselves again to be real, awake, tangible.

In the end, this feeling of tiredness and spiritual fatigue that will not relent even as we try to sleep it away (although sleeping more, as I said, is a decent first-step strategy), is due to a lack of purpose and loss of meaning we have chosen our way into.

How to Resolve Burnout & Acedia’s Loss of Meaning

Unfortunately, getting out of the loop of acedia, burnout, and spiritual exhaustion in our modern context involves a real kind of heroism that previously wasn’t required. 

But it is not impossible. We have real agency and become the brightest versions of ourselves, still. We can take back this drive to live alert to reality at any moment, as uphill as it may sometimes be.

The silver lining is that there is little in between for us anymore. Yes, we can continue to fall into the abyss of meaninglessness, and the hole seems to be darkening and deepening by the day. 

But if we refuse this abyss, then we will spiral up into something bright, beautiful, and especially powerful in our time, likely inspiring many with us.

Courage begets courage.

And action, due to the reality of our habituating nature, compounds over time.

But sometimes, too, only art can truly begin to answer these kinds of aching questions. A while ago, I wrote something in response to so much of this feeling I was wrestling with and seeing others wrestle with, based in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. 

It’s in my private archive, if you’d like to enter into it.

Access to the private archive is sent by email, and the archive includes my ongoing writing and occasional invitations to be more deeply involved in this very human work. 

All of this is made possible by generous patrons.