Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Miserable on every vacation
The pattern
He would trudge through six or eight weeks of work picturing the trip: a relaxed wife, great food and drinks, everything finally going right. Then the vacation would start, and he would find himself irritable and picking fights with his wife, unable to understand why.
What vacation removed
The answer turned up when he noticed what vacation took away. His whole mindset was built on performing, so with nothing to achieve, nothing to improve, and no new thing to learn or money to make, he was left asking who he was. Everything was also provided and friction free, with room service clearing the plates and a view of mountains or a beach, so nothing distracted him from the question.
Looking inward
That turned his attention inward, and he did not like what he saw. Blaise Pascal's word for it is incurvature. He felt like a bicycle that lost its steam and fell over. Then he realized the same thing was true of his daily life: working hard was a way of ignoring who he was.
Why do people avoid sitting alone with thoughts?
In a 2014 study published in Science, University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues left participants alone in a room with their thoughts for six to fifteen minutes. Many of them reported finding it unpleasant. In one experiment, about two thirds of the men and a quarter of the women gave themselves an electric shock they had earlier said they would pay to avoid, rather than sit idle.
What did Pascal say about sitting in a room?
In the Pensées, published after his death in 1670, Pascal wrote that all of humanity's troubles come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He argued that people chase diversions such as hunting, games, and business to avoid facing themselves. Pascal was also a mathematician and physicist who built a mechanical calculator as a young man.
More from Joys of Compounding
