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.

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.

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'll learn 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 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.