The Joy of Quiet

“Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once… ‘Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,’ the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, ‘and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.’ He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone… The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential. - “The Joy of Quiet,” Pico Iyer, http://nyti.ms/vY2IFn