The Sorrow at the Good

Consider, honestly, how you live. Your rooms are warm in January in a way Versailles never managed for Louis XIV, who dined in furs while his wine froze at the table. Your spice rack would have financed a Renaissance trade expedition. You carry in your pocket every symphony ever recorded, every film, a fair copy of the sum of human knowledge, and the means to speak instantly with nearly anyone alive. A medieval king with an abscessed tooth would have traded a province for your dentist; with a fever, half the kingdom for your pharmacy. By the material measures that defined privilege for the whole of human history (warmth, food, music, medicine, knowledge, safety), an ordinary person in an ordinary apartment today lives better than most kings who ever reigned.

And the mood of the age is a low-grade sorrow that nobody can quite name.

You know it. It is not tragedy. Tragedy has a shape. It is the flat, restless, scrolling sadness of an evening with everything available and nothing appealing; the strange exhaustion of people whose ancestors would weep at their pantries; the boredom, documented and rising, of the best-entertained generation in history. If abundance made people glad, we would be the gladdest people who ever lived. We are not, and the interesting question is why.

I named this once in a single sentence, at the close of an essay on what gets expensive when machines make everything else cheap, and have owed it a full hearing ever since. I want to offer an old answer, with modern receipts. The old answer has a name, acedia, and it was diagnosed with terrifying precision by people who owned almost nothing, sixteen centuries before the smartphone. But to see why now is its golden hour, start with an economist.

The hinge: what abundance consumes

In 1971, Herbert Simon wrote a paragraph that explains more of the twenty-first century than most books manage:

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

He was writing about organizations (the essay is "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" (PDF)), and he handed the next fifty years their business model in four sentences. The trillion-dollar attention economy is Simon's paragraph, operationalized: if attention is the new scarcity, then attention is the new extractable resource, and an industry duly arose to strip-mine it. That is the attention address from the synthesis essay: demand for your evenings multiplied, supply fixed at one of you.

But read Simon's principle at full width and it cuts deeper than feeds. A wealth of anything creates a poverty of whatever that thing consumes. What does abundance-of-goods consume? The capacity to receive any single good as good: to taste it, to finish it, to be glad of it. A wealth of options consumes commitment. A wealth of entertainment consumes the ability to be entertained. Every meal available always consumes the feast, because a feast is a difference, and permanent abundance is the end of differences. The kings we out-live had one thing our pantries cannot stock: their feasts ended, and so remained feasts.

This is the paradox's mechanism, and the empirical literature has caught up to it. Tam and Inzlicht, in a 2024 paper whose title does the work ("People are increasingly bored in our digital age"), document that self-reported boredom is rising, particularly among the young, precisely as entertainment became effortless and infinite; their companion experiments found that the signature modern gesture, switching and skipping in search of something better, doesn't relieve the boredom but intensifies it. The global average is now around six and a half hours a day online. The supply of interesting things has never been larger. The capacity to be interested is what it consumed.

The old name

Now the diagnosis, from people who saw it first: in the desert, of all places, with nothing.

In the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus catalogued the afflictions of monks and gave the worst one a nickname that has never been improved: the noonday demon. Listen to how modern this is:

"The demon of acedia, also called the noonday demon, is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all... First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell... Then too he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labor."

The day is fifty hours long. He checks the window. He checks it again. He starts hating where he is and drifting toward the fantasy that the real life is somewhere else: another cell, another city, another feed. Evagrius is describing a man alone in silence with almost nothing, and it reads, line for line, like a man alone at midnight with everything: the endless scroll, the restless checking, the low hatred of one's own good life, the certainty that elsewhere is where the interesting thing is happening. The desert fathers would recognize the person on the sofa instantly. Same demon; better tooling.

Eight centuries later, Aquinas gave the thing its exact definition, and the exactness is the point. Acedia, he wrote, is a species of sorrow, but not sorrow at evil, which is ordinary and healthy. Acedia is "sorrow in the Divine good": an oppressive sadness that rises at the good itself, "which, to wit, so weighs upon man's mind, that he wants to do nothing." Sorrow at the good. Sit with the strangeness of that phrase until it stops being strange, because it names something no other phrase quite catches: the sadness that arrives not when life is bad, but precisely when the good is in front of you (the free evening, the healthy family, the abundant world) and it asks only that you receive it, and something in you turns its face to the wall and reaches for the phone.

Blaise Pascal, halfway between the desert and us, saw where it hides: "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber." His word for our entire entertainment economy, three centuries early, was divertissement: diversion, the industry of not being alone with the question of what all this good is for. Pascal thought kings were the most diverted people on earth, because they could afford to be. Now everyone can afford to be. We have democratized the king's disease.

Why the good, of all things, should make us sad

So: the monk in the desert, the king at Versailles, and the person on the sofa share an affliction that tracks neither wealth nor poverty. What does it track? Here is the pattern I cannot unsee.

Acedia rises where the good arrives without an address: abundant, endless, and from nowhere in particular. A gift makes you glad because it comes from someone and means something; the same object, appearing in infinite supply from an anonymous dispenser, becomes inventory, and no one has ever loved inventory. The feeds deliver more music than the Habsburgs ever heard, and it means less than a court musician's single evening, because meaning is not a property of goods. It is a property of givenness: of things that come from someone, cost something, and end. Strip those three away, which is exactly what infinite abundance does, and the goods keep arriving while the gladness quietly starves. The sorrow at the good is not ingratitude as a character flaw. It is what receiving-without-a-giver feels like, at scale, six and a half hours a day.

Which is why I don't think the cure on offer (more, faster, better-recommended) can ever work. It is the disease with a roadmap. And the old tradition's prescriptions, which sound like deprivation, are precisely re-engineering the three things abundance strips: an ending (the fast, the sabbath: feasts exist only where they stop; my own scratch-card evenings are a domesticated sabbath, one chosen thing instead of every available thing), a cost (the walk instead of the ride, the cooked meal, the ten thousand steps: goods carried a little are goods felt), and a giver, which is where I stop pretending this is a lifestyle essay.

The restless heart

I am a practising Catholic, so I will say plainly what the tradition says, and you may do with it what you like. The tradition's claim is that acedia is not a mood but a misreading: the goods were signposts and we have been trying to live in them as destinations. Augustine put the whole diagnosis in one sentence, addressed not to a reader but to God: "you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Read the kings' paradox through that line and it resolves. The restlessness was never evidence that the goods were insufficient in quantity. No quantity was ever going to work, which is why the fifty-first streaming service will not do what the first fifty didn't. The restlessness is information. It is the heart reporting, accurately, that it was built for something the inventory does not contain. And every good thing that fails to satisfy is not failing; it is pointing. Sorrow at the good, on this reading, is homesickness experienced by people who have forgotten they have a home, which is why it worsens, rather than eases, the more comfortable the exile becomes.

Whatever a machine can make gets cheap, and the machines are about to make almost everything: more images, more music, more text, more diversion than Pascal could have dreamed the whole race capable of. The four addresses say value moves to what no machine can do. And here, at the end of the thread, is the deepest of them. No machine can be glad for you. No machine can receive your one evening, your one family, your one ordinary and astonishing life, and give thanks for it: that is the work, and it was always the work, and there has never been more competition for the attention it requires. The noonday demon has gone fully remote; he works nights now, and he has your phone number. The treatment has not changed in sixteen centuries: stay in the room. Keep the feast by letting it end. Say thank you to someone. And when the fifty-hour day comes (it will come), remember that the sorrow is not the truth about the good in front of you. It is the oldest lie about it, told at the hour when the sun seems to stand still.