The Pill We Already Swallowed
In 1654, in a fragment now numbered 139 of the Pensées, Pascal wrote a sentence that has been quoted so often it has lost most of its weight, and it is worth taking down from the shelf and looking at it again: all of humanity’s misery comes from a single fact, namely, that we are unable to sit quietly, alone, in a room. Three hundred and seventy years later we have built the most extraordinary device in human history for the express purpose of ensuring no one ever has to. ...