Restlessness
Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.
. . .
This man spends his life without weariness in playing every day for a small stake. Give him each morning the money he can win each day, on condition he does not play; you make him miserable. It will perhaps be said that he seeks the amusement of play and not the winnings. Make him then play for nothing; he will not become excited over it, and will feel bored.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Is restlessness bad?
Pascal’s Pensées 127 through 143 are a delight and an embarrassment. Upon reading them, I find that my Schadenfreude rises to the level of a guilty pleasure, as Pascal points out all too aptly how silly we can be. On the other hand, I don’t think anybody can make it through those passages without several moments of, as the meme goes, ‘I’m in this Pensée and I don’t like it.’ It’s human nature to want tasks; on some level we often want something purposeful to do even more than we actually want the purpose at the end of it.
It’s an enduring religious theme that worldly success does not satisfy. One response to this is to suggest that the correct solution is to calm down and be content with what we have. Another is to say that we are correct to be restless, but that we ought to direct that restlessness appropriately. These two possible responses can sometimes find themselves in tension. Should we grasp less after meaningless things because we need to be less grasping overall, or because such efforts distract from the truly meaningful?
An insightful essay by Oliver Traldi on Wisdom of Crowds suggests that both wanting too much and not wanting enough can cause problems. Those of us who live a hardscrabble life, without many choices or luxuries, may find ourselves in need of advice that helps us manage the problem of having too many wants. In a different way, this is also true of those of us who are overly ambitious, seeking fame and fortune that we don’t really need. Yet those of us who feel we have an abundance of choices that are good enough may not actually find contentment in that state. The solution in this latter problem cannot simply be to “want less.” That will merely compound the problem of directionlessness that Traldi describes. Instead, the solution may be to want more. But more of what?
Augustine of Hippo famously suggested, in his Confessions, that human restlessness contains within it a desire for God: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” If this is true, then restlessness is not in itself bad. Indeed, it contains within it a path to true wisdom. Yet here my agnosticism is only one small subvariety of a problem faced by many true believers. What is God, and where may God be found?
It seems to me that, if you equate God with the broader notion of the Good, you cannot simply respond that God may be found in a holy book or a house of worship and leave it at that. If God in some sense is the very essence of what is truly worth seeking, then we must eschew narrow descriptions of what it means to find such a thing. It will not suffice to tell people that the possession of a Bible ought to make them content, nor prayer, nor any single, specific, God-ordained task. Indeed, one might say with more justification that true contentment ought not to be expected in this life at all.
Should we then tell all those who remain discontented that they must simply perform whatever religious tasks are necessary for heaven, and then endure their remaining discontentment, trusting that it will be relieved in time? Some might say so. Yet I think they are wrong, and not just because I cannot myself testify to the existence of an afterlife.
In a poignant article about assisted dying, Kirsten Sanders considers the sad phenomenon of a depressed woman, seeking state-assisted death for no other reasons than her mental health, who speculates freely about ‘what’s next—or is there nothing?’ For Sanders, this is completely contrary to the entire point of believing in an afterlife. Resurrection, she says, ‘is the limit case for God doing what God is always doing—making life where there was none.’ Which is to say, heaven is not something to get instead of this life. It is something to hope for because we treasure life in general.
From this perspective, we are not to ignore the good things that may be found here and now, in order that we may focus only on the all-important ‘pie in the sky when you die.’ Our restlessness should not be quieted to the point of motionlessness. On the contrary, we should seek out the truly good. Indeed, if we lack direction, it may be right and proper to want more and not less, provided that we want the right things.
We should seek justice. We should seek beauty. We should seek peace, and hope, and love. We should be restless, and we should allow that restlessness to move us to action, even as we understand that no satisfaction in this life is to be found.