We now live in a world where we’re connected to everything except ourselves. The less comfortable you are with solitude, the more likely it is that you won’t know yourself. Then, you'll spend even more time avoiding it by turning your focus elsewhere, such as technologies. Very few people in today's world are really self-aware. We are increasingly out of touch with who we are, and that’s a problem.

The Perils of Being Connected

Our rejection of solitude is really an aversion to boredom. It's not that we are addicted to a TV because it is satisfying, but we're addicted to the state of not being bored. We can't imagine just being rather than doing. It makes us search for entertainment or company. We fear facing ourselves. The only way to avoid being ruined by this fear is to face it. When you cross the initial barrier of solitude, you find that being alone isn't so bad. You become intimately familiar with your environment and discover novelty in things you didn't know were novel.

Boredom as a Mode of Stimulation

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.  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. Without knowing ourselves, it’s almost impossible to find a healthy way to interact with the world around us.

The value of solitude

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

Just before his death, Blaise Pascal was hashing out private thoughts that would later be released as a collection by the name of Pensées.  The book is mostly a mathematician's case for choosing a life of faith and belief, but more unusual is his clear ruminations on what it means to be human. Pascal writes that we fear silence, we dread boredom and instead opt for aimless distraction.. The issue at the root, essentially, is that we never learn the art of solitude.

The Art of Solitude

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…

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