In Pensees 139, Blaise Pascal writes: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I sit quietly in a room alone and write. But because of internet tech and social media connectivity my room never needs to be quiet and I never need to be alone.

On one level, Pascal’s truth remains: learn to be by yourself, befriend your boredom, cultivate your creativity, explore your environment, express your experience from your own unique and individual perspective, maybe commune with God.

But on another level, I wonder if we’re losing the context in which his statement even makes sense.

Anecdote: Every school day, I get in the van at 8:25a to take some kids to school. The other day I was running late, rushing to upload my blog post before leaving. A kid says, “Dad, I’m bored. We’re not leaving for another 2 minutes and I have nothing to do.” I, on the other hand, felt like I had a million things to do and 2 minutes left me no time to helpfully address teen ennui. So I did the mature adult thing: “Don’t you have your phone?” Implication: if you can’t just sit quietly in a room alone, use digital distraction (and leave your dad alone!). The response I got: “Yeah, but I’m bored with it too.” Yikes! To paraphrase Green Day, “When [digital distraction]’s lost its fun, you’re f-ing lonely…”

In the early early early days of the internet, my Christian seminary professor came to the soul-crushing realization that despite all the noble promise of digital democratization and global dissemination of opportunity and knowledge made newly available via the world wide web it was mostly just porn. His ‘cope’ as the kids would say was to tell his class of aspiring pastors and preachers that the more endlessly accessible porn becomes the sooner its users will realize how truly sad and empty it is and get over it. This is unfortunately a common evangelical impulse: make as big a mess of things as possible so God will have no choice but to have to step in (Salvation/Rapture/Armageddon) and fix it. Whatever sincerity there was in his sentiment, he clearly did not account for the fact that he was a 50+-year-old married husband and father speaking to mostly single, sexually frustrated, 20-something, performatively male, wannabe super-Christians raised on purity culture and taunted with fantasy come-ons of a happily-married happily-ever-after sex life as one of the great entitlement rewards for their vigilant ‘nice-guy’-ness.

I’m not an expert on addiction, but it seems like a lot of people believe an addict has to hit ‘rock bottom’ before recovery. But it also seems like a lot of people never do. For some people, there is no bottom. Or as Mark Heard sang it, if there is a bottom then “it’s a long way down.” And in the downward-spiraling cycle of self-hate, going even lower than ‘rock bottom’ sometimes becomes one of the last challenges worth pursuing.

I’m just one person, and in the grand scheme of things I’m incredible blessed or fortunate or lucky or whatever you want to call it. So I don’t consider my experience normative or even all that relevant to anyone else’s. But in my experience with depression, I don’t think I’ve ever hit rock bottom. Unless rock bottom means realizing I can always go lower. That’s what scared me most – not that I would hit rock bottom, but that there was no bottom to hit at all. In my worst moments, I might even want to find out just how much lower I can go. In those seasons, the promise of hitting ‘rock-bottom’ felt more like a comfort and a relief – finally, after everything, at least the descent will stop.

Suicide may be similarly motivated. Thankfully I don’t know. I never ‘made a plan’ or felt like that was ever going to be an option for me. But it was sobering when, after several months in, my therapist asked if I was having thoughts of harming myself. I realize that’s standard clinical procedure, but it shook me. I hadn’t ever mentioned it, so my takeaway was that my condition was serious enough that it wouldn’t be outside the norm for me to be considering it. That was shocking. I was just trying to live with it, pray it away, figure it out somehow so I could fix it. It hadn’t occurred to me that all this time it was trying to kill me.

Years later, in a season of serious ‘re-lapse’ a different therapist suggested that the reason I hadn’t yet taken that option was due to the internalized values of my religious upbringing concerning human dignity and love/duty to others. That was when I realized just how lucky I was. And just how important all this Jesus stuff is. I know following Jesus is not the only way to arrive at a reason to live, but it has been my way. And for all its many many flaws and failures and faults, it still was enough to save my life. People choose to live and die for all sorts of reasons. Mine is Jesus. Sometimes I don’t even know what that means, but I owe my life to it anyway, somehow.

So here I sit quietly alone in my room and write. It’s the least I can do.