Human’s disability of being alone with himself should be the reason of humanity’s biggest miseries?
All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
Blaise Pascal
This quote makes us think about two main themes: loneliness of course but also consciousness and self-esteem.
Loneliness is maybe the actual pent-up feeling of our societies, mainly because of the evolution of social connections and the increasing amount of exchange we got on a daily basis, physically as well as virtually. It’s a hard thing to get really alone with ourself nowadays, thinking about something else than what happened at the office with this unbearable colleague for example.
In fact, entertainment leads us to either stay connected with others, or being distracted by the last Netflix’s series on stream. We do not think about us, but think about the others, what are their thoughts about us and how we’re represented in their mind. Blaise Pascal explain human’s ability to connect with himself as a mean to ask himself real questions, the ones who could change your vision of life and how you watch yourself.
Our everyday’s dilemmas are often about people: working or personal relationship, money, self-esteem, conflicts, daily news… We’re making a mental representation of ourself from all those connections and social relations: it can be related to the ‘social determinism’ of the french sociologist Émile Durkheim. We’re confronted in a lifetime to take care of what we’re representing for the others rather than what we’re really for ourself.
Self-awareness is the main point, it’s the central substance of reflexion. The fact of being alone with ourself leads us to think about frightening subjects that we don’t used to think about. This is what explain the terrifying situation of a quiet room in which we would be alone, incapable of thinking to something else than our own person: meaning, life, world, values, wisdom, death…
Nicolas de Chamfort once said: “We’re happier in loneliness than in the world. Does it not comes from the fact that in loneliness we think about facts while in the world we think about humans?”. This quote seems to take all its meaning when we see that any tricks comes corrupt our self-esteem when we’re alone: our self is naked. We head towards more self-awareness by being alone, even if sometimes it’s hard to accept ourself as we really are.
This quote from Blaise Pascal is a brave one but also a strong one: we can’t say that all of humanity’s miseries comes from this fact but we could acknowledge that we’re losing ourself in dealing with reality and appearances. Taking some time to be alone with ourself is a great therapy to deal with our biggest fears and problems in life. We can threat them by redefining what we’re really are, our values and what we’re aiming to achieve in life, not what people wan’t and wait for us to do.