"All the misfortunes of man derive from one single thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room".

-Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal is a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian. Before Dying at the age of 39, he made huge contributions to both physics and mathematics, notably in fluid geometry and probability. His work however influence more than just the realm of natural sciences, many fields that we now classify under the heading of social sciences did in fact also grow out of the foundation he helped lay. Interestingly enough, much of this was done in his teen years. With some of it coming in his 20s inspired by his religious experience, when he started moving to philosophy and theology. Right before his death, he was washing out fragments of private thoughts that would later be released as a collection by the name of "Pensées".

While the book is mostly a mathematician's case for choosing a life of faith and belief, the more curious thing about it is, it's clear and lucid ruminations on what it means to be human. There is enough thought provoking material in it to quote, and it attacks human nature from a variety of different angles. But one of his most famous thoughts aptly sums up the core of his argument:

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"

According to Pascal, we fear the silence of existence, we dread boredom, and instead choose aimless distraction. We can't help but run from the problems of our emotions into false comforts of the mind. the issue at root, essentially is that we never learn the art of solitude.

Today more than ever Pascal's message rings true, if there is one word to describe the progress made in the last 100 years, it is connectedness. Information technology have dominated our cultural direction, from the telephone to the radio, to the TV, to the Internet. We have found ways to bring us all closer together enabling constant worldly access. But, there is perhaps a detrimental side effect,

"a world where we are all connected to everything, except ourselves"

The issue has certainly been augmented by an order of magnitude, due to the options available today. The logic is of course seductive, why be alone when you never have to?

The answer is that, never being alone is not the same thing as never feeling alone. Worse yet, the less comfortable you are with solitude, the more likely it is that you won't know yourself, then you'll spend even more time avoiding it to focus elsewhere. Just because we can now use noise of the world to block out the discomfort of dealing with ourselves, doesn't mean that the discomfort goes away.

What we are really addicted to is the state of not being bored. Almost anything else that controls our life in an unhealthy way find its roots in our realization that

"We dread the nothingness of nothing"

We cant imagine just being and therefore we look for entertainment, we seek company, and if those fail, we chase even higher highs. We ignore the fact that never facing this nothingness is why we feel lonely and anxious. In spite of being so intimately connected to everything else around us.

Fortunately, there is a solution. The only way to avoid being ruined by this fear. like any fear, is to face it. Let the bored take you where it wants, so you can deal with whatever it is that's really going on with your sense of self. That's the time when you'll hear yourself think and that's when

"you'll learn to engage the parts of you that are masked by distraction."

The beauty of this is that once you cross the initial barrier you realize that being alone isn't so bad, boredom can provide its own stimulation. you become intimately familiar with your environment, the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they really are. in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions, and in all their unfamiliarity, you learn just what makes the most noise on the surface.

There will be times, the direction that this solitude leads you to be unpleasant, especially when it comes to introspection, your thoughts, your feelings, your doubts, and your hopes. But it'll be far more pleasant in the long term, than to run away from it all. Without even realizing, you are embracing boredom allows you to discover novelty, it's like being a child seeing the world for the first time, it resolves majority of internal conflicts.

The more the world advances, the more stimulation it will provide as an incentive for us, to get outside of our own mind.

"We are so busy being distracted that we are forgetting to tend to ourselves"

We have an instinctive aversion to simply being, without realizing the value of solitude. We are overlooking the fact, that once our fear of boredom is faced, it can actually provide its own stimulation and the only way to face it is to make time whether every day or every week to just sit with our thoughts, our feelings, with a moment of stillness.

The oldest philosophical wisdom in the world has one piece of advice for us "know thyself". and there is a good reason why that is. being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us, that's ironic because its more important than most of the ones they do. Solitude may not be the solution to everything, but it certainly is a start.