My primary vice has got to be sloth. It’s not that I don’t struggle with lust or avarice or pride or any of the others; I do. But sloth is the one that gets me the most, and it’s the one that leads to the others.
For example, I lust because I’m too lazy and uncaring to actually do the work of loving someone. I give in to wrath because I want everything to be given me without my having to work for it, so I make unreasonable demands of the world. And so on.
As vices go, it’s not very exciting. It’s maybe the only vice not glorified in movies or on cable TV. And this makes sense: the root of the vice is a kind of despair. James Chastek explains Thomas Aquinas’ description of the tristitia at the root of sloth. Tristitia usually is translated “sadness” but James suggests “depression” and I think that’s pretty close. It is the sadness of finding nothing good in the world.
Even wrath and envy find violence or revenge worthwhile, but sloth finds nothing worthwhile – not even pleasure.
The cure for sloth
What a slothful person needs is a wake-up call, a swift kick in the heiney, a slap to the face. Once, when I was making confession, the priest advised me to go to a bar and start a fight if I found myself tempted by sloth. In other words, anything to snap out of the fog and come face to face with reality.
Because the fact of the matter is, the world is full of goodness. Pleasure really is good. Friendship really is good. The beauty of a forest or a garden or a painting really is good. Sloth has to put on a pretty thick blindfold to ignore all the good things out there in the world.
I’m not sure why or how I developed the vice myself, but I know the signs of it: that sigh, that question in the corner of my mind that wonders if whatever I’m doing at the moment is worth it, that desire to take a nap when I’m not remotely tired.
In those moments, the first thing I have to do is bring my attention to focus on something – anything at all. I have to see something that is undeniably good. Or even something that is undeniably bad, because that will stir up my anger that it could be good, that there is a good to be done there. In short, I need to return to reality.
Sloth and clinical depression
I said above that “depression” is pretty close to a good translation of tristitia. But it’s not perfect, largely because of the psychiatric condition called depression. Now, I’m not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. I have been treated for clinical depression, and I have found that medication helps. But it does not remove the tristitia at the root of sloth. All medication can do is relieve the emotions that threaten to overwhelm my ability to think clearly.
Tristitia is not an emotional state, or a mood disorder. It is an attitude. When faced with a cloudy day, one can say “Why bother?” or one can say “Perfect day for a walk!” The latter takes more effort than the former, but it also brings joy that the former never will find. Joy is the result of taking the time and effort to find something good, and it leads to love, to communion with the good that one finds.
Certainly worth one’s while.
I read an article recently that suggested the melancholy/depression and the ability to focus are intertwined physically in the human mind. That is, there is a direct connection between the ability to accomplish focused learning and tasks and a general depressive state. Darwin, apparently, spent lots of time down in the dumps, along with several other thinkers. Medieval doctors noted that melancholic humors often occurred within scholars/monks.
They’ve actually done studies suggesting that people are far more accurate in observing details and coming to conclusions while in a saddened, rather than happy state.
It doesn’t mean that sloth isn’t still something that needs to be worked on (I need to work on it, too), but it might help to think that there’s a physical root and benefit to such states.