What's Running You?

The Desert in the City, Week 3

The going away party was thoughtful and beautiful.

We’d been invited to celebrate a dear friend and colleague I’d hired and supervised for nearly a decade. People had gathered from around the country. There were funny stories, moving testimonies, heartfelt appreciations. The room was full of genuine love for a man who had earned it.

I was glad to be there.

And underneath the gladness, my breaths were shallow and my palms were sweating. An unwelcome thought kept whispering between breaths:

When you leave, no one will care.

I didn’t choose that thought. I didn’t invite it. It arrived on its own, in the middle of someone else’s beautiful afternoon, and made itself at home.

That thought is what the desert tradition calls a logismos. These fast, unbidden, strangely specific interior movements aren’t sinful. They aren’t character flaws. They are powerful invisible forces that undermine our ability to love well. You feel them in your body before you think them in words. A logismos can arrive in an instant and press down on you for the rest of the day.

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Most of us have felt this, even without a name for it.

You post something you worked hard on and find yourself checking, an hour later, how many people engaged with it. A colleague gets recognized for work you contributed to and something tightens in your chest. You’re in a meeting and realize you stopped listening three minutes ago because you were composing your contribution. You go to celebrate a friend’s success and find that your gladness barely covers a sadness you didn’t know you were carrying.

The desert tradition calls this vainglory. The hunger to be seen, valued, and remembered.

It doesn’t look like vanity from the inside. It looks like caring. Wanting to do good work. Wanting to matter. Wanting to leave something behind. These are not bad desires. They are wired into us. The problem isn’t the hunger. The problem is where vainglory takes the hunger to feed.

Vainglory feeds on approval. On metrics. On whether anyone noticed. And the more it feeds, the hungrier it gets. This is why the most recognized people in any room are often the most anxious about recognition. The appetite doesn’t resolve when it’s satisfied. It grows.

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You’re reading this on a platform that tells me how many of you opened it, how long you stayed, and whether you forwarded it to someone else. I check those numbers. The checking tells me something.

It tells me the hunger is still running.

We live inside machines designed to monetize the need to be seen. Every platform your work touches. Every follower count, every metric, every algorithmic signal about whether what you made was worth making. All of it feeding the same need.

As I wrote that last paragraph, a voice in my head wanted you to think: isn’t that clever. I never thought of it like that. That impulse doesn’t serve you. It’s vainglory creeping into an otherwise good desire — the desire to write something true. The two feel nearly identical from the inside. That’s the problem. The question isn’t whether the hunger is there. It is. The question is whether we know it’s running. And whether we’ve confused its voice for our own.

Our political moment runs on the same fuel. Watch what happens when someone from the other side says something true. The body tightens. The mind reaches for a counterargument before it finishes listening. Agreement would cost something. It would mean your team didn’t have the whole picture, that the story is more complicated than the story that makes you in the right.

Genuine conviction asks: what does love of this neighbor require of me right now? Vainglory asks: how does this make my team look? Both can quote Scripture. Both can feel urgent and important. And somewhere in the heat of it, “we’re right” quietly becomes “we’re righteous.” From the inside, in the moment, that shift is almost impossible to catch. That’s not a political problem. That’s the hunger of vainglory wearing the right clothes for the occasion.

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Evagrius of Pontus spent years in the Egyptian desert cataloguing what he found in his own mind when the noise stopped.

What he found disturbed him.

He identified eight recurring thoughts — logismoi — that arose repeatedly in the silence. Not random thoughts. Patterns. Movements with their own momentum. Gluttony. Lust. Greed. Anger. Sadness. Acedia. Vainglory. Pride.

The church would later call these the seven deadly sins. That framing leads us astray. Most of us associate sin with shameful behavior, gross immorality, the things we’d be embarrassed to confess. But the logismoi aren’t primarily about behavior. They are passions, interior movements that, when fed and left unexamined, pull us away from love, away from freedom, away from life. They can lead to sin. But they precede it. They are the current beneath the surface, running long before anything visible happens.

Evagrius wasn’t cataloguing crimes. He was doing diagnostics. The thoughts are not the disease. They are symptoms, signals that something is running underneath. A doctor doesn’t just treat the fever. She asks what the fever is pointing to.

The logismoi are like that. Just as you can’t treat what you haven’t diagnosed, naming these thoughts is the beginning of freedom from them. They are not evidence that something is wrong with you. They are evidence that you are human, that you are paying attention, and that the silence has gotten quiet enough for you to hear what’s been running underneath. Evagrius catalogued them because he found them relentlessly in himself. One of the most educated and gifted spiritual minds of his generation, brought low by the same hunger for recognition that whispered to me at my colleague’s going away party.

The presence of the thoughts is not the problem. The question is whether they are running the show.

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Abba Macarius sent a young monk to a cemetery with instructions: go and revile the dead. Say the worst things you can think of. The monk went. He stood among the graves and shouted insults at those buried beneath the stones. He came back.

Macarius said: what did they say?

Nothing, the monk answered.

Good, said Macarius. Now go back. Praise them. Say the most generous things you can think of.

The monk went. He returned.

Macarius said: what did they say?

Nothing, the monk answered.

Macarius said: you have learned something. You reviled them and they made no answer. You praised them and they made no answer. If you would live — be like them.

When I read this I felt its meaning in my gut.

I can shrug off a compliment with the best of them. Aw shucks, it was nothing. But criticize me unfairly: question my motives, call me names, go after my faith or my family, and something in me is ready to come out swinging.

Macarius is pointing toward something I barely have language for. A way of life in which the most pernicious thing that could be said about me, or the most inflated praise, would land with the same weight. None. My security simply no longer depends on what anyone says about me.

Imagine being that free. Imagine being so held by the love of God that the verdict of others simply couldn’t reach the place where your worth lives.

The dead are not the model because they feel nothing. They are the model because they need nothing. Free from the hunger that makes praise feel necessary and criticism feel fatal. Free from the whisper that shows up at someone else’s going away party. Free from the machine that counts who noticed and who didn’t.

Interior freedom. That’s the target.

The writer Francis Frangipane describes arriving at something like this freedom by an unexpected path: “To inoculate me from the praise of man, He baptized me in the criticism of man until I died to the control of man.”

Baptized in criticism until free from control. That is not a pleasant route. This is the destination Macarius had in mind. This person is no longer run by the need for approval. They are free to love without keeping score.

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So where does that leave us?

The first movement is to identify and name the logismoi. Next time something stirs within you: the urge to impress, the flash of jealousy, the hunger to be noticed. Name it for what it is.

There’s vainglory again. Hello.

That’s fear dressed as planning.

That’s grief pretending to be anger.

The point in naming is not self-condemnation. The goal is to see more clearly.

A thought named loses some of its power to operate in the dark. It can’t run the show quite as easily when the lights are on.

The second movement is resistance by reorientation. The desert teachers didn’t advise fighting the thoughts directly. They advised turning the attention toward the love of God. The thought arrives. You name it. Then you turn toward the love of God, a reality powerful enough to hold and surpass our hunger. Even briefly. Even imperfectly.

The third movement, which comes slowly and mostly as gift, is freedom. The logismoi will keep arriving. But the growing capacity to feel them without being driven by them. To want recognition without being enslaved to it. To feel the hunger and choose where to place your attention.

Evagrius called this apatheia. It’s where we get the English word apathy, but the meanings are not the same. Apathy in the modern sense is synonymous with indifference, detachment, and lack of care. Apatheia is different. It describes a person who is no longer controlled by their passions. The gap between the thoughts and the choices has grown wide. This means you can feel envy and choose joy. Your ego can be bruised and you can choose self-giving instead of self-protection. You become free to love as God loves.

This is harder than it sounds. The thoughts are fast. And some of them have been running so long they feel like personality rather than pattern.

I’m anxious. I’m competitive. I need people to think well of me. It’s just how I’m wired.

The desert tradition says: look closer. That’s not who you are. That’s what got in.

And what got in can, slowly, with attention and grace and time, be seen clearly enough that it stops driving.

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A practice and a question for this week.

At some point this week you will be in a room where someone else is being celebrated, recognized, or praised. Notice what happens in you. Not what you think should happen. What actually happens.

Name it quietly, without judgment.

Then, before you act on it, turn your attention briefly toward God. Not a long prayer. Just a turn. A moment of reorientation away from the hunger and toward the love that the hunger is actually looking for.

Then ask:

How long has this particular hunger been running? And what has it been costing me?

You don’t have to answer fully. Just begin to look.

The desert tradition calls this vigilance. It is not self-punishment. It is the slow building of a habit that makes us, over time, a little more like the dead in Macarius’ story.

Can you imagine what it would be like if we built this vigilance together? Not overnight. Not even next time. But some time in the future — neither praise nor criticism finding their way into the place where your worth lives. A little more free to love without self-protection. To appreciate without envy. To recognize desire without being run by it.

That is worth a week of attention. That is worth a life of it.

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I’m Jason — an Anglican friar, pastor, and writer exploring contemplative practice for people who can’t evacuate their actual lives. “The Desert in the City” is a weekly series on what the ancient desert tradition is teaching me in the middle of a hard season. If this landed somewhere real for you, share it with someone who’s tired of being run by the hunger.