PASCAL...
The Most Important Skill Nobody Taught You
Before dying at
the age of 39, Blaise Pascal made
huge contributions to both physics and
mathematics, notably in fluids, geometry,
and probability.
This work, however, would influence
more than just the realm of the natural sciences. Many fields that we
now classify under the heading of social science 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 twenties. As an adult, inspired by
a religious experience, he actually started to move towards
philosophy and theology.
Right before his death, he
was hashing 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 its clear and lucid ruminations on what it means to
be human. It’s a blueprint of our psychology long before
psychology was deemed a formal discipline.
There
is enough thought-provoking material in it to quote, and it
attacks human nature from a variety of different
angles, but one of its 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, and we can’t
help but run from the problems of
our emotions into the false comforts of the mind.
The issue at the root,
essentially, is that we never learn the art
of solitude.
The Perils of Being Connected
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’s connectedness.
Information technologies 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.
I can sit in my office in Canada and
transport myself to practically anywhere I want through Skype. I can be on the
other side of the world and still know what is going on at home with a quick
browse.
I don’t think I need to highlight the
benefits of all this. But the downsides are also
beginning to show. Beyond the current talk about privacy and
data collection, there is perhaps an even more detrimental side-effect here.
We now live in a world
where we’re connected to everything except ourselves.
If Pascal’s observation
about our inability to sit quietly in a room by ourselves is true of
the human condition in general, then 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?
Well, 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. And then, you’ll spend even more time
avoiding it to focus elsewhere. In the process, you’ll become
addicted to the same technologies that were meant to set you free.
Just because we can use the noise of the
world to block out the discomfort of dealing with ourselves doesn’t
mean that this discomfort goes away.
Almost everybody thinks of themselves as
self-aware. They think they know how they feel and what they want and
what their problems are. But the truth is that very few people really
do. And those that do will be the first to
tell how fickle self-awareness is and how much alone
time it takes to get there.
In today’s world, people can go their
whole lives without truly digging beyond the surface-level masks they
wear; in fact, many do.
We are increasingly out of touch
with who we are, and that’s a problem.
Boredom as a Mode of Stimulation
If we take it back to the fundamentals — and
this is something Pascal touches on, too — our aversion to
solitude is really an aversion to boredom.
At its core, it’s not necessarily that
we are addicted to a TV set because there is something uniquely satisfying
about it, just like we are not addicted to most stimulants because
the benefits outweigh the
downsides. Rather, what we are really addicted to is
a state of not-being-bored.
Almost anything else that controls
our life in an unhealthy way finds its root in our realization
that we dread the nothingness of nothing. We can’t imagine
just being rather than doing. 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 the same as never facing
ourselves. And never facing ourselves 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. It’s to let the boredom take you
where it wants so you can deal with whatever it is that is really going on with
your sense of self. That’s when you’ll hear yourself think, and
that’s when you’lllearn to engage the parts of you that are masked by
distraction.
The beauty of this is that, once you cross that
initial barrier, you realize that being alone isn’t so bad. Boredom
can provide its own stimulation.
When you surround yourself with moments of
solitude and stillness, you become intimately familiar with your
environment in a way that forced stimulation doesn’t allow. The world
becomes richer, 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 that there are other things you are
capable of paying attention to than just what makes the most noise on the
surface. Just because a quiet room doesn’t scream with
excitement like the idea of immersing yourself in a
movie or a TV show doesn’t mean that there isn’t depth to explore there.
Sometimes, the direction that this
solitude leads you in can be unpleasant, especially when it comes
to introspection — your thoughts and your feelings, your doubts and
your hopes — but in the long-term, it’s far more pleasant than running away from
it all without even realizing that you are.
Embracing boredom allows you to
discover novelty in things you didn’t know were novel; it’s like
being an unconditioned child seeing the world for the first time. It
also resolves the majority of internal conflicts.
The Takeaway
The more the world advances, the more
stimulation it will provide as an incentive for us to get outside of
our own mind to engage with it.
While Pascal’s generalization that a lack of
comfort with solitude is the root of all our problems may be an exaggeration,
it isn’t an entirely unmerited one.
Everything that has done so much to connect
us has simultaneously isolated us. We are so busy being distracted that we
are forgetting to tend to ourselves, which is consequently making us feel
more and more alone.
Interestingly, the
main culprit isn’t our obsession with any particular worldly
stimulation. It’s the fear of
nothingness — our addiction to a state of
not-being-bored. We have an instinctive aversion to simply being.
Without realizing the value of solitude,
we are overlooking the fact that, once the 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 yourself. And there is a
good reason why that is.
Without knowing ourselves, it’s almost
impossible to find a healthy way to interact with the world around us. Without
taking time to figure it out, we don’t have a foundation to built the rest
of our lives on.
Being alone and connecting inwardly is a
skill nobody ever teaches us. That’s ironic because it’s more important
than most of the ones they do.
Solitude may not be the solution to
everything, but it certainly is a start.
ZAT
RANA
https://designluck.com/most-important-skill/
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