Incidentally, it is astonishing to see how, in the beginning, man was tempted by pride: he wanted “to be like God” (Gen 3:5); in other words, he wanted to become God without God or against God. That was presumption. Today we are witnessing the opposite temptation: people think it would be better not to exist; this is faint-heartedness.

Two reactions are possible then: losing the sense of time, both past and future, as nihilism does; or else, on the contrary, fleeing the present and taking refuge in the past or in the future.

As a reaction to the gloominess of the present there may indeed be a tendency to cultivate an excessive nostalgia for the successful, well-spent moments of the past. To embellish it, to delight in it, to tell stories about it. When nothing goes well any more in the present, it is so reassuring to become attached to the past, when one “did so many good things”. Then, one tells stories…to oneself or to others. Or else one plunges ahead into the future, since that is the plaything of the imagination and of dreams. Often, however, the flight into the past or the escape into the future produces nothing but sadness and disgust; one finds in them a taste of bitterness and dissatisfaction.

The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
Jean-Charles Nault

Distraction is the corollary of instability.  No doubt you remember how Saint Thomas showed that acedia provoked a twofold movement: first a movement of flight from what causes the sadness or disgust; then a second movement of active seeking: the search for compensations, distractions.  Every man can be subject to the test of time and, therefore, to the trail of boredom; boredom that is not only a passing, external phenomenon but in the end reveals a profound incapacity of the will.  That is when someone may choose to be distracted, to “amuse oneself”, by seeking compensations or else by falling into activism.

One seeks, not fullness, but rather the accumulation of images as an evasion.  Travel agencies proliferate.  No one thinks of anything but getting away, but wherever he goes, he takes himself along.  Now if emptiness, anxiety, boredom dwell within a being, this emptiness, anxiety, and boredom will follow him to the ends of the earth.  The tenacious illusion of always being better off elsewhere does not abandon the individual.  Anything seems preferable to self-awareness and diffuse pain.
—Isabelle Prêtre, La tentation du désespoir

The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
Jean-Charles Nault

We can classify here also the constant tendency to consider most attractive those pursuits that take one far from home or from one’s city.  Here again we find the last daughter of acedia, instability, who thinks that by changing where one is, one can change who one is.

The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
Jean-Charles Nault

The devil of acedia starts by making the soul feel the weight of time; the day seems just endless.  Then the victim, prey to a sentiment of emptiness, can no longer concentrate.  He waits for it to end, hoping that someone will come to lend some substance to that day.  But nothing and no one comes to fill that void.  Besides, who could fill it, since it is interior?

The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
Jean-Charles Nault

The above explains why thoughts of acedia [despondency] can appear in apparently such contradictory ways: in the lukewarm, as sluggishness, indifference, and even depression, and in the conscientious and eager, as unrestrained activism and ascetical maximalism. If this vice is not healed by steadfast endurance and a life of discipline, combined with “tears before God” and constant short prayers, it leads to a complete standstill of the spiritual life and sometimes even suicide. Yet he who bravely and steadfastly passes the trials of this “noonday demon,” who “encompasses the entire soul and [threatens] to oppress the spirit,” emerges from these tests inwardly strengthened. Unexpectedly, those spiritual experiences from which he thought himself forever to be excluded are now revealed to him.

Dragon’s Wine and Angel’s Bread: The Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Anger and Meekness
Gabriel Bunge

Antiochos, who lived in the seventh century, is even more vivid and precise in his definition of accidia:

“This condition brings you anxiety, dislike for the place where you are living, but also for your brothers and for every activity. There is even a dislike for Sacred Scripture, with constant yawning and sleepiness. Moreover, this condition keeps you in a state of hunger and nervousness, wondering when the next meal will come. And when you decide to pick up a book to read a little, you immediately put it down. You begin to scratch yourself and to look out of the windows. Again you begin to read a little, and then you count the number of pages and look at the titles of the chapters. Finally, you give up on the book and go to sleep, and as soon as you have slept a little you find it necessary to get up again. And all of these things you are doing just to pass the time.”

St. John of Damascus says that this struggle is very heavy and very difficult for monks.

St. Theodore of Studion says that the passion of accidia can send you directly to the depths of Hades.

—Monk Moses the Athonite, The Community of the Desert and the Loneliness of the Cities, The Supreme Loneliness of Believers Today

The inexpressible and unaccountable melancholy that oppresses you and prevents you from enjoying anything may be a test, intended to prove the firmness of your decision and the purity of your love of God.

—Elder Macarius of Optina, Russian Letters of Spiritual Direction p.43