The Seven Deadly Sins of the Scroll
The Seven Deadly Sins of the Scroll
It’s striking how the old vices—those medieval stalwarts—have found fresh life on our glowing rectangles. Pride is the easiest to spot. A decade ago, you couldn’t curate your own public image with this sort of precision; now we polish selfies, trim stories, and frame our lives with the emotional range of a Hallmark commercial. It’s a strange alchemy: take an ordinary Tuesday, filter it with Valencia, add a vague inspirational quote, and suddenly you’re the sage of your tiny digital parish. The early monks warned about vainglory, that impulse to be seen doing good. They never met Instagram, but they knew exactly what they were talking about.
Envy pulses just beneath the screen, like a low-grade fever. One glance at someone else’s beach trip, book haul, deadlift PR, or “quiet time aesthetics” and you feel the pinch. It used to be that you envied your neighbors or co-workers—people in your physical orbit. Now you can envy strangers in Copenhagen who photograph their pastries with monastic devotion. I once saw a guy complain that his life felt dull because he wasn’t reading Dostoevsky beside a rain-streaked window in Edinburgh. Edinburgh! As if relocating would fix the restlessness lurking inside.
Wrath thrives online because it no longer requires courage. In older cultures, anger often came with risk; if you insulted someone at the marketplace, you might have to deal with the consequences right there. Now you can fire off a sarcastic retort at 2:11 a.m. and roll over to sleep like a baby, leaving someone on the other end stewing in acid. Twitter—well, X, but it’ll always be Twitter to the rest of us—built entire ecosystems around outrage. The algorithm practically hands you pitchforks and asks if you’d like them sharpened.
Sloth shows up in the endless, narcotic scroll. You tell yourself you’ll take a two-minute break. Suddenly it’s forty-six minutes later, and you’ve learned absolutely nothing except that someone named “CraftyEmma93” thinks her cat can sense ghosts. There’s a peculiar exhaustion that comes from doing nothing with great intensity. The Desert Fathers didn’t have TikTok, but their term acedia—the noonday demon—would have felt right at home in its looping videos.
Greed takes subtler forms. Not just advertisements and affiliate links, though those are everywhere, but the hunger for attention, metrics, affirmation. We check likes the way gamblers check slot machines: maybe this time the lever will deliver. Dante would’ve had a field day mapping the circles of metric-driven ambition. And once you taste virality, even a tiny bit, you start wanting more. It’s like drinking seawater.
Lust, of course, requires very little commentary. It’s the internet’s oldest trade. The access is immediate, anonymous, and corrosive. One scholar once noted that the printing press revolutionized religious life; the smartphone has revolutionized temptation. No gatekeepers, no delays, no community—just desire, digitized.
And then there’s gluttony, the most metaphorical of the bunch, though no less real. Not food, but content. We binge on opinions, videos, controversies, reels, hot takes, theological spats, celebrity meltdowns—an all-you-can-eat buffet that leaves us spiritually distended and intellectually malnourished. The medievals saw gluttony as a refusal to accept limits. That’s the modern internet’s anthem.
The old lists survive because human nature hasn’t changed. The medium is new, but the maladies are ancient. And maybe that’s the silver lining: if the vices have simply shape-shifted, then the remedies—humility, gratitude, patience, discipline, chastity, temperance, charity—still work. Even online. Especially online.
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