This has to be one of the most depressing pieces of research that I've come across in a long, long time and suggests that French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal might have been right when he said:
‘All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’
Acccording to ars technica:
As the authors of a new study note, the ability to sit and think may be one of the defining features of humanity. It's a necessary skill for any plan for the future and for detailed remembrances of the past, and it underlies all of art and literature. And, if their study is to be believed, we hate doing it so much that we're willing to self-administer electrical shocks in order to avoid being left alone with our thoughts.
It certainly explains a lot, doesn't it? Although I have to confess: there are things that make me opt for the electric shock; watching Fox News; listening to Michele Bachman screeching her latest conspiracy theory; watching Rick Santorum do anything, anywhere, anytime. Nah...fuck that: hook me up to the electrodes, Doc.
The article goes on:
The authors, based at Harvard and the University of Virginia, use a pretty simple structure for most of their experiments: put people in an empty room for six to 15 minutes and ask them to do nothing. Then, when they're done, ask them whether they enjoyed it. About half of them didn't. And, even though absolutely nothing was happening, people generally said they had a difficult time concentrating and that their mind tended to wander away from whatever they had decided to focus on.
Maybe it was something about the empty room, the researchers thought. So they asked people to set some time aside for thinking at home. In general, however, the participants enjoyed this even less, and about a third of them admitted they cheated and started checking their phones or browsing the Web. In fact, when given the opportunity to do these alternative activities, most people said they preferred them.
To truly get a grip on how much people hate being alone with their thoughts, the researchers asked some of their participants whether they'd pay to avoid getting an electric shock; most would. But then, given 15 minutes on their own in an empty room, two-thirds of the male participants ended up giving themselves a shock to avoid the tedium of their own company. (And that's after they removed the data from one guy who gave himself 190 shocks in the 15 minutes.) A quarter of the women involved also give themselves a jolt.
"Being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min[utes] was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid," as the authors put it.
So, if (like me) you were kinda hoping that people in general would wake the fuck up and start to give some serious consideration to the issues that are going to make-or-break us as a society...hell, as a
species...then, yeah...no: that ain't going to happen anytime soon.
Because thinking is painful and we're too damn busy distracting ourselves to death: ooh...a tweet about some Kardashian...doing something! Look! Justin Beiber has had a portrait of Warren G. Harding tattooed on his ass! Buzzfeed is reporting that Donald Trump has been fired by his own toupée! Wait a sec...some kid I went to elementary school with just updated his status! To be honest, I can't remember the guy at all; but thank God for Facebook!
Meanwhile out in the world, the world that it hurts people to think about:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- W.B. Yeats