The Sunday Blues. Sunday Scaries. Sunday Syndrome. What is it about Sunday of all days that seems to be a day of dread for so many?
It is the day after the prior busy week and just before the next busy week. No tasks are on the calendar — jobs, chores, appointments. No forward momentum towards a goal — money, status, recognition. Sunday is a day of omission. For some, it feels like a void. Suddenly the creeping dread swells and ends with a jolt of awareness. The face flushes. The pupils dilate. The feet pace. Then the mind murmurs: “What am I doing with my life? Am I on the right track? Is this the right job? Where do I want to settle down? What, O God, is the point of my life?”
As the fiction of how-I-live drifts away, the existential reality of why-I-live drops like a hammer.
Viktor Frankl wrote of this Sunday neurosis one hundred years ago. This makes me think the cause runs deeper than our novel digital technology. Far deeper. He defines Sunday neurosis as a “…kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.”1
My hunch is this is not a technological ill, but a modern ill.
Let us take hold of this ill and use it as a window into the human soul.
It is staggering to note the absence of this Sunday neurosis in those immersed in ancestral forms of hardship. It is becoming clear that something crucial to the human experience has been lost, or rather buried in the depths of our ancient minds.
What is it about ancestral hardship that once grounded us? What does it say about the scaffolding we have erected around us and hang our lives on? And what is the path forward?
Let us visualize the mode of life of those as far removed from the modern world as possible: the Bambuti hunter-gatherers of the Congo.
Men with limbs of twisted steel sprint through the jungle hunting for antelope while wary of mambas and vipers. Women sing loudly in single file not only to amuse each other as they keep an eye out for berries and roots, but also to keep leopards and buffalo at bay. The forest is good because it gives life — but it also gives death. What then? When disaster strikes — when a leopard drags a member of the band into the black forest — the Bambuti sit and they sing: “There is darkness all around us; but if darkness is, and the darkness is of the forest, then the darkness must be good.”2
The crucial point is that while living on the edge of ruin, they flourish not only Monday through Saturday, but every day. On the edge of ruin a huddle of Bambuti will sit on their heels and pass around dripping bits of honeycomb. On the edge of ruin they will move their entire camp to a freshly speared elephant and feast on its meat, dance around its carcass, and sing with the cicadas.
On the edge of ruin they live.
What, then, fills the Sunday void for so many at present? Safe and possibly lonely rooms. Chairs, walls, and cars. Calendars, jobs, and tasks. Television, phones, and computers which drown out the warnings of the ancient and savage inner discourse.
And so on Sunday this painted world might suddenly be revealed for what it is — painted.
It is here my mind starts chanting “Yes.” It is here we learn why Sunday neurosis may not exist for the Bambuti who were knee deep in ancestral forms of hardship. Death waited behind every leaf and in the current of every muddy river. I believe it is not the certainty of life but the prospect of death that wakes us up and strips the paint off the walls of our lives. I believe a constant threat of death made them constantly refine their how-I-live — their code, rituals, myths, taboos, tribes — so much so that each of their how’s were deeply meaningful.
Death no longer makes life high-definition. Life may now be camouflaged. In ancestral hardship, the risk of death was a plague but also a gift. But in modern ease, our risks are often abstract and, strangely, it seems the world of ease is missing out on something crucial. Where is the slither of snake on leaves while drifting to sleep? Where are the heaving lungs and legs flushed with acid sprinting uphill on an empty stomach? Where is the wood fire deep in the forest illuminating its cycle of life and death?
Thus our hyper-awareness of jaguar and mamba leave us just as hyper-aware of a lack of meaning once the busyness stops on Sunday. If this is true, what is all the busyness of ease if not the “lack of content” Frankl wrote of? It is now possible to exist without meaning by staying busy within these fictions, but is this living? How can it be, when the fictions are so painful once they are revealed on Sunday?
The significant point is the sufferers of Sunday catch a glimpse of something good, primal, and beautiful — and then bury it in busyness.
And what if modernity continues on the path of Sunday neurosis? How grand can the fiction become? Let us do a thought experiment. Might some billionaire create a Matrix at last? If so, how many would willingly plug a chord into the base of their brainstem or connect their minds to virtual reality via Wi-Fi? How many would say No to the epic beauty of their existence on this blue orb in space to spare themselves the discomfort of gazing within? Maybe it is already happening. How many trade the wind in the trees for a digital forest on YouTube, the moon and stars for a digital Milky Way on Instagram, and a bath of adrenaline and battered calves for a digital sprint in Call of Duty?
I believe in my bones Sunday neurosis is a gift. It is stripping the paint off the walls. It is the recognition that ease gives us what we want but hardship gives us what we need. To the Bambuti, the forest “is the chief, the lawgiver, the leader, and the final arbitrator.” We may have left the blood and flood of the forest behind, but our path will be the more difficult one to walk for we are now our own final arbitrators.
What is the solution to Sunday depression? I do not have the answer. That is a big question for a small essay.
But at a minimum, I think we can say this: Lean into it.
Turn Sunday neurosis into Sunday command.
What, then, might the God of the sun — Helios — say to those suffering such a neurosis on his day, the day of the sun?
Your Sunday misery is a gift, for it is a reminder that you might live a fiction until the day you die. It is within your control to shake your fist at your Creator and moan, and rage, and spit, and hate, and blame. But it is also within your control to make it your mission to go beyond those forced to suffer in hardship by forcing suffering on yourself in ease. It is in your control to pressure test the fictions of Monday through Saturday and see what lies behind them; to take this I-might-die mode of mind I am giving you to see the world anew; to understand life is not happening to you, for you are happening to life;
to smile at death and script your own life from first principles;
to step outside and walk with sun or moon on your skin;
to look into the blue, green, or brown eyes of those who share this gift of life with you.
This is within your control.
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Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning. Translated by Ilse Lasch, Beacon Press, 2006.
Turnbull, Colin M. The Forest People. New York :Simon and Schuster, 1962. For this and other references to the Bambuti.
This calls Huxley's Brave New World to mind. In it, the citizens have absolutely no responsibilities and eagerly live a pointless but happy lives. As you imply, in this modern age, fewer and fewer of us are involved in essential pursuits. More and more of us have careers that border on pointlessness, or are even counter productive. And I think we are seeing an awakening to that reality. Stay tuned.
Great essay Sam. It reminds me of how important it is to be immersed in people and life; not the representations of people and the world (often false) so easily available through technology, but the tangible world with all its messiness and imperfections. As you drive home with the point about the Matrix, we too often seek ease or what we think is enjoyment in ways that offer a false degree of control and curation. But we're always living in someone else's architecture. Got to break out, connect with real people, explore, discover, take risks, feel joy and pain in our bodies.