“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Oh, man. If I had to choose, I’d say the best part of that opening line is the part where he says he flew to Singapore...
Using these quotes of Pascal as an endorsement of merely unplugging the internet is hilariously ignorant. (For Pascal,...