Every so often, usually around 10 PM on a Wednesday, I find myself accidentally doomscrolling on Twitter for the better part of an hour. Yes, I know, I swore I would stay off that cesspool of hate and “hot takes,” and I only keep it around because I have a legacy account going back to March 2007 that I may need for marketing purposes one day. As I said, it was an accident, like the beers and cigarettes the night before, only probably worse for my health.
Doomscrolling, for me, leads to that inevitable feeling I call “creeping malaise.” (I really only know the term because of that Pink Floyd lyric, so I looked it up to make sure I was using it properly. According to Google, that’s where everybody knows it from. Thanks, Roger.) It’s that slow-building nausea/dread cocktail that whispers “something’s wrong, but with nothing specific you can fix.” Thanks to my self-help shelf, I’ve self-diagnosed this as being a simple, natural result of “ambient anxiety” and “systemic uncertainty.” (No, I’m not qualified to make that call, but I find it helps to give it a name.) Left alone, it snowballs into a full-blown “meaning deficit” where motivation flatlines. Other times, it’s just vitamin D. I live in Indiana, where we merely talk about and remember the sun fondly between November and February. Take your Centrum Silver and don’t judge me.
When I hit these troughs, I fantasize about unplugging, not a cutesy “digital detox” where you delete social media for a week and live entirely via email. I’m talking about doing the “hamhock dropTM,” smashing the router, drowning the phone in the toilet, telling your boss you’re not feeling particularly agile anymore, and disappearing under Sam’s Stick and Sheet on the pristine beaches of Weaver Bay. It’s a fantasy. Even if I had the will, I don’t have the logistics. So I did the next best thing: I gave the fantasy a name and turned it into a character in “that book I force myself to work on when I’m too lazy or tired to get up and wander the desert alone.” Enter Vidas Sheng.
Sheng is the protagonist of The Halferne Bodhi: a former deacon and missionary for St. Nicholas Black Elk Church on the frontier worlds. His archetypes are the sage, the explorer, and the reluctant prophet. He once heard voices he believed were divine, which pushed him into ministry and across the systems, helping others, building communities, all while searching for meaning in the indecipherable syllables in his head. Then one day, the voices stopped. Sheng fell into desolation, wondering whether he’d displeased God or imagined the whole thing. Eventually, he sank into the ultimate meaning deficit, lost his faith, left his post, and began wandering the systems looking for something. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he has faith that he’ll recognize it when he finds it.
Here’s the catch: purity is so ingrained in him that even without agency or faith, he still practices humility, embraces suffering, shuns possessions, and lives a monastic life almost by reflex. The seed came from The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis’ 15th-century devotional thumper, gifted to me by my bar-stool theology sparring partner and best drinking buddy (he’s the first baseman for devout Catholicsm; I’m a pinch hitter for “hopeful agnosticism”).
The Imitation of Christ is not a soft book. It’s blunt, demanding, usually borderline brutal. Maybe I’m projecting, but my take is that the book is basically à Kempis (in the 1400s) trolling the holier-than-thou masses. “So you want to live like Christ? Cute. Try giving up everything that makes you comfortable and happy, and even then, you’ll still miss.” If anyone still reads it seriously today, they probably treat it like IKEA instructions: nod solemnly, ignore the words, and wing it from the pictures.
Early in Bodhi, Sheng admires a plant display in his therapist’s office. Most are plastic; the interesting ones are holograms, and a few ineffective real plants wilt in the back. It’s not just a metaphor for how he sees humanity (hold your applause); it launches a motif of “real vs. fake,” or more precisely, “faith vs. simulation,” and later, “freewill vs. determinism.”
Sheng lives in a future Kaunas, Lithuania, a city I proclaimed my love for in a prior post. Old Town is still there with its brick alleys, arched courtyards, and medieval churches, insisting on permanence. Towering over it is the modern city of Kaunas proper, which blocks out the stars with glass towers and arcologies humming like human beehives. Sheng sympathizes with Old Town even as he knows a lot of it is a preserved façade wrapped around modern commerce. The past survives only in fragments you can trace, like seams in old stone. It’s irretrievably gone, no matter how much we wish otherwise.
Which brings me back to my off-grid fantasy. Sure, you can cancel the phone plan, ditch the internet, sell your stuff, and move to the beaches of Weaver Bay. The grid will still be there, though, lurking in the supply chain that grows your food, in the water system, the power grid, and the hospital when you step on a seashell wrong. Try paying taxes without it. Even if you avoid arrest for vagrancy, the IRS does not have a sense of humor. Sheng knows he can’t live as à Kempis prescribes, and he’s struggling to reconcile that inevitable failure with everything he was taught.
Sheng is a painful character to write. (Is it just me, or does every writer have one of these? Put yours in the comments, and we can commiserate together.) As a result, Bodhi’s progress lags behind — currently seven chapters and around 24,000 words. He’s created to be a main character in the subsequent series, but I just can’t see him picking up a plazrifle and joining the resistance with Rik, Serah, and Jaysn, so I’m still playing with a couple of ideas for his story/arc after Bodhi. The problem is, it’s physically draining to live in his head, so I have to wait for his headspace to come find me.
I have my own flirtations with renunciation: days where I dream of pitching every device into the river and living like Thomas à Kempis is peering over my shoulder, nodding as I sharpen pencils and fill a fountain pen. Is it real detachment or simulated detachment, though? This blog runs on WordPress, which runs on Amazon Web Services, which runs on a thousand servers in windowless datacenters in Virginia, so even this post about disconnecting is a product of the very network I fantasize about escaping. I dream of being Sheng, the wandering sage, helping and protecting where he can, beholden only to what he needs to survive, but the minute I hit “Publish,” I’m just another parishioner in the algorithm’s cathedral.
So yes: the Luddite priest is a myth. The disconnected writer banging out novels on a typewriter from a beach bungalow is a myth. Sheng can’t escape the machine, and neither can I. The myth still matters, though. It gives us a measuring stick, a reminder of what we’ve lost, and a glimpse of how to endure knowing we’ll fall short. Sheng clings to a dream of purity in future Kaunas, walking through illusion while staring at reality. I daydream about freedom from a soul-sucking day job and an Internet of zombie hate-bots. On those days, it’s easier, and frankly therapeutic, to vent all that energy through Sheng and type a couple thousand words.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check my notifications. Baaaaah, baaaaah.
