Psychology of Akedia
What Slaughtered Masculinity?
Toxic masculinity! The mere mention of it has some immediately roll their eyes and others immediately launch into the inherent evil of all masculinity. Personally I think there are toxic elements of masculinity, but there are also many virtuous elements. Too often though, I find that those who critique the toxic elements fail to honour the very real struggles of being masculine. They just leave us with a narrative of villainy without an alternative narrative of the heroes men could be. As the feminist bell hooks wrote,1
“Many radical feminists have been so enraged by male domination that they cannot acknowledge the possibility of male suffering or forgive.”
In this essay then, I’m going to discuss the masculine psychology of Akedia, the cause of the voice of alienation, absurdity, and nihilism that has come to speak in the hearts of too many men.2, 3 Understand that without a positive vision to draw us forward, more and more men find themselves stuck in the traps of porn addiction, Red Pill, and incelibacy.4 The men who follow Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and even Andrew Tate often say that these men helped them find purpose and meaning in life.5 I’ve had more than one man tell me that these men had saved them from ending their own lives.
But why have the echoes of Akedia become so deafening for so many men? In my last essay, “Psychology of the Kathekon,” I defined the Kathekon as the voice of masculine conformity that tells a man to quit being such a feminine little bitch. While the Kathekon still has a far too powerful influence, I think Akedia has become just as powerful, and for some men, even more powerful. Despite the toxicity of the Kathekon, it was also the very thing that was providing men meaning in their lives. Without it, they feel lost at sea in what Dr Vervaeke calls the “meaning crisis”, which is something that has affected all of Western Culture.6
Akedia then, is the archetype for the crisis in masculine meaning that has played a part in the rise of anxiety, depression, and the number of men who choose to end their own lives.6 Remember back to my essay, “Psychology of the Chained Vortex.” As you read, think about what social norms are chaining people and what negative emotions are driving those social rules.
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Masculinity’s Warden, Kathekon, and His Meaning
With all of that being said, what exactly is Akedia? The philosopher Dr. Snell writes that it’s the original name of the deadly sin – sloth.2 We tend to think of sloth as laziness, but Dr. Snell says that it’s far more accurate to say that it’s the hatred of the established order that the Christian God provides. Dr. Peterson has written that a masculine God often represents the conformity and tradition of a specific culture, and that overcoming an oppressive conformity is represented as the death of a God.7
So point being, the way that I am using Akedia is to connect it with the hatred of traditional masculine conformity. If Kathekon is the whole body of social norms, rules, and regulations in regards to masculinity, then Akedia is the force that questions these social norms. Personally I think this was absolutely necessary to do. Regardless of the positives of traditional masculinity that we need to hold onto, there were also myriad ways in which it oppressed not only women, but also the very men who lived by it. However, as I’ve been saying, this has left men without meaning of any legitimate kind.
If a loss of meaning is such a problem though, what exactly is it that we’re losing? What does it mean to have “meaning” and how did Kathekon provide it? Dr.’s Martela and Steger define three facets of the definition I’ll be using: coherence, purpose, and significance, while Dr. Susan Wolf adds a fourth called mattering. To have meaning in your life is to have coherence, purpose, significance, and mattering.
The first facet then, coherence, arises when we feel like our lives and the world make sense to us. As human beings we are motivated to have an accurate understanding of the world and that makes perfect evolutionary sense.8 If the world becomes incoherent to us that is going to directly affect our survival. We have no way to understand what is happening or to predict what’s going to happen. The slogan for a loss of coherence is something I’ve heard many times since Donald Trump was first elected, “we live in the strangest timeline”. The world simply doesn’t make sense anymore, it’s become absurd.
The traditional masculinity of Kathekon provided coherence because it told us this is what a man is, this is how he behaves, and these are the jobs he is supposed to have, and as such, what we should expect from a quality woman. Already I’m sure you can see how this coherence has collapsed with the feminist movement. To make the claim that these expectations are all defined by an oppressive patriarchy is to decohere our entire vision for “mankind”. To expect anything of someone just because they’re a man or woman is considered sexist. Then we have the rise of effeminate men, whether gay or straight, which has also questioned what it means to be truly masculine. Not to mention that males can now be women and females can be men!
So to be very clear, I don’t think this any of this stuff is bad and that’s actually the difficulty. Dr. Wolf argues explicitly that having meaning is not about being moral, and so coherence and incoherence are not about being good or bad. It’s specifically about how much sense things make to someone. From the perspective of Kathekon all of these changes are absurd and no coherent positive alternative has been offered for them. Most people who hate transgender have no idea what it even means or how it works. All they know is that the world has suddenly become incoherent.
Remember, that Conformity itself is a stage of development.9 Developmentally speaking, we need some sort of coherent worldview to conform to or else we feel as if we’re lost in chaos. However important feminist and LGBT+ liberation has been, I don’t think anyone would disagree that it’s made the gender landscape incoherent from the perspective of Kathekon’s traditional masculinity. That’s precisely why those who are most indoctrinated by the Kathekon react so harshly against it.
This incoherence is merely one facet of Akedia’s deconstructive assault. The second facet of meaning that Kathekon provided was purpose. To have purpose basically means that you have a sense of direction and future-oriented goals in life. When you wake up in the morning you not only know what you need to do, but you know why you’re doing it. You have your eyes on the future and know that this thing you’re aiming toward is worth all of the sweat, blood, and tears you’re going to invest today.
Again though, what is purpose in a world in which any of the traditional masculine roles are considered oppressive? You want to be the primary breadwinner? Well that’s not going to work because women are far more likely to be educated than men in both Canada and the United States.10, 11 Being more educated is associated with having a higher income, and those who grew up in higher income families are more likely to be more educated.12, 13 Notice how this crosses over with coherence, you had a coherent role as breadwinner that provided a purpose to your life, and that is now lost. You are also now less likely to be educated in the new coherence.
I know this point has already been made, but this isn’t a completely bad thing. The collapse of traditional masculine purpose has reduced the oppressive aspects of it and provided women with far more choice for purpose in their own lives. However, from the perspective of Kathekon this is going to be strictly viewed as a loss because men don’t necessarily feel like there is a replacement purpose that they can orient their entire lives around.
Loss aversion research also tells us that we care far more about losing something than gaining something.14 We are more devastated by the loss of Kathekon than we are joyful about the gain of an alternative, even if it may be very positive. The effect of this loss is an extreme level of boredom because we have nothing to do that’s meaningful to us other than video games and porn.
Then we arrive at the third facet, significance, which we have when we feel like our lives are important, worthwhile to live, and inherently valuable. Number one, we live in an infinite, dark void of mostly dead matter that cares nothing for us, and any achievement we ever make will soon be forgotten after we die. It doesn’t get much more insignificant than that, but, number two, connect this with a loss of coherence and purpose.
In his book Emergentism, Brendan Graham Dempsey outlines the consequences of the reductionist scientific worldview.15 By reductionist, this means that we view ourselves as being just a bunch of atoms floating in that dark void, or “love” is just a brain chemical and isn’t actually “real”. Think about what that implies. You as a person are fundamentally incoherent. The transhumanist Ray Kurzweil has literally said that an AI replica of his father would be more like his father than the flesh and blood father.16
In other words, who you are as your own individual person is at base, atomically insignificant and replaceable. A loss of coherence is a loss of significance, and vice versa. And what purpose could possibly be significant enough to make life worth living, when it’ll all be forgotten anyway?
And finally, the fourth facet of meaning in life is mattering. This means that we feel our lives contribute to people we care about, and who in turn, care about that contribution. This means that once we do die, we aren’t forgotten, because our contribution mattered to people who are still alive. Often that is, at the very least, children and grandchildren. They continue living after we’re gone, you obviously care about them, and if you did a good job, they care about you. They also provide you a sense of purpose, they make your life feel worthwhile and significant, and they help you make sense of your place in life because you’re making decisions based on raising them properly.
However, they are also one of the worst things we can do for the environment, with some researchers advising people to have less children, if they should have any at all.17 This doesn’t just mean that we are losing one of the most meaningful parts of our lives, again children provide all four facets of meaning, but you are now a bad person for having children. Don’t you care about climate change? So again, we do need to fight climate change, but just notice how one of the primary ways of creating a meaningful life according to Kathekon, becoming a father, is now considered an immoral thing to do.
Notice how that also fits in with everything I’ve said about Kathekon as traditional masculine conformity. The people who think that we should deconstruct all of Kathekon believe this because they accuse masculinity of being inherently toxic. When it comes to mattering, to having a contribution that is valued by the people we care about, Kathekon is immediately suspect. Just like with climate change and children, any contribution we could make according to Kathekon is viewed as detrimental to ourselves, to women, and to the world. From the perspective of Akedia, to try to find meaning in life according to Kathekon means that you are a bad person.
Akedia replaces coherence with incoherence, purpose with existential boredom, significance with nihilism, and mattering with villainy. Traditionally, Akedia is the hatred of God’s established order and the limits that the Divine Law places upon us. What I mean when I use Akedia is that it’s the hateful and suspicious deconstruction of the established masculine order provided by Kathekon. While this has been necessary to correct for the unnecessary oppressive elements of Kathekon, the negative consequences are also pretty clear, but what then is the way forward?
The Slain Remains of the Kathekon
Firstly, what isn’t the way forward is backward. This is the “way forward” provided by Jordan Peterson, and even more so by Andrew Tate. Dr. Peterson promotes a return to Christianity that is directly hostile to the very real insights of postmodernism and at least in my opinion, Tate is an incredibly regressive bad actor. So again, these are not ways forward because the way forward needs to come to terms with Akedia.
I just mentioned postmodernism, so for those of you who don’t know it’s basically just a philosophy that is focused on deconstruction.17 When I talk about Akedia challenging the traditional masculinity of Kathekon, or identifying and challenging systems of oppression, or understanding how culture influences us, these are all very postmodern forms of thinking. It’s definitely not that simple, but that’s a good way to understand it for now. So, to come to terms with Akedia means coming to terms with the insights of postmodernism. As Dr. Peterson himself says,7
“[a dead god] is tantamount to a denial of the hero.”
We have to be able to deconstruct the dead Kathekon so that we can make room for a new heroism, a new positive vision for men to orient their lives around. Dr. Peterson also says that nihilism is the alter ego of totalitarianism. Put in my own words, he says that Akedia alone also kills the hero because we can’t believe in our potential as men. Without meaning in life there literally is no reason to be alive. Why would there be when you’re insignificant, your life is an incoherent mess, you’re crushed under existential boredom, and any action you could take makes you a villain?
So the way forward has to come to terms with Akedia, but by definition Akedia deconstructs Kathekon, leaving us without any legitimate meaning. How do we resolve this paradox?
In his book, Acedia and its Discontents, Dr. Snell offers a really beautiful analysis of Akedia, but I think he too offers a mostly backward way forward. The reason for this is because, as a Christian, he defers to God’s Divine Law, something that cannot be questioned. To come to terms with Akedia means that we see how culturally determined Kathekon is. There is no “Divine Law” that tells us what Kathekon is and must always be forever more. Akedia is the means by which we update Kathekon because to live by Akedia is to disobey the demands of conformity.
The solution I’m getting to is to bring the forces of the Kathekon and Akedia into right relationship. So let’s use an analogy to explain what I mean. In your body you have the fight or flight system and the rest and digest system.18 One is more activated when you’re threatened whereas the other is more activated when you’re relaxed. The important thing to understand though is that either system is always working. Even when you’re fighting for your life, the relaxation system is still working. This is because it limits the fight or flight system from escalating so far that you have a heart attack.
Now let’s say you have PTSD.19 In this case these two different systems in your body are antagonistic.20 They’re fighting each other too much. So something stressful happens and you absolutely lose it. You might hear fireworks and react as if you’re back in a war zone fighting for your life. In this case, your unresolved trauma has stopped your relaxation system from properly balancing out your fight system. We call this mismatch antagonistic processing.
Opponent processing on the other hand is when the two systems are working as they should. Somebody here’s a loud bang and they jump, adrenaline starts pumping, but they quickly realize they’re safe and the relaxation system calms them down. The two systems are working in opposite directions, they are opponents, but the fact that they’re working together means that your body functions as it’s supposed to.
I hope you see where I’m going with this. In our current cultural context, Kathekon is in an antagonist relationship with Akedia. This is obviously true in an ideological context with traditionalists fighting progressives, or conservative Christians fighting atheists and agnostics. I know it’s a bit more complex than that, but you get my point. Additionally though, this process is happening inside of you as the pressures of conformity trap you in the antagonistic fighting between Kathekon and Akedia. Your mind is at war with itself.
So please remember that Conformity is a stage of development.21 At this stage of our lives we have an external compass given to us by our culture. If our culture is divided between Kathekon on one hand and Akedia on the other, that means that we have two competing cultures to which we must conform. Think about it. Some people say reclaim your masculinity, embrace tradition, feminism has ruined everything, be a man, etc. Other people tell you the exact opposite by talking about toxic masculinity, the negative effects patriarchy has on men, and that they want a new future for gender or even without gender altogether.
The point is that our external compass is divided between a half-dead, oppressive Kathekon and a deconstructive, nihilistic Akedia. To have no meaning in life in our culture is to have a compass that is pointed in too many directions. It’s not accurate to say that meaning disappears altogether, but that meaning becomes fragmented and unable to guide us. So…again…what is the way forward?
Locked Within Mindless Consumption
I’m sure I’m going to piss some people off, but I can’t give you the full answer just yet. I’m leading up to that, but for now there is just too much to explain for this one video. If you do want a head start on that though then please check out my completely free assignments here.
Either way, the point I do want to end on is why it’s so difficult for us to get Akedia and Kathekon to work together. Tyler Durden from Fight Club says it best,22
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.”
What I’m about to say is an extraordinarily important issue that too many of us are facing today. Murphy et al. (2022) investigated the relations between social media, boredom, and finding a passion.23 They make a distinction between superficial boredom and profound boredom. Remember what I said about purpose being replaced with boredom. The idea is that when you experience profound boredom you basically get so bored that you have to find something to do, and this allows you to find a passion, a purpose.
Superficial boredom is what you get when you numb yourself by mindlessly consuming tiktok, reddit, instagram, porn, video games, and even youtube. None of these things are necessarily bad in all cases, but none of them are truly meaningful. They will never provide you with truly fulfilling enjoyment in life, but what they will provide is enough entertainment to prevent you from becoming profoundly bored.
Boredom is not passive. It is meant to be an active state where you’re challenging the current state of things, actively trying to find a new coherence, to make things make sense, so that you can find a new purpose that makes your life significant. Eventually you even find a community of people who are also passionate about that thing. You make friends and share experiences, learning to care about them, and having them care about you. This is mattering. All four facets of meaning lie on the other side of profound boredom, and society has offered you the perfect distraction to keep you trapped in a quiet, bored discontent. Never fulfilled enough to be truly happy, but never bored enough to do something about it.
In the next episode I’m going to go deeper into another component that makes our culture’s prison of Conformity so difficult for us to escape today. If modern technology keeps us trapped in superficial boredom, why do so many of us find it difficult to stop using it?
Until then, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
You can find the recommended reading order at the bottom of this article.
References:
1 – hooks, bell. (2003). The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Atria.
2 – Snell, R. J. (2015). Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire. Angelico Press.
3 – Cameron, W. (n.d.). 3 Keys To Find Your Authentic Self. Retrieved October 5, 2024, from https://metamasculine.substack.com/p/3-keys-to-find-your-authentic-self
4 – Grubbs, J. B., Kraus, S. W., & Perry, S. L. (n.d.). Self-reported addiction to pornography in a nationally representative sample: The roles of use habits, religiousness, and moral incongruence. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 8(1), 88–93. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.7.2018.134
5 – Peterson, J. B. (with Fogra, J.). (2021). Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Random House Canada.
6 – Vervaeke, J., Mastropietro, C., & Miscevic, F. (2017). Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis (Hardback ed. edition). Open Book Publishers.
7 – Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1st edition). Routledge.
8 – Henriques, G. (2011). A New Unified Theory of Psychology (2011th edition). Springer.
9 – Cook-Greuter, S. (2021). Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making.
10 – Government of Canada, S. C. (2021, September 22). Gender-related differences in desired level of educational attainment among students in Canada. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2021009/article/00004-eng.htm
11 – Parker, K. (2021, November 8). What’s behind the growing gap between men and women in college completion? Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/08/whats-behind-the-growing-gap-between-men-and-women-in-college-completion/
12 – Education pays, 2023. (n.d.). Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved October 2, 2024, from https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2024/data-on-display/education-pays.htm
13 – Education and Socioeconomic Status Factsheet. (n.d.). Https://Www.Apa.Org. Retrieved October 2, 2024, from https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education
14 – Loss Aversion: Definition, Risks in Trading, and How to Minimize. (n.d.). Investopedia. Retrieved October 2, 2024, from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/loss-psychology.asp
15 – Dempsey, B. G., & Adyahanzi. (2022). Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. Independently published.
16 – ABC News. (2011, August 9). Futurist Ray Kurzweil Says He Can Bring His Dead Father Back to Life Through a Computer Avatar—ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id=14267712
17 - Carrington, D., & editor, D. C. E. (2017, July 12). Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
18 – Storm, J. A. J. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (First Edition). University of Chicago Press.
19 – McCorry, L. K. (2007). Physiology of the Autonomic Nervous System. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 71(4), 78.
20 – M.D, B. van der K. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Illustrated edition). Viking.
21 – Vervaeke, J. (n.d.). Awakening from the Meaning Crisis—YouTube. Retrieved August 2, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ
22 – Kegan, R. (1998). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Reprint edition). Harvard University Press.
23 – Fight Club (1999)—IMDb. (n.d.). [Video recording]. Retrieved September 23, 2024, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/characters/nm0000093
24 – Murphy, S., Hill, T., McDonagh, P., & Flaherty, A. (2023). Mundane emotions: Losing yourself in boredom, time and technology. Marketing Theory, 23(2), 275–293. https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931221138617