Pascal would have thrown away his iPhone

Photo by Gilles Lambert on UnsplashYou’re standing in a grocery store line. You’re waiting for a flight. You’re stuck in the passenger seat on a long drive. You reach into your pocket and find it empty. Somehow, your smartphone is gone. For a few seconds, your brain short-circuits. What do you do with your hands? Where do you look? How do you survive three to five minutes of unstructured nothingness?If you’re like most of the modern world, you’ll do almost anything to avoid this feeling. You’ll doomscroll through outrage, swipe through strangers’ curated vacations, read the Wikipedia entry for the Lesser Antilles, watch actual footage of a school shooting or a gruesome murder, or play a mindless matching game, all to dodge the existential terror of standing still with your own thoughts.More than three hundred and fifty years ago, a sickly, brilliant French mathematician, physicist, and theologian named Blaise Pascal diagnosed our present condition. He had no iPhone, no algorithm, no…