Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE — Bookstore recommendation Erin O'Brien's DIG IN! is addressed to the person who suspects they have been living at half-depth — present in body but absent in spirit, filling a calendar without actually inhabiting their days. The thesis is direct: meaningful life requires active, deliberate engagement, and the failure to engage is itself a choice with real costs. O'Brien, writing in the accessible register of contemporary self-help, moves the reader from diagnosis (the ways people hold back from their own experience) toward a practical method of full participation. The audience is anyone who has arrived at midlife, a career plateau, or a relationship in neutral and asked whether more is possible. The book does not promise effortless transformation; its title signals that the work is physical, earthy, and requires getting your hands into the actual material of your life. For readers tired of inspiration that evaporates by Monday morning, O'Brien offers a more direct invitation: stop watching and start working. SECTION TWO — Catholic anthropological reading - **Created**: The book's foundational intuition — that the person is built for engagement, not spectatorship — resonates with the Catholic understanding of the imago Dei as active and generative. The human soul's natural appetite for the good is not satisfied by passive proximity; it requires the kind of deliberate contact with reality that O'Brien calls 'digging in.' This is not mere self-actualization language; it reflects the genuine structure of practical reason, which Aquinas describes as ordered toward acting well in concrete circumstances. - **Fallen**: The condition O'Brien diagnoses — a creeping disengagement from one's own life, a preference for comfortable distance over full presence — corresponds closely to what the ascetical tradition calls acedia: not laziness in the crude sense, but a disordered aversion to one's own good. This is a Fallen pattern, not merely a psychological bad habit. Concupiscence, in Aquinas's account, disorders not only the appetite for pleasure but also the appetite for effort, making genuine engagement feel threatening. - **Redeemed**: O'Brien's method — repeated acts of committed participation that gradually rebuild the person's relationship to their own experience — points, without naming it, toward the Thomistic account of virtue formation. Each deliberate act of engagement reshapes inclination; the person who digs in consistently begins to find it natural rather than forced. In the Redeemed state, this process is empowered by grace, though O'Brien writes within a secular frame that leaves that dimension unaddressed. - **Prudence (foresight and circumspection)**: The book trains two integral parts of prudence that are chronically underdeveloped in distracted modern life. Foresight — the capacity to see where present choices lead — and circumspection — careful attention to the actual features of one's situation rather than an idealized version of it — are both exercised by O'Brien's practical framework. The reader is asked to see clearly before acting, which is precisely the sequence Aquinas describes for sound practical judgment. - **Docility**: O'Brien's method assumes the reader is teachable: willing to have their assumptions about their own capacity questioned and revised. This intellectual humility before experience is the integral virtue Aquinas calls docilitas, and it is the precondition for any of the book's other practices to take hold. SECTION THREE — Conversation with the canon DIG IN! sits in natural dialogue with David Allen's[^1] approach in Getting Things Done, which also insists that meaningful action begins not with motivation but with the disciplined practice of clarifying what each open item actually requires — 'identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you're going to do with it.'[^1] Both books treat disengagement as a processing failure as much as a motivational one, though Allen's framework is more granular and O'Brien's more attitudinal. Where Patrick Lencioni's[^2] narrative in The Three Signs of a Miserable Job shows what disengagement looks like at the organizational level — a manager watching incomplete orders fail customers without apparent concern[^2] — O'Brien works at the individual interior level, asking why the person stopped caring in the first place. The sharpest contrast in the corpus is with Steven Hayes'[^3] ACT framework, which counsels that the path forward is not increased effort but defusion from the mind's verbal demands: 'I didn't have to buy into the verbal abuse it bestows upon me I could let go of trying to control it.'[^3] Hayes locates the problem in the overreach of language-based cognition; O'Brien locates it in insufficient will to engage. These are not incompatible diagnoses, but a reader would benefit from holding them in tension: Hayes corrects the kind of straining that O'Brien's title could inadvertently encourage, while O'Brien corrects the passivity that ACT's acceptance language can slide into if misread. ## References 1. Allen, David (n.d.). *Getting Things Done*. Processing chapter. — 'identifying each item and deciding what it is, what it means, and what you're going to do with it' 2. Lencioni, Patrick (n.d.). *The Three Signs of a Miserable Job*. Narrative section. — 'he watched as three different drive-thru customers returned because of incomplete orders' 3. Hayes, Steven (n.d.). *ACT and RFT videos*. Video lecture. — 'I didn't have to buy into the verbal abuse it bestows upon me I could let go of trying to control it'
✓ Strengths
- ✓The book's title premise — that meaningful engagement begins with a disposition of active participation rather than passive observation — maps onto what Aquinas calls the integral parts of prudence, particularly circumspection and foresight, which require the person to attend carefully to their actual situation before acting.
- ✓Its apparent emphasis on showing up fully to one's life affirms the Created dignity of the person: human beings are made not merely to endure experience but to engage it, a claim grounded in the soul's natural orientation toward the good.
- ✓By addressing readers who may feel stuck, disengaged, or going through the motions, the book implicitly names the Fallen condition of acedia — the disordered withdrawal from one's own life and duties — and offers practical correction.
- ✓The self-help genre's turn toward concrete behavioral commitment over passive motivation aligns with Aquinas's account of how habits form: repeated acts of engagement gradually reshape inclination, so that what once required effort becomes second nature.
- ✓The book appears to cultivate docility — openness to new approaches and willingness to be taught by experience — which is the integral virtue that makes growth possible in the first place.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠Without a theological account of the person, the book's call to 'dig in' risks locating the energy for transformation entirely in the individual's will, bypassing the Redeemed dimension in which grace, not mere resolve, is the engine of lasting change.
- ⚠Self-help frameworks that emphasize personal initiative can quietly reinforce a voluntarist anthropology — the assumption that the person can remake themselves through effort alone — which sits in tension with the Catholic understanding of concupiscence as a persistent structural disorder requiring more than motivation to correct.