The Worst of All Possible Worlds

A Christian apologetic of malaise

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.

All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

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If you’ve ever heard someone talk about their experience with addiction, you may have noticed something interesting. At some point in the journey, the addict stops feeling pleasure in whatever they’re addicted to. Their relationship to drugs, sex, alcohol, technology, food, etc., changes qualitatively, and at some point there is a hard stop to any happiness, even temporary, associated with indulging. But they keep on doing it. Why? Because they are compelled.

But this compulsion isn’t like the compulsion of being a household slave or prisoner. It’s not a gun to the head that you might just snap one day and decide to try to wrestle to the ground. The compulsion is the compulsion of desire, but a kind of shadow desire. Desire in the traditional sense suggests a wish fulfilled. The desire of the addict, though, is not this kind of desire. He doesn’t “fill up” his desire with the substance. The substance depletes him. Yet the desire doesn’t know this, and it seems like it never can.

Perhaps the word for this is malaise. This kind of psychological state does, to quote Lewis above, neither what it wants nor what it should. It breaks the diet but doesn’t savor the sweetness. It downloads the video but can’t climax. There is a place you can reach where there is neither pleasure nor pain, just a prolonged limp between compulsion and guilt. Malaise won’t do what it should do, and it can’t do what it really wants to do.

Malaise is the worst of all possible worlds.

We in the contemporary Western world are citizens of malaise. We are more likely than any generation prior to throw off religious or moral restraints, yet we are less likely than any generation prior to actually enjoy the fruit of that freedom. Americans, for example, do not believe that sexual intercourse outside marriage is wrong. Yet single people are not having much sex. Younger employees are more self-actualized and less likely to value the “strong work ethic,” , but they work longer, take fewer vacations, and take on more “side hustles” than their parents ever did. Absolutely everything in the bookstore and the therapy clinic radiates self-actualizing positivity, yet the emerging generation can seemingly only watch as their mental health declines.

Stigmas are gone. Propriety is oppression. No identity or hobby or kink can be ruled out. But nobody seems to do anything about it. The pleasure exists only on paper. In real life, we use all of our liberation to avoid touching each other, all of our pluralism to avoid talking to each other, all of our body positivity to break our minds and our checking accounts with Noom, Peloton, Ozempic, etc.

I still hear some pastors and teachers, usually older, describe American mass culture as hedonistic. The problem (these teachers say) is that modern people do whatever makes them happy. They’re free to do this because of the sexual revolution and relativism. There’s some truth to this, I think, but not a ton. In reality, I think this is a diagnosis of a culture that no longer really exists. The idea that Americans are hedonistic doesn’t square with the data. How hedonistic can a generation be that refuses to drive? Americans drink a lot, but they do it alone more than with others. The traditional image of secular hedonism has expired.

It’s been replaced, not by virtue, but by malaise.

German philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes modern society as a performance society. In contrast to previous eras where governments and clerics would use moral absolutes and the fear of punishment to elicit certain behaviors from members, our era, Han writes, has replaced “ought” with “can.” Can does not here mean “may,” as in, “I don’t care what my parents say, I can do this.” Can means “able.”

“Twenty-first-century is no longer a disciplinary society,” Han writes, “but rather an achievement society. . . . its inhabitants are no longer ‘obedience-subjects’ but ‘achievement-subjects.’ They are entrepreneurs of themselves.” Han’s point is that an achievement society appears to grant limitless freedom, since no moral restrictions define what we should or shouldn’t be. But this is an illusion. Achievement society uses the aspirational to compensate for the moral. Instead of sermons, we have self-help. Instead of confession, we have therapy. Every modern person feels it’s wrong to insist someone becomes religious, yet it’s common for corporations and books to push people toward fitness, self-care, and “becoming a better you.”

Han charts the fallout from achivement culture in books like The Burnout Society. Western malaise is the intersection of liberation and burnout. It’s like the feeling you get when you pay hundreds of dollars a month for streaming services and realize there’s nothing you want to watch. Malaise is freedom with no destination, and self-love with no joy.

Malaise is doing neither what you ought, nor what you want.

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Psalm 107 recounts the salvation of different groups of people. One group mentioned appears to be suffering from something like this malaise:

Some were fools through their sinful ways,
and because of their iniquities suffered affliction;
they loathed any kind of food,
and they drew near to the gates of death.

There is a kind of foolishness that can make even the taste of pleasure feel numb. This is how many addicts describe their condition, and it’s an apt description for modern malaise. Recoiling from food is a sign that anyone is in a bad way. It’s affliction from the inside-out, a suffering that prevents its own remedy. A glutton may vomit and realize he’s been stupid, or a prodigal might start eating slop and realize he’s better off as a servant. But there’s a dark frozenness to this passage. If the Psalmist had lived later, he might have described this kind of fool as someone who loathes food and logs on to social media to rage against it, and blasts those people whose own happy feasts reenforce his despair.

It’s too easy in our age to loathe nourishment and get by. Why? Our digital diets compensate in the short term. “Likes” paper over loneliness. Scrolling keeps the anxiety at bay. Porn and AI put the life we can’t or aren’t willing to live on a glass plate, and let us nibble on imaginary leftovers instead of living it. Even as the malaise intensifies, it becomes harder to reckon with.

But the Pslamist goes on:

Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
He sent out his word and healed them,
and delivered them from their destruction.

All it takes is one cry, sent in the right direction, and salvation comes. The Lord sees the distress they’ve brought on themselves, and he sents out his word and heals them. What does the word do? The word makes the universe. It brings something out of nothing. It hangs sun and moon in the sky, makes the formless earth teem with life, and it turns dry bones into a living army.

When the Lord sends his word, the word creates life. And life is what defeats malaise.

I think the task of Christian witness in these days is, at least in part, to live, and work, and play, and feast, and marry, and worship, and read books and watch movies and go see things. The task of Christian witness is to demonstrate what happens when the word of the Lord creates life where there was only malaise.

Christians can even sin in a way that makes this life visible. The citizens of malaise hide from life, fearful that a wrong decision or bad choice will destroy them forever. The word of the Lord includes forgiveness, and forgiveness creates life out of malaise. Christians sin, and they repent and forgive each other because Christ shed his blood so that ours would not be shed. Where there is life instead of malaise, the only direction you can fall is back into the arms of grace.

And eventually, over time, through many dangers, toils, and snares, the grip of malaise loosens, and people whom the Lord has healed can see what they ought to do and what they want to do becoming one. The dead fire in a cold room becomes a roaring flame in a family mansion. But we have to die first. Malaise cannot become resurrection without that middle part. So the message of the Christian church in the empire of malaise becomes, “This is worse than death. Come die, so you can live.”