Acedia and the Tyranny of Optimization

Jia Tolentino, in her well-known essay published in The Guardian, writes about what she calls "the tyranny of the ideal woman." In describing this mythical and yet familiar figure of womanhood, Tolentino opens the essay by writing:

“Everything about this woman has been preemptively controlled to the point that she can afford the impression of spontaneity and, more important, the sensation of it – having worked to rid her life of artificial obstacles, she often feels legitimately carefree. The ideal woman can be whatever she wants to be – as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure, or, in other words, of “lifestyle.”

Cultures of optimization have been prevalent since the industrial revolution, but what distinguishes this current one is that it demands women to not just appear more perfect but actually to change themselves mentally and physically to meet an unattainable standard. I remember a mentor pointing out to me that the ‘it girl’ ideal shifted like a pendulum every decade from at least the 1890s onward in order to maximize consumer energy and disincentivize wardrobes that could be retained and bestowed between generations. This meant that each new decade one might find themselves more or less within reach of the cultural norm. By the 2000s, though, the use of digital and surgical technology enabled the creation of an appearance that no one could actually possess, and which made everyone inadequate. By the 2010s, mobile technology democratized that digital technology. You no longer needed an iMac with an Adobe suite–you could create and propagate viral images of an unattainable standard of life and beauty using a device in your pocket.

It is not enough to resemble the optimized ideal; you either embody it entirely or not at all. Further, the present generational disdain for the artificial requires a careful game of irony–the ideal is perfected only when one can seem to have effortlessly attained the standard while maintaining the complete rejection that such a standard exists. Pursuing this elusive image obliges an impossible degree of ease, where one must work hard without breaking a sweat. In our previous essay on productivity, the question of the cult was "Am I trying hard enough?" Productivity culture is not concerned with replacing what is natural, only with getting the results we want and nature better not get in our way. Where we move into the cult of optimization is with the threshold question of "Am I appearing to be trying too hard?" Streamlining is the arch virtue of the optimizer–it is the replacement of nature with a simpler and more elegantly desirable form of nature. These aspirations lead to a cultural environment ideal for acedia.

My dear friend and colleague Laura Hashimov has discussed the tyranny of the ideal woman at length, and also how it has merged with Christian identity to create a 'tyranny of the ideal Christian woman.' Following Tolentino's ideas, she observes that the tyranny of the ideal woman involves significant effort to present oneself as carefree, in service to a market and as a logical opposite of someone who doesn't try hard enough. Laura has observed that the tyrant of the ideal Christian woman is combined with a service ethic commonly attributed to the faithful 'church lady.' Together, this can create a culture of optimization that demands the most faithful woman exhaust herself in the service of others, suggesting to her that she "becomes optimal in the moment she ceases to exist meaningfully as a self." In other words, she exists most when there's nothing left of her to qualify the role she has become.

Remember that acedia manifests as both a state of restlessness and aimlessness in a horrible dyad. In today's culture of optimization, the twin devils of acedia appear again on our shoulders. The first devil whispers harshly that we are unworthy of love or attention. The second devil, disguised as an angel of light, promises to help us stand out and to be loved, ushering us into a series of laborious tasks that wear us down while promising the acceptance we seek. Eventually, we become too weary to continue, and the second devil reveals its true colors by agreeing with the first devil's verdict that we are not worth loving or seeing. “If only you just tried a bit harder…pity.” Unfortunately, this internal struggle is often confirmed by the world outside, including the Church.

If I have suggested that this cult of optimization falls with particular weight on the shoulders of women, it is because I believe that to be true. But the fervent demand to optimize pervades the lives of us all. To return for a moment to that image of the monk in the cell, productivity culture demands of the monk that their efforts are wasted in that place–that they need to find a community and an environment in which they can excel. Optimization, conversely, suggests to the monk that until they become the ideal monk, the exercises and disciplines of the spiritual life, the benefits of community and the cell, are inaccessible to them. They cannot begin until they become the right sort of person. In the Church, as commentators like Peter Steinke have observed, this drive to self-reform often takes the shape of a kind of rampant overfunctioning in congregational spaces, which is often baptized by the community as devotion to service.

There is a difference between a person who has a sense of self and who freely offers themselves to serve others in ways that naturally extend from who they are and what they are gifted to do, and a person who is willing to do anything because they long to discover who they actually are, which they imagine will emerge from their activities. There is an additional difference between a person who serves because they are trying to doggedly self-improve and a person who serves because they want to contribute as they might to the good of another. I have yet to meet the person who is solely possessed by only one or the other, and that should call us to an honest but limited regard for our motives as we live the Christian life in community. If we knew exactly who we were in Christ, we would do only what is ours to do and it would be precisely what is needed in the total work of the Body of Christ. But who we are remains somewhat a mystery, and so if we are too ardent to assert what is and is not ours, we can get it wrong and overfunction or underfunction. Alternately, if we are too self-skeptical, we can also become aimless or despairing in our response to love God and others in word and deed.

Optimization distorts the good of becoming who we actually are by attempting to curate the unveiling of the true self as it is revealed to us in communion with God. Optimization seeks to expedite what is a gradual revelation by asserting provisional observations as immovable facets of the self and then systematizing their activity. When we compulsively optimize, we strive to transfigure a provisional goal into an ultimate end, making that goal to bear a meaning and significance it cannot bear, leaving us always disappointed and striving. In the meantime, shame enters the scene as a taskmaster, reminding us that we still are not yet what we’re supposed to be, pressing down on us and promising to lighten up when we get our act together. All of this serves acedia by obscuring the voice of the Spirit who reminds us that the yoke and burden of Christ is easy and light, though it must be born with patient endurance to the true end. Acedia wears the mask of optimization when it objects to the Spirit and says, in turn, “but you’re just not working efficiently or quickly enough. Let me do it for you.”

So we strive to become super-Christians. Attending Mass on Sunday? Try everyday, twice a day. Daily Offices of prayer? Try the full medieval monastic ordo. Service projects once a month? Cute; but how about three times a week instead? We understand that the Christian faith obliges us to live a life of prayer, but falsely envision it to be a series of sequential steps that if I can just speed up, then I’ll become who God wants me to be much faster, right? Isn’t that a good thing? But this vision of faithfulness is still too driven by a persona that is trying desperately to be true self, not a true self delighting in devotion. It is like telling a tree to grow faster (absurd) or a child to grow up more quickly (potentially abusive). Like with productivity, we succumb to the toxic shame of not becoming the impossible thing we’ve set out to be–a self-possessed and curated Christian. Again despondency sets in, leading us to weary of the hope that God is with us or that we can become the people He is making us to be.

How could we possibly trust God's loving call to transform us into glory when the voices of acedia, the twin devils on our shoulders, constantly attack us? One devil says we are not worth loving, while the other insists we must prove our worth through exhausting tasks. These temptations can lead to despair, which is not how Christ calls us to new life. A simple but disciplined rule of prayer will help us become free from the tyranny of acedia by embracing stillness and quietness along the way of seeking to be with Jesus. Remember that Christ does not wait impatiently on the other side of those obstacles in the heart that amount to our inner resistance to the demands of love. Rather, Jesus comes alongside of us to encourage us by reminding us that He, too, has labored when it felt like too much. Our Lord has lived through the temptation to avoid quietness and prayer by staying busy, and He has lived through the temptation, when He fell down, to stay down.

I wonder, though, that our Lord who fell multiple times on the way to the Cross did not show us by Himself falling down that the optimized way is not the way of the Christian. There was nothing effortless on Good Friday–despite the jeering of the Pharisees the Cross was not the pretext of a spectacular self-rescue but of the mystery of self-entrusting. In practice, we observe discipleship by following our Lord’s example and entrusting our lives to God especially when they seem the least acceptable, and this alone is how we are transfigured into the beloved. Optimization is the temptation to avoid the demands of God’s love, just like any form of acedia. We avoid God’s loving demand that we turn and face Him as the unworthy, unlovable and find that He receives us graciously and mercifully forgives and heals us. Optimization is a self-salvation that refuses the simplicity of prayer by laboring in an elaborate regimen of Herculean devotions. We must reject it in each of our lives and in the lives of our parishes and congregations. And when we finally let go of those tempting visions of curated righteousness, we will find, as many saints, before us, that God indeed makes us beautiful on the inside, and then conforms our outward life to that which is within.

To close, I am reminded of a lyric in a song by the group Sleeping At Last that I think talks back to this voice of acedia:

The list goes on forever
Of all the ways I could be better, in my mind
As if I could earn God's favor given time–
Or at least congratulations.
Now, I have learned my lesson
The price of this so-called perfection is everything.
I've spent my whole life searching desperately
To find out that grace requires nothing of me.