“The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion [distraction]. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek more solid means of escape, but diversion [distraction] passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to death.”[i]—Blaise Pascal, seventeenth-century French mathematician and Catholic theologian
[i] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Classics), 120.