Sit down and think for a moment

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

- Blaise Pascal

If you are like most people in an industrialized society today, you are surrounded by computers, smartphones and television all day long. Maybe you don't spend all your time with these devices, but you are in reach of them, ready to be reached by others. By now there is significant social pressure to stay available as much as possible, and this is likely only to become worse in the future. But I'm not writing this to condemn this situation for it's stressfulness, this has been done by many others. My point here is more a psychological one.

It is natural for humans to wonder, to ask themselves and others about what they see, hear, taste, touch, smell and think. Children do this all the time, and I think it's partly due to habituation that adults cease to do it for the most part. Another significant factor is leisure time. If you have to spend most of you day working to afford your living and communicating to organize your day, you're likely to spend free time relaxing and giving your brain some rest. However, for the insightful kind of wondering that I want to talk about, you need not just free time, but also free mental capacities - "the will to think".

At first, it seems paradox that we (people in modern industrialized societies) are often stressed out and with little free mental capacity, because at no point in human history was living as comfortable and safe as it is now. Very few people among us need to worry about hunger or thirst, about freezing or about dying due to diseases or injuries. These dangers still exist, but they are far away from ordinary every-day life. Human achievements such as written language, higher forms of art, mathematics or philosophy were invented and developed in wealthy societies, when at least some people were free to think extensively and to share their thoughts with like-minded others. So why aren't we a society of calm thinkers, able to focus on whatever strikes our fancy?

Quite obviously, because we are constantly keeping our minds busy. Communication, information, distraction. There certainly are evolutionary reasons why these tasks are pleasurable, but the modern media, especially smartphones, have evolved to most effectively abuse our attention mechanisms. "Social" media networks do the same with our social reward systems. Does this technology have useful applications? Yes. Is there a huge potential for abuse and addiction? Yes.

Coming back to the opening quote and the central point of this post:

So much science has been done thus far, and its results are readily available to us. However, the great mysteries, the big challenges and immeasurable unknowns lie neither ahead of us, nor besides us. They are within us. Just like it has been ridiculed that we know more about the surface of the moon than about the deep sea, it can be ridiculed that despite all our education and acess to knowledge we are often strangers to ourselves.

A peculiar video game (about which I will write more at a later point) has made an overwhelming argument for introspection and reflection. Sit down, think, and listen to the silence. What are your desires and your fears? Why do you like the things you do? How many of your actions are in your conscious control, how much is retrospectively rationalized? How many decisions in your life were only reactions to the circumstances? Are there any big regrets nagging on you? If you achieve what you strive for, will you be happy?

For some of these questions, psychology has found answers - statistical and generalized ones of course. But you are an individual, with individual answers to these questions, and it can be quite helpful to know some of them. And even if you don't find an answer, thinking about such questions is valuable in itself. From my observation, people with an unpleaseant character also tend to be reluctant or even unable to reflect on these topics, whereas people who are open to them are typically considered a pleasant company, not just by me.

Finally, concerning all kinds of knowledge: I think there is a great difference between knowing something in the sense of "being able to retrieve the fact upon request", and realizing something, as in "incorporating it into your model of the world". The latter requires much more processing, because the new bit of information needs to be compared to many aspects of your mental world model to find confirmation, contradiction or new results altogether. Some of this processing happens all the time in the background, some when at rest, some during sleeping, and some only upon active and deliberate reflection. I personally find that it's the last type of processing which yields the most surprising and valuable results. Therefore: Sit down and think.