This all happens within a schizophrenic culture that simultaneously celebrates every product and innovation that makes something easier and lower-effort, while also celebrating effort and self-discipline — and, at the same time, ignoring millennia of wisdom on how ascetic practice actually works and pretending it’s just a matter of individual choice and volition:
Now, as the tide of internet slop rises around us, it should already be clear that this industrialisation of thought is making us as cognitively sedentary, as cars and labour-saving machines made us physically so. Accordingly, cognitive fitness is on track to become as much an ascetic practice as staying fit in culture of couch potatoes. Now, if we’re going to talk about cultivating the kind of physical and cognitive askesis required to avoid becoming physically and mentally flabby in this context, that means reckoning with the noonday demon. And that means reckoning with technology of acedia that is to cognitive askesis as smoking is to the physical kind: our phones.[…]
Perhaps there’s scope for careful engagement. But it should be clear that there are also whole industries out there today, whose sole aim is getting rich by feeding and legitimising your noonday demon, and making it difficult for you to sustain the self-discipline needed to flourish. And sure, there is a certain amount we can do as individuals to resist: the cheery self-help post. But I think this is a collective action problem, too, which is to say a moral one. We should take the whispering noonday demon — and those who profit from it — a great deal more seriously than we do.