cthewind's Blog

Obcedia (“over-caring”) attacks in the middle of the night, disturbing sleep, increasing urgency while depriving agency.

For many years I’ve been acquainted with the midnight demon—the one who disrupts rest and spins the mind unhelpfully in too many directions. Seizing on things you really care about and slipping in under the cover of night, when much of the world is asleep, this demon acts on the body, heightening your senses and putting on you alert: “This very night your life is demanded of you.” Ordinary cares and responsibilities are elevated to existential crises, and no amount of insomniac reflection leads you to believe that you or anyone around you is equal to the task.

Worse still, under the sway of obcedia, complex situations seem suddenly, stunningly clear, and you become convinced you know exactly what is going on and how the problems should be solved.

It can be really disappointing to encounter yourself and other people in the grouchy drowsiness of the next day. In the light of day clarity recedes and urgencies go limp. Unable to summon the urgency and clarity of the night before, you are all the more susceptible to seeing the inadequacies of others. They just don’t get it. You know, from the visitation of obcedia, that the situation is clear and urgent, so you become convinced they just don’t want to act or that they just don’t care.

Exhausted from the midnight wrestle, you might stop caring too, yielding to acedia, the noontime demon.

Acedia or “not caring” is the inability to care, the deflation of motivation, loss of agency, and crisis of meaning. It is a certain flavor or tone to “I can’t even.” It attacks at midday, when the sun is warmest and bodies most want to rest after a meal. Creeping in at this time, one can blame the weather or the fact that one just ate, rather than grapple with the anomie on the inside.

Though acedia has been a recognized feature of spiritual-material life since the Middle Ages, more recently it has been recuperated by Kathleen Norris (Acedia and Me), and earlier still by Aldous Huxley, who wrote that, “[a]ccidie in its most complicated and most deadly form, [is] a mixture of boredom, sorrow and despair” (Essays New and Old). These modern thinkers believe acedia to be on the rise among people in developed, industrialized countries.

I think obcedia is also on the rise and that it works hand in hand with acedia.

What we think about in the middle of the night IS worth caring about, yet our caring is not (usually) in its best form during the middle of the night in the sacrifice of sleep and the deprivation of common life. Under the influence of the midnight demon, everything is intense, urgent, and seemingly clear. Since so few are actionable in the middle of the night, however, agency is stunted and frustration creeps in. The following day, sleep-deprived, one cannot summon the clarity or energy one felt in the middle of the night. Tired, frustrated, and unclear, one is susceptible again to acedia.

These twins—noonday demon and midnight demon—are both related to care, yet both obscure the groundedness and relationality of actual care. Like cataracts, they descend over the eyes, distorting the view of the earth and the beings who inhabit it. Like drugs, they contort the nervous system, making one seem far more or far less capable than one can expect to be.

Visitation by acedia or obcedia involves suffering, so this is not a judgment on the sufferers nor a naïve appeal to will or faith or reason to overcome them. It is more like a gentle alarm, a call to self, a willingness to bear spiritual diagnosis in a rationalized world. It is an offer of company, of truth-telling, of loving back into a self who is grounded and connected, able to care and able to act in the company of others.