Seneca, On Peace of Mind 2.7

All these symptoms become aggravated when their dislike of a laborious misery has driven them to idleness and to secret studies, which are unendurable to a mind eager to take part in public affairs, desirous of action and naturally restless, because, of course, it finds too few resources within itself.

When therefore it loses the amusement which business itself affords to busy men, it cannot endure home, loneliness, or the walls of a room, and regards itself with dislike when left to itself.

Recognizing my restlessness, I then become painfully conscious of the emptiness inside me, and I dread having to face my own thoughts. Distracting myself is suddenly just an empty chore, even as it seems that everyone else is quite content with it.

I have, after all, been told that the best way to get ahead in life is to constantly be busy, continually occupied with one task after another, so that I may then have a feeling of accomplishment and worth. But I find no achievement in any of it, and I would laugh if it didn’t make me cringe. It is much like trying to sit patiently at a table and not knowing what to do with my hands.

Others will go on looking busy, yet I can only wonder if they are just putting on a show, because I am surely not the only one who doesn’t like gazing in the mirror. What am I afraid of? It can only be that I don’t like what I am going to see.

I really haven’t nurtured what is inside of me all that well, have I? Without the outside to occupy my attention, the silence is rather deafening. I know that it shouldn’t be that way, so I am ashamed in addition to being frustrated.

I think of Blaise Pascal, who tells us in the Pensées that all our miseries come from an inability to be alone with ourselves. I will make the reference quite often, since I sense how it goes straight to the cause of our deepest worries. People will thoughtfully nod in agreement, and then, after a brief silence, everyone starts changing the subject.

I push myself a bit further into the text, forcing myself to swallow more of the bitter medicine:

He who does not see the vanity of the world is himself very vain. Indeed who do not see it but youths who are absorbed in fame, diversion, and the thought of the future?

But take away diversion, and you will see them dried up with weariness. They feel then their nothingness without knowing it; for it is indeed to be unhappy to be in insufferable sadness as soon as we are reduced to thinking of self, and have no diversion.

If our condition were truly happy, we would not need diversion from thinking of it in order to make ourselves happy.

What is so terrible about being in my room, at home, alone? It can only be that I don’t particularly enjoy my own company. It only remains for me to ask whose job it is to do something about that.

Written in 5/2011