An Old Name for It

Post 3 of a series on Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

Frankl had a name for the thing I could not name.

He called it the existential vacuum. A hollow spot where a reason used to be.

He was seeing it everywhere by the 1950s, in people whose lives were fine on paper. Not grief. Not trauma. Just an emptiness that showed up when nothing was demanding their attention.

He had a phrase for when it hits hardest. Sunday neurosis. The week finally stops, the noise clears, and what is left is the quiet. And a lot of people cannot stand what they hear in it.

Frankl thought most of what we call modern misery grows out of that hollow spot. Depression. Aggression. Addiction. Not the cause of everything, but the soil.

Here is what I think he got right. When you are in it, the emptiness does not feel like a lack of meaning. It feels like a lack of energy. Like something is wrong with you.

Somebody had already described it

Sixteen hundred years earlier, a monk in the Egyptian desert wrote it down in more detail.

His name was Evagrius. He lived in the fourth century, out past the edge of everything, and he made a list of the thoughts that come after a person who is trying to live well.

Eight of them.

Centuries later, the West trimmed the list to seven and called them deadly sins.

The one he thought was worst does not appear on that shorter list under a name you would recognize.

He called it acedia.

There is no good English word for it. Not laziness. Not depression. The closest I can get is a flatness that makes everything feel pointless while convincing you the problem is your circumstances.

Read his description and tell me it is sixteen hundred years old.

The monk keeps looking out the window. He checks the sun and it has barely moved. He goes to the door to see if anyone is coming. He starts to hate the room he is in. He thinks about other places he could be, where the work would be easier and the people would be better. He remembers his old life. The day feels fifty hours long.

I have done every one of those things with a phone in my hand.

The noonday demon

They had a name for it, and the name only exists because of a translation.

Psalm 91 talks about the destruction that lays waste at noon. When Jewish scholars in Alexandria put the Hebrew into Greek, that line came out as the noonday demon. That Greek Old Testament is the one the desert monks read, and it is the one my church still reads.

So they called acedia the noonday demon. The thing that comes for you in the middle of the day.

Not at midnight, when you would expect it. At lunchtime. In the flat part of an ordinary afternoon, when nothing is wrong.

That detail is the whole diagnosis. This isn't something that hits you when life falls apart. It hits when life is fine, and you cannot feel it.

Two answers, pointing the same way

Here is the part that got me.

Frankl's answer to the vacuum is not to study it. He warned against what he called hyper-reflection, watching yourself so closely that the watching becomes the illness. His counter to it was to turn a person outward. Toward a task. Toward another person. Something with a claim on you that is not you.

Now the desert. When a young monk went to one of the elders and said he was drowning in this, the answer he got was just a few words long.

Go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.

Do not move. Do not go looking for a better room. Do not go find yourself. Stay where you are and do the next thing in front of you, and the flatness will eventually say what it came to say.

A Viennese psychiatrist and an Egyptian monk, sixteen centuries apart, both looking at the same hollow spot and both saying the same thing.

Stop staring at it.

Where they part

Frankl says find a task worth doing. The task is yours to choose, and the choosing is the point.

The monk is not choosing. He is already in the cell. The room was assigned. His answer is not to find a purpose but to stay put inside one he did not pick, and to trust that obedience to a small ordinary duty is doing something even when he cannot feel it.

One is about finding your why. The other is about staying when your why has gone quiet.

And quite it gets. Just about every Sunday afternoon.

I have needed both. Frankl got me looking up. The desert taught me what to do on the days when looking up produces nothing at all.

I am a guy who loves to grow. Loves finding new meaning. So it surprised me that the answer was usually to sit with the meaning I already had.

That does not always come with a feeling. And the cruel part of a flat season is that the missing feeling starts to make you wonder whether the thing was ever real at all.

So here is what I do now. Sit. Name the feeling once, out loud. Then go do the next task inside the why you have already been given.

Naming it is not the same as studying it. One takes a second. The other takes years.

That is how a thing becomes more than a feeling.

Next: two kinds of numbness, and why one of them is a gift.