The Ancient Glitches: Debugging the Seven Deadly Sins

For centuries, the "Seven Deadly Sins" were taught as a list of things that would send you to hell.

But you don't need to be religious to see the utility in the list. If you strip away the theology, what remains is a shockingly accurate taxonomy of human self-destruction. They are not just moral failings; they are system errors. They are the default settings that occur when our software is left unpatched.

Here is how I view the ancient list through the lens of modern psychology.

Pride (The Ego’s Firewall)

Pride is often called the "original sin," and for good reason. It is the inability to process feedback. When you are too proud, your ego builds a firewall against reality. You stop learning because you believe you have already finished the course. In software terms, Pride is a hard-coded variable that refuses to be updated, eventually causing the whole program to crash when the environment changes.

Envy (The Comparison Algorithm)

Envy is the only sin that offers no pleasure. Gluttony tastes good; Lust feels exciting. Envy just hurts. It is a broken algorithm that measures your value relative to someone else's external display. In the age of Instagram and LinkedIn, this algorithm is running 24/7, consuming massive amounts of mental RAM to calculate a "status score" that doesn't actually exist.

Wrath (The Latency Failure)

Wrath is a loss of impulse control. It is reacting to a stimulus before your logic processor has had time to boot up. Stoicism teaches us that between the event and the reaction, there is a space. Wrath is the elimination of that space. It is a high-velocity crash caused by a lack of emotional brakes.

Sloth (The Resistance)

We often think of Sloth as laziness, like lying on a couch. But there is a more dangerous form: Busyness. Spiritual Sloth (or Acedia) is knowing what you should do—write that book, fix that relationship, build that business—and doing literally anything else to avoid the discomfort of starting. Checking email for three hours is not productivity; it is often just high-energy Sloth.

Greed (The Infinite Loop)

Greed is the error of thinking that an internal void can be filled by an external object. It is an infinite loop: while (true) { acquire(); }. The problem is that the "satisfaction" condition is never met. You buy the car, the house, the watch, and the loop just resets.

Gluttony & Lust ( The Dopamine Short-Circuit)

I group these together because they are mechanisms of numbing. They are attempts to hack the brain’s reward system. We use food, substances, or sensation to force a dopamine spike when we don't want to sit with our actual thoughts. They are temporary patches for a permanent underlying bug.

The Fix

The antidote to these glitches isn't self-hatred; it is awareness. You cannot debug code you haven't read. By recognizing these patterns not as "evil" but as "defaults," we can start to override them.

We can replace Pride with Curiosity. We can replace Envy with Admiration. We can replace Sloth with Action.

The software of the soul is open source. You can rewrite it, but only if you're willing to look at the logs.