Explainer

Creed

Distraction

19 June 2023

8 min read

How to escape 'the sole cause of unhappiness'

Our capacity to distract ourselves from the bigger questions is nothing new. Born 400 years ago this month, Pascal noted something similar and that got him thinking. Graham Tomlin tells his story.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An engraving of Pascal's showing him raising an eye brow.

Blaise Pascal almost raises an eyebrow at today's distractions.

Clermont Auvergne Métropole, Bibliothèque du patrimoine, GRA 6025, via Wikimedia Commons

A recent survey of belief in Britain yielded a confused result. Belief in God has declined, yet belief in the afterlife has risen. People are less likely to see themselves as religious, and don’t pray much, yet continue to trust religious organisations. We are caught between belief and unbelief.

A guide to our times might just be found in one of the greatest geniuses of the modern world, born 400 years ago this year – on 19th June. Blaise Pascal died before he reached the age of 40, and lived much of his life in chronic sickness, but in less than four decades he became one of the most famous and celebrated minds in France, conducting ground-breaking scientific experiments in a range of fields of physics, laying the foundations of probability theory, building one of the very first functioning calculating machines - a precursor to the computer, playing a key role in a start-up company which provided one of the first urban public transportation systems in Europe, and writing one of the great classics of satirical French literature – the Lettres Provinciales.

Yet he is best known today for a book that he never finished.

The thoughts

Pascal was born into a well-to-do middle class French family, the son of a tax official in the civil service. Although his mother died while he was still a toddler, his father recognised the extraordinary talent of his young son and decided to home-school him along with his two sisters. Theirs was a fairly conventional Catholic family and yet in time they came under the influence of an intensely devout movement in 17th century French religion, the Jansenists. Taking their name from a Belgian Bishop, Cornelius Jansen, their world-denying piety and ongoing feud with the powerful Jesuits made them a controversial group in the landscape of French religion at the time.

Blaise himself had a somewhat distant relation to the Jansenists, being much more interested in his investigations into physics, geometry and mathematics that began to raise eyebrows all over Europe. That was until a dramatic event on the 23rd November 1654. Not much is known about this life-transforming experience, but for two dramatic hours late that evening, Pascal experienced a profound encounter with the God who had always been vaguely in the background of his life but not a compelling presence.

The change was radical if not total. He didn't give up on the life of the mind, but instead started to think deeply about how to change the minds of the many cultured despisers of religion he had come to know through his scientific researches and through his exposure to the fashionable salons of Parisian life.

As various thoughts on this project occurred to him, he began to write them down on scraps of paper. Some were brief enigmatic sentences that clearly made sense to him but to no one else; others were a paragraph outlining a radical thought; some were longer, more reasoned pieces, carefully developing an argument. He died before he was able to finish this great Apology for Christianity and left behind a haunting, tantalising collection of fragments, which were collected together by a group of friends after his death and published as the Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion et sur Quelques Autres Sujets – or Pascal’s Pensées, for short.

Pascal had a problem in trying to do this. He knew from his own experience that piling up arguments as to why God might exist, or that you should think about God once in a while, don’t get you very far. They tend to produce at best a lukewarm, distant kind of religion that is more of a burden on the soul than a liberating presence, the kind of passive, slightly reluctant faith that he had held until that dramatic November night. They also point you towards the wrong God, the ‘God of the philosophers’ as he described it in his famous phrase, a God who is the logical conclusion of an argument rather than a living, breathing, haunting presence, both majestically distant and yet hauntingly present at every moment. He also knew that you can't manufacture profound experiences of the presence of God such as had happened to him. It was at the heart of St Augustine’s teaching, as conveyed through Jansenism, that only God's grace can shift the stubborn human heart, kindling in it a love for God that until that point was impossible to imagine, let alone experience.

Pascal was fascinated by our capacity to distract ourselves from the bigger questions of life and death. Is there a God? Who am I? Which religion is true, if any of them? What happens after our brief lives are over? If we are a tiny speck of life on a tiny insignificant planet within the vast expanses of space that were beginning to be discovered at the time, what possible significance can we have? How do you explain the monstrous contradiction of human beings who have the capacity for compassion, understanding and greatness and yet also for cruelty, bestiality and shame?

In the room

These are all big questions on which our eternal destiny depends, and so should occupy our minds day and night, and yet we have a remarkable capacity to distract ourselves from thinking about them. Silence and inactivity are unbearable to us and so we fill our time with (in his day) hunting, cards, conversation, tennis. As he put it, “the sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” He would have marvelled at our age with Twitter, TikTok, 24-hour TV and the myriad ways we find to divert ourselves during the most fantastically distracted age there has ever been.

And so Pascal tries to unsettle his reader, trying to stir up the instinct to consider deeper questions. Yet he still knows that even when we do start thinking about these things, we get muddled. Is there a God? Religious people say Yes; Atheists say No. Pascal knows enough of science to know that it is not capable of adjudicating on such questions, that evidence of miracles or biblical prophecies are ambiguous, and certainty is impossible to find. So what do you do when you're intrigued by religion but there isn't enough evidence to push you across the line to be a Christian? When one moment you're convinced God is real, but the next you doubt the whole thing?

Maybe you give up on it - get back to scrolling through TikTok videos, watching the football on TV, musing over Harry and Meghan? Yet Pascal says you can't just do that. You have to live your life as if there is a God and you need saving, or as if there isn't, and you don’t. And you and I will face the consequences of that choice after our lives are over, one way or the other.

This is where one of Pascal's most distinctive moves comes in. Among his sophisticated friends, were many who spent hours betting. Pascal had already done a playful bit of work working out the odds on certain bets, and what the likelihood was all victory and defeat in an uncompleted game – for cricket fans, a kind of early Duckworth-Lewis method for gambling with dice.

The wager

Pascal’s argument runs like this: If you were strictly speaking betting rationally on the odds, then you’d always bet on God. If you bet on God not existing, and there is no life after this one, and you’re right, you don’t gain a great deal – just a few brief years’ pleasure while you’re young and fit enough to enjoy it. But if you bet on God existing, and there is a life beyond the here and now, and you end up being right, you stand to gain a huge dividend – eternal happiness in the presence of God – all this for the sake of a tiny stake – a life of discipline and self-denial for a few years here on earth. So looking objectively and rationally at the odds on offer here, a betting man or woman would always bet on belief. But Pascal knows that we don’t think that way. Why? It’s not because we are being rational; it’s because belief is inconvenient, we would rather there was no God, it costs too much, and we just don’t want to believe.

So if the evidence is inconclusive, and you're aware that your own motives are mixed, then what do you do? Pascal thinks we are creatures formed by habit. So his advice is to start living as if it's all true even if you're not sure whether it is. Wise people in the past “behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said and so on….” Start practising the habit of daily prayer to God even if you're not sure whether he's listening or not. Start treating each person you meet each day as if they're not just another inconvenience in your path but someone precious, loved by God and created in his image. Start going to a church regularly meeting with other Christians for that kind of mutual strengthening of faith that only being with others can bring. Take the bread and wine of Holy Communion as if they really are the gift of Christ’s presence to you. And see what happens.

Start living

Pascal reckons, sooner or later, as had happened to him and countless others, belief will surely follow behaviour. Start living as if it is true and slowly (or perhaps dramatically) you will realise not only that it is true, but that it brings far more joy and delight than you ever thought possible.

T.S. Eliot once wrote:

“I can think of no Christian writer… more to be commended than Pascal to those who doubt, but have the mind to conceive, and the sensibility to feel, the disorder, the futility, the meaninglessness, the mystery of life and suffering, and who can only find peace through a satisfaction of the whole being.”

If we live in a culture that profoundly doubts God, yet which at the same time longs to find happiness, then perhaps Pascal is just the kind of guide we need.

Article

Culture

Digital

Film & TV

Work

24 June 2025

7 min read

What my film about the prodigal son really means

Our relentless focus on productivity devalues the things that make us human

Emily Downe

Emily is designer and animator at the Theos think tank.

In Sync with the Sun.

Theos.

Watch now

In his 2021 book 4,000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman observes that an obsession with productivity doesn’t give us more control over our lives, ‘instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven - or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by post.’

With technologies like artificial intelligence rapidly accelerating our lives, this constant demand to squeeze more into our time is not only limited to the mundane tasks that we have to do and wish we didn’t. It seeps into what we want to do and indeed must do in order to flourish: creating art, spending time in community, and caring for others. The problem is that these things cannot be measured in productivity metrics because they inherently do not function in that way. How do you measure how ‘productive’ a conversation is? Or a work of art? Artists such as Vincent Van Gogh or Emily Dickinson didn’t see their influence in their own lifetime.

The more we measure our lives in productivity metrics, the more we devalue the things that make us human, ultimately making our lives and the world around us increasingly artificial. This is the basis of my recent film, In Sync with the Sun, which is a short animation about the rhythms of activity and rest that are written into our world, and what happens when an obsession with productivity takes over.

I wrote the initial script for the film after a period of burnout. I was fully in the “make the most of every second” mindset, which left me feeling exhausted and confused about where my value resides. In response, I began researching the sleep-cycles of various animals and I was liberated by surprising details such as the fact that lions, which we see as mighty and majestic animals, sleep for around 21 hours a day. Even creatures like jellyfish, which don’t even have brains as far as we know, still have cycles of rest. Every living thing thrives in these rhythms of activity and rest, even down to plants and minuscule organisms. Our whole world is built on this pattern, in sync with the sun. Yet for us humans, our rhythms have been broken by technology, leaving us confused about our limitations and what we should do with our short lives.

The film begins in nature, deep in the jungle where some leopards are sleeping. But the tranquility is abruptly interrupted by the voice-over declaring, “the war against sleep began when artificial broke into the night.” Brilliant white light breaks up the deep blues and purples on screen, until the screen is filled with blinding white. I wanted it to feel like that moment you peer at your phone in the middle of the night - the pain of your pupils trying to adjust. If you think about it, for 99.9 per cent of human history, our eyes would have never had to do that - until now.

Artificial light wasn’t powerful enough to change that. Instead, it’s given us an unquenchable guilt about how we use our time.

With his invention of the light bulb, Thomas Edison was determined to banish the night, and the limitations it enforced on us. Edison was known for being fiercely obsessed with productivity and, as a result, was an anti-sleep warrior who believed,

“There is really no reason why men should go to bed at all.”

As someone living a century on, I find it baffling to imagine that humans should eradicate sleep entirely. Perhaps because just 100 years later we are seeing the results that sleep-loss and over-working can have on our physical health and wellbeing. Maybe we cannot supersede nature after all, since we are an embedded part of it. It seems that “Sabbath" rest is written into our world and into our humanity. Artificial light wasn’t powerful enough to change that. Instead, it’s given us an unquenchable guilt about how we use our time. Now we decide when the day ends, so whoever can rest the least wins.

The battle is still raging; incandescent bulbs only set aflame that root desire to be increasingly productive. The hamster wheel is spinning uncontrollably, and we must keep up. So, what do we do? The attempt to remove the limitations outside of us has revealed that they are in fact inside of us too. Therefore, the only way to keep up is to remove the human from the hamster wheel altogether. The failure of artificial light leads to the birth of artificial minds.

As a creative, this is what frustrates me most about artificial intelligence; that it is mostly being driven by this quest to bring everything under the reign of productivity. It goes without saying that this is greatly needed in some areas of society. Just like artificial light, it can and will do a lot of good in the world. However, when the obsession with productivity is prioritised over human flourishing, that’s when we know there is a big problem with how we view our lives.

Thinking back to the examples of Van Gogh and Emily Dickinson; what is lost when we don’t allow space for artists, carers, mothers, or any skilled role that requires an element of patience? For me personally, I can’t force creative inspiration, instead it comes at me, often at times when I’m not looking for it. Similarly, sometimes that inspiration leads directly to an instant idea, but most often it’s a vague idea I jot down to which later life experiences and opportunities then build onto, forming it into something bigger and more in-depth. This could be compared to a role or situation that requires relationship building. Sometimes there are moments of instant bonding and “productive” progress in relationships, but it’s often more complex where external experiences or changes, which are outside of our control, may unexpectedly deepen understanding between people after long periods of frustration.

In my animation, I used the metaphor of a butterfly to illustrate this sentiment. After the character realises he is not made for a life of relentless productivity, he steps out of the black and white skyscraper into the lush wilderness. A butterfly lands on his productivity badge and the voice over says, “You’re not a machine.” I imagine the Creator saying this to the loved creation. Creatures like butterflies seem completely unproductive to our human standards. They take weeks to form in the chrysalis and exist in the world for less time than that. Yet they are a source of wonder and beauty for anyone who has the privilege of seeing one up close. A reminder that nature is not in a rush. Where AI is concerned, however, speed and profit are the focus of desire. But looking at the world around us - that we are a part of - it’s clear that not everything can or should be valued by these limiting metrics alone.

The overarching narrative of In Sync with the Sun is loosely inspired by the biblical story of the prodigal son. The main character has travelled far away from his home in pursuit of success, and he eventually realises that this master does not love him. At the end he comes home again, finding connection in community and in the good rhythm of productivity and rest that he came from. I wanted the film to address the issues that an unhealthy obsession with productivity can cause, and instead evoke a desire to accept and live more in sync with the boundaries and rhythms that are embedded in the natural world we are a part of.

The film ends with the line, “The only thing that can stay awake is not awake at all.” In the midst of the changing world of AI, humans might be tempted to measure our productivity levels in comparison to these machines. However, technologies always raise the productivity bar higher and higher, and one day we need to accept that we simply aren’t going to be able to reach it. We don’t sit apart from nature like technology does, so let’s stop resenting that, and instead celebrate it. To quote Oliver Burkeman again,

“the more you confront the facts of finitude instead - and work with them, rather than against them - the more productive, meaningful and joyful life becomes.”

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