Our public and private minds and hearts are reverberating with the voices heralding that the news of humanity and Earth is bad. These antihumanist voices are loud and diverse. Some speak in expressions of dread. People dread the Trump administration. People dread another world war. People dread a fresh economic or environmental or other kind of catastrophe. Dread-mongering encourages us to feel certain that something big and awful beyond our control is definitely coming, even if we can’t be sure what it is or when it will arrive. The intellectual landscape is filled with such voices.

Even more influential than expressions of dread are expressions of loathing. Much of the most recent presidential election was about who you loathe — not just who you deplore or who disgusts you, but who actually makes you feel worse about being human. This is becoming the political norm, the means by which group identity is formed and given agency. Turn on the news, log on to Twitter: The message that the horrible people are winning, polluting society, and dragging us all down dominates, cutting across all ideologies. Beneath the sense of smugness and superiority it breeds, it nurses a creeping conviction that the world’s growing class of bad people — defective, repulsive, loathsome — actually proves that we should not love being human. Perhaps we should fear and loathe it.

Retreating into the confines of our own friends, families, homes, and handheld devices does not alleviate this feeling. It often worsens it. Expressions of what classical and medieval thinkers called acedia — a depressed, melancholic boredom and disinterest in being human — are on the upswing. Aldous Huxley wrote an essay about it, titled “Accidie.” Kathleen Norris wrote about it in her 2008 bestseller, Acedia & Me: “The demon of acedia — also called the noonday demon — is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all.” Norris quotes from the writings of a fourth-century monk, who says that the demon “makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all” and “instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself.” More than just seeing others as proof that to be human is to be unlovable and that Earth is a fundamentally bad place, we begin to see that proof in ourselves as well. Monks may struggle against acedia in their isolated, ascetic lives as they work to achieve a state of spiritual joy — “ascetic” is a word derived from the Greek for “exercise.” But our forms of rigorous self-isolation lack spiritual discipline. They turn us into workaholics, Internet addicts, hoarders, and hermits, or the just plain lonely.