Vital Signs: Lethargy and Adulthood

To their detriment, adults are more complicated than children because they are aware of more. Their minds become more intricate and their bodies become larger. The faculty of imagination is surrounded by practical and theoretical reason and a greater ability for self-reflection. Greater awareness corresponds with greater abilities. Greater abilities do not come without a price. Adults are able to do more than children, and thus are expected to do more. Responsibilities bring pain in tow—the pain from the exercise required to meet them, the pain from not understanding how to meet them, or the pain from understanding one has failed to meet them.

Adults are most obviously responsible for their preservation. Once they leave their parents, they must work to sustain themselves. The responsibility for self-preservation is partially fulfilled by a job or career. Labor is traded for wages and wages are traded for goods and services, necessary or not. Labor is an expenditure of energy by the will, and the will does not always replenish quickly. When depleted, a person feels lethargic and lacks motivation.

There is another responsibility, hidden in interiority, to be autonomous. Autonomy is the capacity to choose one’s course of action without being determined to do so by exterior influences. Fully functioning adults can determine their course of action in the world more independently than before. Drawing from theoretical reason to establish their goals, self-reflection to establish their identity, and practical reason to set about accomplishing their goals, they can freely direct the course of their lives. Autonomy requires knowledge and a lack of knowledge leads to anxiety and despair.

While in childhood, we saw entertainment supplant the imagination, in adulthood we will see it supplant the will and suppress rationality, both theoretical and practical. Entertainment can be a supplement for the tired and a sedative for the anxious. Love of entertainment jeopardizes these faculties, and so we are right to explore the “whys,” “hows,” and “whens” of jeopardy.

To continue our examinations, our strategy must be even less systematic as we enter the thicket of maturity. Anxiety, despair, and lethargy are not temporally related. They do not unfold in a certain order. The roads between them are not one-way. As before, we will begin with the most obvious and work our way towards the obscure. I beg you patience once more at the outset. At times, I will need to do a great deal of prefacing in order to return to the disease under our microscope.

Lethargy

We observed earlier adults are weary. Reflect upon the lives of the adults you know to verify this observation. Self-preservation leads to lethargy. Maturation is the process of determining the indeterminate. In the professional context, many of the determinations are involuntary. Once practical concerns are met, we have time for leisure. Leisure is time that can be spent on other responsibilities or on what one fancies. Perhaps a person needs to take a nap. Perhaps a person wants to read a book. If the person is a contemporary of ours, he will likely turn to the television. This is all the more understandable considering he is tired from his day. Work has many ways of making us weary. Doing something we do not appreciate makes us tired. Doing something around people we do not like makes us tired. Doing something monotonous makes us tired. Doing something exciting makes us tired. In short, action is tiring. The whistle at the factory and the click of the office lights at the end of the day are the sounds of surrender. We have expended energy all day long and we retain just enough to click a button.

One of the consequences of a weak will is a predilection towards laziness. It requires much less effort to be entertained than to be, for instance, entertaining. Sloth, like all vices, is fertile. Left unchecked, it will reproduce viciousness elsewhere. Love of entertainment can be its progeny.

When an adult enters into the liberated atmosphere of the evening, far from work and mandatory tasks, one is confronted by the "what now?" of freedom. What a cruel master freedom is who asks us every time we raise our eyes to him, "What now?" How exhausting to take the question seriously each time, to treat each query afresh! The mind, like the body, travels frequently along the path of least resistance. Through sloth, we adopt the readymade response instead of forging a new one.

The strength of habit is a contributing factor to this widespread forfeiture of freedom. Repeated choosing of entertainment corrodes the will. To the "what now?" of freedom, one can quickly retort, "when then?" What was before? we wonder. What did I do before when I was free to do something? I remember spending the evening playing a game. I frittered away my time on the computer. How manageable this question becomes with the retort of “What then!” The question nearly answers itself. The solidity of the past conquers the fluidity of the future. One's life builds itself automatically as the cyclical invitations to living are answered by the circular repetitions of prior responses. What could be easier?

We have worked for another all day long. When we can work for ourselves for ends not required to live, we say, "Enough. I have worked enough today and don’t want to be bothered anymore. You choose." Who or what is there to choose for us? There is no boss inside the home. There is no manager in the living room. There may be a spouse or child, but we have listened enough to others today. There remain only the contents of one's abode. The bathroom can be no help here. It is too boring. The bedroom will be helpful eventually, but not yet. There are only the prefabricated voices from prefabricated devices to listen to—those conduits of entertainment pouring into our heads.

Children and adults live in the same world where entertainment is inescapable. Nothing attacks us more in our culture than entertainment. Because of the superabundance of entertainment, the option of what to do with oneself is nearly made for a person. Entertainment presents itself as the answer to the question of “What now?”

Our environment is another factor contributing to our choosing not to choose. The situation is like that of a woman who is hungry and looks into her pantry. If a salesman had snuck into her house, unbeknownst to her while she was away, and stocked her shelves with nothing but his products--what would she eat? She would be surprised at first to be sure. All she finds on every shelf, from top to bottom, are boxes of cereal. It is time for dinner; she has no interest in eating breakfast again. She might tip a few boxes over to see what else is available. In the end, her disappointment succumbs to her hunger. For all she knows, there may be a can of soup or a bunch of bananas shoved in the back, but that would be more work. She does not want more work. "Cereal it is," she decides. On her next trip to the store, our heroine recognizes the boxes and purchases it without a second thought. So it is with entertainment. How can a man look into his soul when all of this entertainment is heaped on top of his eyes? How can a woman consider her freedom when all of this entertainment is welded onto her mind? It takes great effort to resist these forces of exteriority. Worse still, how could a person be autonomous when he would rather not be free? Left unchecked, the environment will do the choosing for you.