Unafraid to Fail: The Power of Action in the Face of Anhedonia and Apathetic Catatonia

Standby for failure. It is inevitable if you want to live a life of action. Of not standing by. Of doing and making your own things instead of being fed the garbage churned out by the corporate spectacle.

Do you think there is no future for you? There may not be within the preordained choices promulgated by straight society. But the future is at least partially amenable to our own interventions. If you don’t want to be just a fly on the wall, to live a life where nobody notices you and all you do is observe the actions of others, it can be helpful to get off your shit, detach yourself from looking at whatever the fuck other people are doing, and chart a course of your own.

The current state of our disintegrating culture would have us all feeding off the corporate tit, our brains plugged in to a digital matrix. Down home punks reject this insolvency. The only debt worth having is the debt to our family, friends, and ourselves – the debt to do better. We are free to pursue a course with no commercial potential. Yet often, what was deemed by the business world to be unvaluable has proved to be a viable way of making a living -and more importantly a way of living a life.

To multi-national corporate America, most of us, and whatever scraps of community are left, are just pawns inside an abstract data stream, numbers in a game, and they only take notice when those numbers fluctuate below the level they like or when there is a glitch in the system. Our soi distant overlords in the corporate managerial class have demanded that our lives be less lived, be depersonalized by consumption and playing the pawn in their game, and this has led many into quagmires of inaction and internal querulousness.

​Jon Lydon noted how “anger is an energy.” Apathy is the lack of that energy. And while many of us punks prefer the equanimity of peace, it seems that over time, anger has given way to a pestilence of inaction, afear of doing. It is a catatonia of anhedonia 

Yet the undercurrent of anger is there, and it has been there, and it can be tapped into. On the chessboard of life, refuse to be a pawn.  The authenticity and the ferocity, the energy that comes from doing your own thing in face of the prevailing winds opens oneself up to new eddies and swirls within the crosscurrents. Lean into the wind.

Instead of “do it yourself” there is a “do it for me” attitude, propped up by being habituated to the servile service industry. I think part of it is a kind of Stockholm syndrome resulting from being held hostage to interests that are better served by people being consumers rather than producers. These systems seem to encourage a heightened awareness of alienation.

At one time punk was about transgression, but transgression has become banal. And there is nothing more dull than banal. Our society transgresses every day. Transgress a healthy diet by eating Doritos and twinkies. Transgress a healthy boundary by revealing too much to strangers on the internet. Transgress our needs by giving into our wants and buying more plastic crap that serves no purpose. The temptation to transgress comes daily and those transgressions are rewarded by those who believe in putting no limit on their desires or the things they deserve.

But such a life is hardly satisfactory, and those with a conscience can feel the way these transgressions eat away at their integrity. The old adage that money can’t buy happiness still applies. The number of “likes” received on social media content will also not deliver the ultimate good, though it may deliver dopamine in increasingly small amounts.

The material affluence and corruption of decadent America has led to a withering of our self-control, and as those fruits have died on the vine, so too has our self-respect. Though the United States has been in sharp decline since the 1970s, we still live in a country that, for the time being, has a greater share of the earths limited resources. Within this affluence people have gotten bored on the glut of material out there for their minds to glue themselves too, rather than do anything on their own. Amidst the trappings of external wealth, we have become paupers with regards to the inner dimensions of life. This leads to our terminal boredom as the spectacle never brings true fulfillment.

Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence. If this is true of individuals, that money doesn’t buy happiness, why can’t it be true of a whole society?

The spectacle would have us all sit still inside a terminal waiting room, holding our breath, listless, flipping through magazines and taking in their ads and messaging, until our name is called. I say don’t wait for your name to be called, but get up and do something. Cancel the meeting with the higher authorities and make your own appointment with destiny.​

The monks of the Christian tradition had a name for the spiritual sickness of not wanting to do jack shit. They called it acedia. Weakness of will is not the curse of our time alone, though in our time it may be exacerbated by all the things around us that can sap the unwary of their will.

From the Greek, acedia is a word that means, “indifference, lethargy, exhaustion, and apathy.” This monk dude named Evagrius of Pontus wrote about acedia back in the 4th century, when he compiled a list of temptations known to plague those living the monastic life. As these became codified over time these temptations became the well-known seven deadly sins and the experience of acedia became better known as sloth.

Today this can be seen as a general aversion to activity, to taking action. For the most part this seems to be an acquired behavior -or lack of behavior. Sloth thrives on confusion and disengagement, two things the spectacle continues to provide. Confusion from the malfeasance wrought by a media now allied to the state, and disengagement by being fed a constant supply of dubious entertainments.

Leave the meh behind and get stoked. Blahness is so boring and passé. Excitement and interest generate resonance and relation and lead to activity in the areas of one’s interests. At a time when the noonday demon seems to be present at all hours of the day, buckling down to some good old-fashioned work may be the best thing to keep the demon at bay. This doesn’t have to be work for the system, for Babylon, or laboring for the false glory of making a manager look good.

A new self-respect can be built from taking on obligations -to oneself and to others outside the orbit of corporate control.  The good feelings generated by doing something voluntarily, by oneself or as a group, were part of the fuel that kept the punk rock engine burning.

Fulfillment comes from other things, and one of those is action. Distance oneself from the fear of failure and do whatever you can to put a leash on apathetic catatonia.

Living only on the internet tends to catch a person up in an abstract intellectual world. But reality, and its material components, are not primarily abstract. The abstractions society has found itself embracing from modernity to post-modernity to the atomizing effects of the internet, tend exacerbate this embrace of the abstract. What is happening online seems more real than what is happening outside the frame of the television, computer and smart phone screens. What is needed to counteract this late-capitalist abstraction is tending to the concrete. Even more than tending to the concrete, tending to the soil.

​Too many choices is no choice at all. So make one. Work with the hands and get out of the head.  

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