Terminal Vagueness

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.
— Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)

Thomas Merton wrote these words from a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, five years after leaving behind his life as a Columbia University student. His spiritual autobiography explored the idea that consumer culture doesn’t simply respond to desire but manufactures it—creating artificial needs and profiting from our agitation.

The holidays are capitalism’s masterpiece in this regard. Every November, the machinery revs up. Lights appear earlier each year. Inboxes flood with “last chance” offers and “only today” deals designed to trigger the fear of missing out. Seasonal music plays on endless repeat in every store, creating emotional associations between nostalgia and purchasing. Advertisements promise belonging, joy, love, all available for purchase. For some of us, desire stops feeling like desire and starts feeling like an obligation.

We’re told the season is about tradition, family and generosity. But beneath runs what Merton diagnosed as a system that survives by keeping us restless, needing and reaching. The signal gets so scrambled by manufactured urgency that genuine longing becomes indistinguishable from programmed craving. Some of us can lose the ability to know what we actually want.

One way this can show up is through overspending. Debtors Anonymous calls it terminal vagueness—the systematic refusal to look at what’s real. Some of us learn to avoid actual numbers, ignore credit card statements, comfort ourselves with approximations. “I’m fine.” “I’ll figure it out in January.” “Everyone overspends at Christmas.” The blur feels safer than clarity because clarity might require change. It might mean saying no when the culture demands yes. It might mean disappointing someone, or sitting with the discomfort of having less than we think we deserve. Vagueness protects us from those reckonings, but it also keeps us cycling through the same patterns year after year.

I know this blur from addiction. Don’t look at damage, don’t add up costs, don’t let time reveal patterns. Keep moving so fast that reality can’t catch up. The next substance, the next purchase, the next temporary escape, all promising that something outside me will finally complete me. What I couldn’t see then is that vagueness wasn’t protecting me from pain. It was preventing me from discovering that I could survive the truth. Every avoided reckoning was a vote of no confidence in my own resilience.

DA’s second promise is “Clarity will replace vagueness.” Clarity requires pause. What do we actually have? What do we actually owe? What can we genuinely afford—not in theory but in fact? These questions are hard to ask in a culture that profits from our confusion. But clarity reveals more than numbers. It reveals that we have options—that we can say no, spend less, make different choices.

Merton’s solution was radical—he entered a monastery and stepped completely out of the consumer machinery. Most of us won’t do that. But we can learn that artificial tension is manufactured, which means we can refuse to participate. Not through deprivation, but through honesty about what actually fulfills us. Sometimes the most radical act is simply pausing long enough to determine what matters.