Another trip ‘around the sun. Another year spent juicing the last drops from the overworked well of dopamine. I have been down with fatigue and headaches the past couple of days, as my body tires of another cycle of indulgence. The screen, work, booze, smoke, exercise—all rejected, all impossible—so I sit in bed, unmade, much like the man at the moment. This has been a result of a 3-day bender starting last Friday—but the root cause started a minute back. For the first time in months, I’ve done nothing. The disgust of my brain, left unchecked, has run rampant. No distractions to quell my anxiety, no work to offer validation, no vices to numb the stress, and no routines to counter the toll my habits have taken.
Early Christian hermits, the desert fathers, had a word for this: acedia, an existential malaise that plagued monks when faced with idleness. Acedia was often seen as the “demon of the noontime”—when the work paused, they wrestled with this demon, describing it as a paralyzing force that left them restless, despairing, and questioning their purpose. Acedia was not simply boredom—it was a profound confrontation with the void, an encounter with the self without the usual distractions to obscure it. Their writings detail how this state could lead to disgust with the self and the environment—feelings the modern machine has made a dedicated effort to avoid. What once was a natural human experience—a pause in time—has been digitized, repackaged, and served as a 10-second anesthetic. A fleeting escape, now a product designed to deliver these microdoses of dopamine to soothe our restlessness in exchange for a deeper disconnection.
Eight hours in, as the back pain worsened, strangely, my restlessness finally gave way to clarity. It was a clarity, however, tainted—a brutal revelation of the time I had squandered—high, high on distractions, lost in films that didn’t move me, trapped in a job I despised, breakups not processed, and haunted by the memories of careless remarks made that now make my stomach twist in shame. I am sure there is a parable to be made with my previous argument on the listlessness of the desert fathers.
The Desert Fathers fled into the wilderness, seeking solace from the distractions of the world, but found instead a mirror of their own inner turmoil. They fled into solitude not only to escape the noise of society but to confront something far more insidious—the chaos within themselves. What they encountered, however, was a disorienting stillness, where the usual distractions—work, socializing, comforts—were absent, and only their own restless minds remained. A force crept in when the external noise faded, exposing the emptiness of their inner lives. It wasn’t the silence of peace they encountered, but the noise of their own dissatisfaction and unease.
Much like them, I find myself here, in the strange quiet of my own making. As the distractions fade—no work to do, no distractions to numb the discomfort—the mind begins to turn inward, and with it comes a clarity that feels more like a weight than a revelation. True solitude does not seem to bring instant peace or enlightenment; rather, it forces you to face the rawness of existence—the petty regrets, the unresolved guilt, the gnawing sense of time slipping away.
The disquieting sense of inertia continues to morph as I go deeper into the night, and sleep remains a step ahead. Pain pulses through my neck and head as I lay in the dark room, burritoed in my blanket. There is no comfort to be found—the room is simultaneously too cold to have my feet out but too warm to be covered up completely. There is no diplomacy between the blanket and the room. I think of Raoul Duke, lost in Vegas, having woken up from a bender of unimaginable proportions and dealing with the confrontation of the aftermath of a hollow life lived in a blur. I don’t want that for myself. Too late, too late—maybe not. Maybe.
“I felt the familiar wave of nausea rise in my throat. A feeling I had known too well by now, like some kind of strange animal crawling up my spine. But it was different this time. A sudden clarity, a desperate urgency to make sense of all of this. I thought about the American dream, about the madness of everything we had done so far. And for a moment, I felt like I was seeing it all for what it really was—too late, too late.”
- Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
As the first slivers of light pierce through the curtains, there is no grand change in my circumstances, no miraculous transformation. But it does bring with it a certain calmness—a quiet but undeniable confrontation. I cannot stay suspended in this dissonance of awareness and loathing. The day beckons as it always has, with a promise of nothing more than the next step forward. Perhaps the key is not to seek resolution or the end of restlessness, maybe just to accept its presence, quietly, as I move forward—without grand epiphanies or promises, but with a steady sense of acknowledgment, and a calm, uncertain step into the day. I stumble out of bed in pain to make some coffee and start the next day of this misery.