I can’t remember the last time I was bored for longer than a minute. Waiting for coffee, stopped at a red light, standing in the hallway while the kettle boils, my hand finds the phone before my mind has registered that nothing is happening. Boredom used to be weather. Now it’s something I can switch off.
That sounds like progress, and in some ways it is. But nearly every contemplative tradition I know of treats the dull stretch as a door you’re supposed to walk through, and I’ve been wondering what happens to a person who never gets near it.
The Monks Had a Name for It
The fourth-century desert monks of Egypt knew this feeling well enough to give it a name. They called it acedia, from a Greek word that means something like “not caring,” and Evagrius of Pontus, a monk who lived in the Egyptian desert in the late 300s, wrote the most famous description of it in a short handbook called the Praktikos.
His account is worth paraphrasing in some detail, because it’s uncomfortably modern. Evagrius calls acedia the “noonday demon,” borrowing a phrase from the Greek version of Psalm 91, and says it’s the most oppressive of all the demons. It shows up around ten in the morning and hangs on until about two in the afternoon. It makes the sun look like it has stopped moving, so the day seems to be fifty hours long.
Then the demon goes to work. The monk keeps getting up to look out the window, checking whether any visitor is coming. He starts to resent his cell and the work he does in it. He starts thinking that the other monks don’t love him, that somewhere else he’d serve God better, that this place is the problem and a different one would fix it.
Swap the window for a lock screen and you’ve got a pretty accurate portrait of my average Tuesday afternoon. Evagrius would have known me on sight.
What the Phone Took
For those monks, acedia wasn’t a nuisance to be managed. It was one of the main tests of the whole life. The cell was a small room with nothing to do in it, and the monk’s job was to stay there when every nerve wanted out.
There’s a saying from the desert tradition, usually attributed to Abba Moses, that comes up whenever people write about this. A brother asked him for a word of advice, and Moses told him, more or less, to go and sit in his cell, because the cell would teach him everything. The teaching wasn’t in a book or a sermon. It was in the room, and you only got it by not leaving.
Here’s what strikes me about that. A monk in the fourth century could flee his cell, but he had to stand up and walk out the door, and everyone could see him do it. My escape takes a thumb and half a second. Nobody notices, including me.
So the gate is still there. I just never arrive at it.
People Would Rather Be Shocked
If you think you’d handle the cell better than I do, there’s a study you should know about. In 2014 the psychologist Timothy Wilson and his colleagues published a paper in Science called “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind.” In one experiment they left people alone in a plain room for fifteen minutes, with nothing to do but think.
The catch was a button. Earlier in the session, everyone in this group had tried a mild electric shock and said they’d pay money to avoid feeling it again. Then, alone in the room, they were allowed to shock themselves if they wanted to.
Twelve of the 18 men did, along with six of the 24 women. One man pressed the button 190 times.
To me that reads less like a story about weak people and more like a measurement of how badly the mind wants something to happen, and how little most of us have practiced sitting with nothing. The desert monks would have recognized the button immediately. It’s the window Evagrius describes, wired to a battery.
Thomas Says You’ll Be Troubled
The Gospel of Thomas has a saying that I think explains why the monks stayed put. It’s saying 2, and in Marvin Meyer’s translation it reads:
Jesus said, “Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be troubled. When one is troubled, one will marvel and will reign over all.”
Look at the order. Finding comes before trouble, and trouble comes before wonder. The saying assumes there’s a disturbing middle stretch between the first discovery and the marvel, and it tells you not to stop there.
Boredom isn’t exactly the trouble Thomas means. But I’ve found that boredom is often the lid on it. When I stop feeding myself input for twenty minutes, the first thing that shows up is restlessness.
After that come the things the restlessness was covering, like a conversation I’ve been avoiding or a fear I haven’t named. Every time I reach for the phone, I’m also reaching away from whatever is waiting underneath.
Thomas has another line that fits here. In saying 91 the disciples ask Jesus who he is, and he tells them, “You examine the face of heaven and earth, but you have not come to know the one who is in your presence, and you do not know how to examine this moment.” Examining this moment is exactly what boredom refuses to let you skip. There’s nothing else to examine.
Boredom Isn’t the Goal
I want to be careful here, because a post like this can slide into praising misery. The monks sat in their cells because something was supposed to happen on the far side of the boredom, and Evagrius says as much.
When a monk holds out against the noonday demon, he writes, a deep peace and an unspeakable joy follow the struggle. That’s my paraphrase, but the shape is his, and it’s the same arc as Thomas 2. Trouble first, then marvel.
So the discipline is staying inside the one state that reliably comes right before attention changes gear, even when every part of you wants to bail. I’ve written before about fasting from the world, and boredom is what that fast tastes like for the first few days.
Staying in the Cell
None of this requires a desert. Here are some ways I’ve been trying to let boredom back in:
- Leave the phone in your pocket for small waits. Coffee lines, elevators, the two minutes before a meeting starts. Notice the reach, and don’t finish it. These are tiny cells, and they come free with the day.
- Name the noonday demon when it shows up. Evagrius’s list is a pretty good checklist. If you catch yourself thinking a different job or city or relationship would fix the restlessness, that’s the demon talking.
- Pick one dull task and do it without audio. Dishes, folding laundry, a walk around the block. No podcast. The first ten minutes will be irritating, and that’s the part that counts.
- Sit for fifteen minutes with nothing. That’s Wilson’s number, and you don’t need a button to fail it. Set a timer, sit somewhere plain, and see what comes up after the restlessness passes. Write it down afterward if you want to.
- Expect the trouble. When something uncomfortable surfaces in the silence, you’re probably doing it right. Thomas promised it would show up. If you want more structure, A Rule of Life for the Internet Age builds a daily cell into the week.
The Sun That Wouldn’t Move
Last week I tried the fifteen-minute sit on a weekday afternoon, around two o’clock, which is the exact hour Evagrius said the demon gets tired and leaves. It didn’t feel like it was leaving. The clock on the stove seemed stuck, and I got up once to check whether the mail had come.
Somewhere past the ten-minute mark, though, I noticed the light on the kitchen floor. It had moved about a hand’s width while I sat there. The sun had been going the whole time.
The Gospel of Thomas is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). Evagrius of Pontus’s description of acedia is paraphrased from Praktikos 12. The saying of Abba Moses comes from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and is paraphrased. The shock experiment is from Timothy D. Wilson and colleagues, “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind,” Science 345 (2014). For the larger battle over attention, see The Attention Economy Is a Spiritual Battlefield.
