Reader wants to “achieve stuff”.

A READER WRITES: “Your website doesn't exactly inspire me to work harder on my very important documents in my very important job...don't you realise I am trying to achieve stuff here....and your writing only inspires me to go for a walk and look at stuff??”

BB SAYS: If you enjoy frenetic activity and busyness, then that is probably what you should be doing.

But I invite you to consider the thoughts of the French thinker Pascal. He says “nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair. Since men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.”.

But according to Pascal, the attempt to use activity, distraction and busyness to avoid confronting the truth of our human condition is doomed to fail - “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone … Error does not lie in seeking excitement, if people seek it only as a diversion; the evil is that they seek it as if the possession of the objects of their quest would make them really happy. In this respect it is right to call their quest a vain one. He who does not see the vanity of the world is himself very vain.”.

Pascal concludes: “If our condition were truly happy, we not need diversion from thinking of it in order to make ourselves happy. The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”