Dan Kennedy (0:00)

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Todd Hanson (1:08)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy and before we get started I want to tell you that the Moth is coming to Michigan. Michigan Radio is going to sponsor crack up stories of comedies and calamities and the first stop is going to be Royce Auditorium in Grand Rapids. That's going to be on June 22nd and tickets are available at smartticks.com the show will also be appearing as part of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival on June 23rd at the Power Center. Tickets are available @annarbor summerfestival.org the story you're about to hear by Todd Hanson was recorded live at the moth in 2006 at our annual members Show. The theme of the night was the Seven Deadly Sins and it featured a story for every sin Todd took on sloth.

Todd Hanson (2:01)

So I'm sitting in my shrink's office this one time and he says to me, how's it going? And I say, well to be honest Doc, I had a really, really horrible experience the other day and he says, tell me about it. And I say, well, it all started when I was laying on my couch and he looks at me and he says, really? Which if you know me, is an incredibly funny thing for him to say because I have probably spent more time lying on couches than any able bodied man under the age of, say, 110 living today. If lying on couches was a martial art, I would have a ninth level black belt Ninja master status in it. As a matter of fact, when I was originally asked by the moth to do this event and they explained about the seven deadly sins, I was amazed that sloth was even still available. I assumed that sloth would be the first sin picked because it is really the central thing about our culture, isn't it? Which is all. We live in a whole society based on consumer entertainment and sort of luxury effort reduction. But within that culture, my own generation, which they used to call Gen X or slackers, really distinguished itself even among, you know, the general culture. And within that elite group of underachievers, I distinguished myself as really a super achiever of underachievement. If sloth is a sin, I am, I think it's fair to say I'm really guilty of like Milosevic level crimes against humanity. And, and if the Vatican conducted its affairs the way that governments do, there would be some sort of secret Vatican sniper up in these windows ready to take me out. Right now I live for years and years and years just bumming around this wonderful college town called Madison, Wisconsin. And did people know Madison? Great, that's fantastic. And we had a whole culture there that was essentially built around couches. Everything was centered around the living room because what your life consisted of was every second that you weren't slaving away at your shitty minimum wage job. And that's. I'd like to dispel a myth about slackers right now, which is that they don't work hard because in order to live a life of sloth, you really have to work like a slave to do it. Because opting out of the career rat race essentially means opting into the working poor, you know, and so every second that you weren't at that job, you were sitting in your living room, sitting with your friends, you're watching tv, you're smoking pot, you're listening to rock and roll and watching DVDs, but mainly just engaging in conversation and you're trying to ring every last ounce of leisure of luxury effort reduction out of the remaining hours before your shift at the job you hate starts again. We had a wonderful tradition in Madison because every year when the students would move, the frat guys would leave their furniture abandoned by the side of the road. And so every year you would take the cigarette hole, burned, beer stained, vomit smelling couch that just stank like weed and cigarettes and you would pick it up and you'd march it out of the house and you'd set it down and then you'd go get a brand new couch. From the frat kids and you'd move it into the empty space where you had the previous couch and you'd set it down and you'd have a wonderful new couch to abuse for the following year. Now one of the things I did during all these years of slacking in Madison was I was writing jokes for the Onion. And to my great surprise, that eventually turned into a career. And no one could have been more surprised about it than me, believe me. And I ended up moving to New York and for the first time I had money. So I was incredibly excited because I was not only going to be able to live this life of slack, but I was going to be able to live it in style. And I set up this one. I got this wonderful apartment in Brooklyn, this nice living room, and I filled it with, with seating. I bought a surround sound home theater and I got a DVD player for it. I got a big TV and I got a fantastic number for a great connection with a just top notch weed delivery service. And the best thing is I bought this fantastic. It was the couch of my dreams at this vintage store. I spent $500 on it. Only couch I ever spent money on in my life. And I was so looking forward to all the wonderful times I was going to have with all these great new friends I was going to make in New York. But what I didn't understand was that New York is not like Madison, it's not a living room based town. Because all of the Lower east side, you know, downtown bohemians that I was wanting to hang out with, they don't have living rooms. They have a box with a bed and a refrigerator and a toilet and a shower and a sink. And that's what, that's where they live. And so in lieu of hanging out in living rooms, they hang out in bars and restaurants now. And for that reason, it's also not a marijuana town, it's an alcohol town. So I've had to learn to drink and I'm getting pretty good at it, to be honest. But, but none of those things really matter if like me, you live in Brooklyn, but people from Manhattan won't go to Brooklyn because it's a 20 minute ride on the train and they're busy spending 40 to 80 minutes waiting to get into the cool restaurant or bar. So the upshot of all this is I spend about the next five years of my life in the ultimate slack pad I've created. Surrounded by empty seats alone, playing video games, watching DVDs by myself, surrounded by empty seating. And what's worse is that my DVD player even mocks me because whenever you hit stop, a screensaver comes on with their consumer entertainment home theater slogan that says, everyone's invited. Everyone's invited. Every day, everyone's invited. But you're here by yourself, aren't you? Over the years, the combined effects of A, gravity, B, time, and C, my ass on this couch literally destroy my dream couch. The part of the couch where my ass is centered has collapsed completely. There's, like, springs and metal falling out the bottom. Stuffing is falling out the bottom. I have to. There's just a whole. Where my ass is. I have to fill it up with pillows and blankets and put a board over it just to continue to lay on it. Now, at this point in the story, I'm sure that those of you in the audience with even a remote sense of insight into the human condition are probably thinking to yourself, well, you know, these stories are all kind of cute anecdotes, and they're a little bit funny, but I have another interpretation of everything this man on stage is saying. And it sounds kind of to me like he's describing the behavior of someone who is, not to put too fine a point on it, clinically depressed. And you would be right. I happen to have been clinically depressed pretty much my entire adult life. Which brings us back to why I was sitting in my shrink's office in the first place, telling him about this horrible experience. So he says, tell me about it. I say, I'm laying on the couch, and it was one of those days when you've run out of all the distractions available in the living room. Like, I had watched all the DVDs, I had finished all the video games. I had masturbated to all of the available pornography. I smoked all the drugs. There was nothing left. And I had a moment of Zen stillness and clarity where I was face to face with myself. And I looked in myself and I saw this horrific, nightmarish void of nothingness. It was just this swirling vortex of empty zero. There was nothing there. I felt like I had no future, no past, no options, no hope, like there was nothing to believe in. And at this point, my shrink cuts me off, and he says, todd, Todd, wait, wait. Hold on. Right now, I'm hearing a lot of negativity from you. I mean, you're just describing a horrible descent into nihilism. And I give him this look like, well, duh, you know? And I say, yeah, the reason you're hearing that is because that's what I'm telling You. And he says, well, Todd, but that's very serious. Nihilism is a terrible place to end up. Bad things happen to people that go there. You can drown in that shit. So I say, well, let me tell you, do I hear a cell phone? Is that what that is? So I tell him, maybe someone's just giving me a little hip hop background to this. So I tell him, well, let me finish the story. Have you ever been so depressed that you just can't get out of bed? Or you just can't get out of your chair and you just end up relying on whatever's in arm's reach of you, you know? And so I'm sort of groping around the couch just for. Just looking for something, anything to distract me from this horrible emptiness that I'm experiencing. And I reach under the couch and I find this old paperback book that has been kicked under there probably a couple months earlier. And I pull it out, and it's the ultimate perfect book for lifting someone out of their own personal hell. Happens to be. Swear to God, this is true. Not making this up. Dante's Inferno. So I'm like, I obviously cannot handle reading Dante's Inferno right now. But lacking anything else to do, I decide I'm going to read the forward. So the foreword is written by some scholar of medieval Italian epic poetry or whatever. And I start reading it. And I say to my doc, as reading it, I learned a new word. He says, what was it? And I said, well, the word is acedia. I'd never heard of this word before. He says, what does it mean? I said, well, it was the medieval Catholics word for the profound sense of emptiness that comes from not believing in anything. They saw it as a sin, and specifically the sin of the failure. They defined it as the failure to pursue God. In other words, a lack of making the effort necessary to seek out the joy of God or more generally, of creation. And it was considered so dangerous that they actually numbered it among the seven deadly sins. Acedia. And by the way, I don't know if it's actually pronounced acedia because I'm a college dropout. I don't know how to pronounce ancient Latin. Granted, I knew I was going to be speaking in front of a couple hundred people. I probably could have googled it and figured out the pronunciation, but I was too lazy. So. And at this point, I can tell, you know, I can tell that. That my shrink is a little uncomfortable with how the conversation's going because he doesn't like talking about sin. He doesn't like sin doctrine based modes of behavioral modification because he's a shrink. And shrinks are always against thinking about things in terms of sin because sin is always about guilt. And a shrink's job is to get people to get over guilt. So he's kind of trying to change the subject. But what I say to him is the amazing thing about this is that in modern times it's usually translated or mistranslated, if you will, as sloth, because it involves a lack of effort. But the idea is, you know, when we hear sloth now, I mean, it just seems like laziness. It's not that big of a sin, it's not deadly. But they were talking about something far more serious. They were talking about a deep existential despair. Thanks. And I realized as I was talking to him that if I'm guilty of Acedia, then so is our whole consumer entertainment Prozac taken depressed out of their mind nation. And I figured there's two ways of looking at it. Either we should be very grateful that ancient Catholic doctrine doesn't still dominate the intellectual world, because if so, then me and the whole nation are all just guilty, unredeemable sinners and can be written off. But the second way of looking at it is perhaps a little more productive, is that this was a way of looking at my depression that didn't involve me being a helpless victim of, of a sickness defined by a condition, and that I might have some degree of personal responsibility for my own state of mind. So my shrink looks at me and he doesn't say anything for a very long time because he doesn't like how the conversation's going. But on the other end, he's a smart guy, so he's thinking very, very intently. And finally he looks up at me and he says, that's very interesting. What are you going to do about it? And I look back at him and I say, hmm, thank you.