Question

This question is more complicated than it seems. You would think that with more time, more leisure, and more luxuries, that compared to our ancestors, we would have more time. In ancient societies like among those in the Roman Empire, leisure time was generated because the slave class did their work. Even a few generations ago, your great-grandma scrubbed clothes on a scrubbing board, cooked on a coal or wood burning stove. Now, we are able to push washing machine buttons, use microwaves, and even have food delivered to us in minutes. So, you would think we would have more time to do what we want? But do we? It seems unlikely.

Philosopher Peter Kreeft of Boston College contends that "we want to complexity our lives. We don't have to, but we want to. We want to be harried, hassled, and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it."

Kreeft claims:

"So run around like conscientious little bugs, scare rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this is unendurable to us, like a dark empty room without distraction where we would be forced to confront ourselves, the one person...whom we fear the most, yet need the most, and the only person...whom we are constantly trying to escape, yet the only person who we can never escape, to all eternity."

Kreeft continues, "If you are typically modern, your life is like a rich mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hid a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiply diversions."

Pascal puts it this way:

"If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it."

That is why Pascal famously stated:

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

Kreeft goes on to say:

"Therefore the society or individual which has the most diversions and amusements is not the happiest but the unhappiest. Therefore our society is the unhappiest. All the social indicators bear out this conclusion: depression, divorce, suicide, drugs, violence--you name it. The point is simple: we never want to divert ourselves from happiness, only from unhappiness. If life felt like a holiday, we would not want holidays from it.

Later, Pascal puts it this way:

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement....Man is so unhappy that he would be bored even if he had no cause for boredom, by the very nature of his temperament, and he is so vain that, though he has a thousand and one basic reasons for being bored, the slightest thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard cue, will be enough to divert him."

Therefore, after reflecting upon these statements by Peter Kreeft and Blaise Pascal, do you think they are onto something? I mean, why are so occupied with business? Is it because, at some level, we are diverting ourselves from our state unhappiness? Is business a type of diversion from seeing how unhappy we actually are?

Answer 1

Answer.

In their arguments, both Pascal and Kreeft present a strong case against humankind’s inability to be alone with one’s own thoughts. But it remains to be seen whether this is the root of all of our problems. In Pascal’s quote, there is the idea of the prevalence of a high level of anxiety or nervousness about ‘ sitting idle’ and being isolated. Pascal’s thinking about the challenge of boredom to h7man action and consciousness resonates with contemporary everyday practices where we find ourselves reaching out for our phones the first thing in the morning upon waking.

Nowadays, we enjoy a number of inexpensive and readily accessible stimuli- whether it is books, movies or social media. Technology has in a way made it possible for us to never be alone as we always live in a virtual network of relations. Thus the experience of being alone is increasingly becoming a myth such that we move to the virtual world if we have no one to talk to and nothing to do. Thus. It seems to be  the case that the state of being alone with one's thoughts appears to be an unpleasant experience. However, the claims of these thinkers to whether all work and business is essentially a distraction seems to be a far cry and it needs to be understood within the specific context of cultural practices of the Western society. as highly individualistic societies, countries in the West are more likely to focus on individual’s sense of independence and achievement away from the group goals. In such a context, individuals are found to value their self identity and sense of privacy over and above their group identity. In such an individualised context then, ‘boredom’ from being with oneself would emerge not as a social or moral problem as the given thinkers have argued, but as an emotion itself which is built into the system of an individual oriented environment but which nonetheless tries to define society through affiliations between the different individuals. Our ways to keep ourselves busy is thus not out of fear of loneliness but a cultural symptom of ambition and achievement.