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“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” -- Blaise Pascal
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.
...
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.
Deep thoughts by Blaise Pascal. Was he right? Are we addicted to not-being-bored? Is boredom good for us?
(Score: 2) by TheFool on Wednesday November 28 2018, @08:16PM
Like anything, it's something you can learn on your own. It might just take a bit of dedication to do so.
This is a bit of an odd observation. Saying this is a bit like saying alcoholics aren't addicted to being drunk, but that they're addicted to not-being-sober. It's true, but it's kind of indirect. Boredom is more like a withdrawal symptom than anything. When you hit it, you compulsively reach for that bottle of sweet sweet stimulation, or suffer, if you can't find an adequate amount.
Being able to sit completely at peace when you don't need stimulation is... well, even if you don't like spiritual/religious notions of that, you're entering a similar territory. So I don't know that it's good or bad, it's just a thing. We wouldn't get a lot done if we could be content with doing nothing.
It probably does drive us to do too much, though, and if we don't have an obvious reason to stop we probably won't. Tempering our stimulation addiction might be a good idea. Bring it down to the one or two drinks a day level, rather than the 12-pack a day modern society has us drinking.