The Eighth Deadly Sin

A medieval monk standing in an icy well in the Egyptian desert came up with a list of spiritual invaders—gluttony, lust, anger, pride—but none of them could have predicted the feeling you get scrolling endlessly online, half there and half not, at three in the afternoon with your brain on mute. Which of the seven deadly sins is this? The answer is: none really fit. That's the twist. We've invented something new—an eighth deadly sin that didn't exist when the list was made. The seven deadly sins were never as fixed as we imagine. Evagrius Ponticus, the original list-maker, actually started with eight, including something he called “sadness” and “vainglory.” Two centuries later, Pope Gregory the Great cut and merged and ended up with the classic seven, swapping in “envy” and rolling “sadness” into “sloth.” The sins became characters—Giotto painted Envy as a woman with a snake for a tongue and burning feet, Avarice as a woman with stump arms turned into claws. But the most disturbing figures in the old paintings aren’t the monsters—they’re the ordinary people on the sidelines: the servant scowling at the angel, the woman overhearing a secret. Peter Jones, a historian teaching in Siberia, writes that these “bitter witnesses” are everywhere now; just look at social media—an endless cloud of people quietly withering away from comparison and spite. Jones's own confessions are small: ogling at the hot springs, a snippy remark in a meeting. That’s the point. You can experience all seven sins without leaving your house. The trick is recognizing them, naming them, and then—here’s the ancient hack—using their opposites as medicine: humility for pride, moderation for gluttony, compassion for envy. The medievals might sound weird with their lists and humors and allegories, but their real insight was that sin is less about outrageous acts and more about the daily shape of our attention. Sin, they said, is whatever blocks the rays of divine love. And Jones finds this is more like a system than a series of accidents. Anger, for example, isn't just a feeling—it's a wave of bliss, as a 13th-century doctor wrote, but also a kind of jailer, a puppeteer pulling your strings. Metallica actually nailed this centuries later: “Master of puppets, I'm pulling your strings.” You think you’re committing a sin, but sometimes it’s the sin committing you. Unless you see it, name it, and summon the counterforce. The modern twist is that our new sin isn’t excess in food, sex, or money—it’s the emptiness and groundlessness of being always online, always plugged in, never reached by anything outside the feed. Digital detoxes and dopamine fasts are our version of medieval asceticism. But even those might not be enough. To break free from this eighth sin, Jones half-jokes that we might have to go medieval for real: get on our knees and pray, not just unplug. Here’s the line that sticks: You’re not just fighting temptation; you’re fighting being hollowed out by nothingness. If you leave this thinking, “Maybe I’m not as in control as I thought,” you’re not alone. If discovering the eighth sin has changed something in you, on Lara Notes, you can indicate that this perspective now applies to you with I'm In—choose whether it's an experience, a belief, or just curiosity. And if you find yourself talking about it with someone you often feel is being sucked into the screen, you can use Shared Offline on Lara Notes to tag that conversation: that way, the other person also knows it was important to you. This was The Atlantic; I saved you almost three minutes compared to the original article.