SAGE ADVICE: The Noonday Demons

How the Seven Deadly Sins show up in creative entrepreneurship — especially right now.

I’ve been finding myself thinking quite a bit about the seven deadly sins, as of late.I’m not religious, but I am bound to something—a values system more pluralistic than any single tradition, pulled from many. Connected to the ethers, to divine energy, to the shared moral weight that runs across Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, early Christianity, Islam. They don’t agree on much. But they all circled the same handful of traps, which leads me to this month’s newsletter subject…

The early Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus called it the noonday demon—the particular spirit that descended not at the dramatic hours, but in the flat, bright middle of the day, when work feels meaningless and the self seems hollow. He was describing one specific demon, but the phrase always felt bigger to me. The noonday demons, plural: all the ways capable people unravel under pressure. Not a little fraying at the edges, either—tearing themselves apart right in the middle of their lives and work.

To be honest, it initially seemed out of the blue that this particular (problematic?) ideology would pop into my mind. But I’ve come to realize: when I’m called to think about something, even when it feels off-base, there’s a thread I need to pull, something intuitive working before my conscious mind catches up.

Why was the topic of moral dangers coming in so hot? Upon reflection, I believe it’s because many leaders right now—political, business, culturally influential — are inhabiting not a few, but all of these sins. At scale. Publicly. And it got me thinking about the fractal-ness of it. How what gets performed at the top gets absorbed at every level below it—role modeling has real influence and we are so overly influenced right now amIright!?

Which brings that here, to us.

Creative business owners are running some of the highest-pressure environments there are. You, fundamentally, are it: are the creator, the seller, the manager, the marketer, the CFO, and the brand—simultaneously. And you’re doing it in a culture that glorifies the launch and disappears when the real work starts. A culture currently being led mostly by people modelling exactly the patterns of vice this piece is about.

So, yeah. You’re going to bump into some of these tropes. Probably all of them—I do too. The question isn’t whether, it’s what you do when you recognize them.

This isn’t a finger-pointing exercise. It’s a field guide—observations to hold up against your own station in life and work. Diagnostic, not judgment.

PRIDE

Superbia · Māna (Buddhist) · Hankaar (Sikh)

Pride isn’t believing you’re talented. It’s believingyour talent is enough on its own.

In practice, this looks like refusing to market because your work should speak for itself. It’s centering your vision so completely that anyone and everyone else—staff, vendors, customers—become just supporting characters in your story. The business as monument to you, rather than ecosystem built with and for others.

Narcissism isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s quiet: the founder who can’t delegate because no one does it ‘right’ like they do, because no one knows what they do. The creative who resists feedback because the work is too personal, too sacred. The business that only functions when the owner is in the room—because the owner made sure of it, perhaps passive-aggressively.

A business built around individual brilliance is fragile by design. New leaders can’t grow if you always have to be the smartest one in the room, the only one with the taste. Customers can’t become a community if they’re only ever an audience. Vendors can’t become partners if they’re imagined simply as interchangeable inputs.

We’re watching this play out at the largest scales of power right now—the leader who cannot tolerate a room that doesn’t orbit them, or who dismantles the collective because the collective doesn’t need them enough. It’s not a different problem at the small business level. It’s the same one, closer to home.

BE HUMBLE: Humility isn’t self-deprecation. It’s the structural choice to build something that doesn’t require you at the center of everything. That’s not a limitation, that’s durability. Humility is what actually makes the space for growth.

GREED

Avaritia · Rāga (Buddhist) · Lobh (Sikh)

The creative business version of greed rarely looks like hoarding. Perhaps you’ve even persuaded yourself to think it looks like ‘fiscal responsibility.’

The cheapest vendor. The contractor ‘bro-dealed’ below market. The supplies sourced only on sale, or from places that use slave labor. The staff salary that’s stayed flat for three years, with no growth path in sight. The reluctance to reinvest revenue back into the thing generating it.

Here’s the problem: every time you extract from your supply chain, your team, your own infrastructure—you’re recreating the exact system you probably said you were building an alternative to. You cannot charge a premium for your work and pay bargain prices for the people and materials that make it possible. Even, and especially if you believe your customers won’t pay for it. That math doesn’t hold. And it doesn’t go unnoticed.

Greed also shows up as overreaching—saying yes to everything, because we’ve been ingrained to believe that ‘more’ is always better, that launching everything you’ve ever imagined defines what ‘success’ is. That’s just “extractive capitalism light,” as a client of mine recently said.

I’VE SAID THIS BEFORE: enough is a strategy. What you put in determines what you can offer. Invest in your people, your materials, your infrastructure—and price your work to make that sustainable. That’s not charity. That’s the logic of a business built to last.

LUST / MOH

Luxuria · Kama (Hindu) · Moh (Sikh)

This one gets two terms, because it has two faces.

The first is desire—I often speak about this as an addiction we all flirt with. The shiny object. The new platform, the new format, the new idea that arrives and suddenly everything you’ve built feels stale by comparison. Creative people are wired for novelty—it’s part of what makes the work good. But novelty-seeking without follow-through isn’t creativity. It’s avoidance. (Unless you’re running a successful concept studio, in which case can I come work for you?;)

REMINDER: You’re running the business you wanted to create. That business needs maintenance, refinement, someone paying close attention to what’s already working and making it exceptional, not someone who flits away for the next interesting thing.

The second face is Moh—attachment. Specifically, attachment to your ideas. The over-protectiveness. The resistance to sharing, collaborating, building in community. The belief that an idea can be owned and that of your ideas are unimpeachable.

Influence is not theft. Ideas don’t belong to anyone. The creative economy runs on cross-pollination, and founders who try to wall off their ideas from it don’t protect them—they calcify themselves and their work. You also can’t understand what’s actually worth following through on if you’re not in genuine dialogue with the field you’re working in. Closing yourself off to influence doesn’t make your ideas more original, only more brittle.

LET GO: Follow through. Stay open. Ask for help, and trust in it. Let the work be influenced. Detach as a part of your process. It gets better when it touches other work.

ENVY

Invidia · Matsarya (Hindu)

Everyone knows this one. Nobody talks about it honestly.

Envy in a creative business looks like watching what everyone else is doing instead of building your own thing.

Instagram, TikTok, etc. are comparison engines.

A competitor’s launch as evidence you’re behind. Someone else’s press as proof your work isn’t landing. And yet… it sounds harsh, but there’s hardly ever any real proof of anything. All you’re really doing is indulging yourself, soothing insecurities (and procrastinating.)

What makes envy particularly dangerous isn’t the feeling—it’s the cognitive cost. Envy is dissociative. When you’re tracking someone else’s trajectory, you lose access to your own. You literally cannot see what your work needs when your attention is on what their work is doing. You go through the motions while your brain has quietly left the building. That’s not just emotionally corrosive, it’s operationally expensive.

Every tradition names this trap because it’s not a character flaw: it’s a feature of the human psyche based in evolution, and so of course it’s baked in to the comparison economy we’re all embedded in. You’re not broken. You’re responding. The question is whether you’re going to keep responding on those terms.

DO IT YOUR WAY: Curate your orbit like your clarity depends on it. Because it does. Who you watch determines what you want and what you believe is possible. Now that’s a business decision.

GLUTTONY

Gula · overconsumption

Gluttony in a creative business is not about food, but indulgence.

More courses. More credentials. More frameworks, tools, strategies, coaches, mastermind groups. The ‘one more resource before I start’ spiral that is, functionally, imposter syndrome with a shopping habit. The belief that the next award, press piece, certification, influencer dinner invite, tagged photo, etc., will finally make you legitimate. That enough external validation will quiet the internal doubt.

Running a healthy (by which I mean successful on your own terms) business shouldn’t rely on stolen valor.

Gluttony also runs the other direction: I often bring up The Giving Tree in client sessions… Over-delivery, giving everything in every offering until there’s nothing left. Self-indulgence in what you find interesting rather than what creates genuine value. Losing track of what actually deserves investment and mistaking accumulation for progress.

The regenerative frame matters here. The question isn’t how much you can consume or produce, it’s what replenishes your work. What practices, investments, and relationships put back what the harder parts of running the business takes out? A clear point of view, genuinely held, makes most of the consumption unnecessary. You stop needing everyone else’s input so much when you trust your own.

GIVE & TAKE: Build a brand, business or practice that fills needs and creates reciprocity. Not more for more’s sake but enough invested well.

WRATH

Ira · Krodh (Sikh, Hindu) · Dvesha (Buddhist)

Wrath in a creative business can be explosive or chronic. Or both. I think wrath is directly connected to how entrepreneurs organically operate externally.

It’s a low-grade resentment that can completely infect a business.

Blaming clients because you think they “don’t get it.” Frustration at staff who can’t meet expectations that were never clearly stated, trained into, or modeled. Bitterness at a market that undervalues what you want to sell, while you continue to insist you control the moment. Or perfectionism that punishes yourself, your team, everyone adjacent to anything that falls short.

The hardest version of this truth: founders who struggle most with their teams are often struggling with themselves. Wrath shows up loudest in environments with an accountability imbalance—expecting too much, offering too little. Too little clarity on what good looks like. Too little guidance on how to get there. Too little investment in growth. Only focusing on what people didn’t do, rather than asking what conditions you created—or failed to create—that made the gap inevitable.

You cannot hold people accountable to systems that don’t exist because you didn’t build them. You cannot expect leadership from people you never developed, especially if you haven’t invested in them. You can’t blame your team for the distance between your vision and reality if you didn’t build the bridge.

This pattern, too, is being modelled from the top right now—the leader who demands performance from institutions they’ve systematically defunded, who expects loyalty from people they’ve never invested in. You didn’t invent this dynamic. But you can choose not to replicate it.

GET REAL: Wrath is energy which itself is not the problem—where you point itis. The most productive redirect is inward: what did I not build, not say, not offer, not clarify, that created the conditions for this?

SLOTH

Acedia · the noonday demon

Sloth is the most misunderstood sin on the list.

Acedia—the Greek term, what Evagrius called it—wasn’t laziness. It was the noonday demon: the spiritual deadness that descends when the work stops meaning anything. Going through the motions, incredibly “busy,” feeling nothing.

For a creative business owner, it also looks like this:

• No onboarding. No training strategy.

• People hired too fast and held too long (after it’s clear it isn’t working.)

• No systems. No contracts—staff, contractors, collaborators expected to be under-resourced mindreaders.

• Constant verbal processing, especially with subordinates. Relentless communication rarely provides clarity (and hardly ever creates calm.)

• The business built entirely of launches, with nothing holding them up.

• Chronic resistance to the unglamorous work of actually running a business— because structure feels like the enemy of creativity, and policy feels corporate, and frankly it’s just less interesting than starting something new.

But here’s what the abdication of infrastructure actually produces: people who can’t meet your expectations because you never told them what those were, never put the time and energy in to build the means for success together. That’s Sloth—laziness (and entitlement) without corresponding effort.

A business that depends entirely on your presence to function isn’t really a business. A team that can’t grow into leadership because there’s no path, no development, no investment in what they could become aren’t even really employees. Vendors you want to pay to solve the problems you avoid, or opportunities you don’t want to work towards… Initiatives you want to exist, but not work on… the list goes on and on and I see it way too often.

Sloth and Wrath are not separate problems, TBH—they’re almost always intertwined, cyclical. You don’t build the infrastructure SO people can’t meet your standards. You resent them for it, and the resentment feels valid, because the outcome is real. And yet… you made it this way, no? Enter burn out.

PULL IT TOGETHER: Infrastructure isn’t bureaucracy, it’s care. An onboarding process says: I thought about what you need to succeed here. A contract says: I value this relationship enough to define it clearly. A training strategy says: I see you as someone worth developing.

BUT ALSO… GET REAL: Maintaining, building and growing your business is not the ‘boring part of the job.’ It is the job you chose to create for yourself.

These seven aren’t a hierarchy of failures. They’re actually more like a web, they all have relationships. (We frickin’ LOVE American Gods in our house, problematic as Mr. Gaiman may have turned out to be, and it’s REAL FUN and frequently instructive to think of these seven as Greek/Roman/Hindu god-type characters. What would Pride do?, etc.) Speaking of which, Pride feeds Sloth—if you’re the only one who can do it right, why build anything for anyone else? Sloth feeds Wrath, like we just said before. Envy feeds Gluttony—you see what everyone else has and go looking for the course, the strategy, the credential that will close the gap. Lust/Moh tangle into each other—desire for the new, attachment to the fantasy of starting, resistance to the reality of sustaining.

The reason this particular set of traps is alive right now—in politics, in institutions, in the culture at large. Pressure magnifies what’s already there. Technocratic and oligarchical dominance has bent society to its will—that’s pressure, and we’re ALL feeling it. It is our responsibility to reclaim our agency and autonomy and to reject these ridiculous new (yet old if we’re being really honest; they’ve always been there and are eager to be indulged) metrics for success and operational efficiencies.

The seven deadly sins aren’t dramatic failures. They’re the predictable responses of humans, and now business, under sustained pressure, lacking the structures necessary to back us up, and catch ourselves when we fall.

Choosing to be humane creative entrepreneurs comes with responsibility to reflect on the systems meant to lull us into simple replication. We can do better.

SO, some antidotes. These are not virtues to perform. They’re structures to build. Steps toward a business that holds more than your original fearlessness and brilliance. That invests as generously as it charges. That follows through. That curates its orbit. That trusts its own point of view. That builds as an act of love.

The noonday demons show up in the flat, bright middle of an ordinary workday. The question is what you’ve built to meet them.

#getwithit
— gJ