Essentially, we are our own enemies. Although tension and uneasiness unnerve us, we derive warped gratification from conflict and drama—otherwise, life would be trifling, lacking in dense significance. Woes consume our lives, but we accept this self-actualizing fact and think: So be it. Puzzlingly, each bemoans and at once celebrates his or her separate and unique orbit of pain, melancholy, and agony. Though perhaps unconscious of this truth, without strife, or experiences that harness our wandering, inattentive spirits, an overwhelming sense of ennui—BOREDOM, would disease our nondescript existences. Consequently, a flood of emptiness would circulate in our hearts. BOO. Adversity engages us in the important task of constant re-evaluation and forced introspection. Oftentimes, subconsciously our paranoia inclines our psyches to fish for trouble that usually is absent. What is it about our inconsistent natures that prevents us from finding satisfaction in the here and now? In effect, as much as we try to convince ourselves that the case is otherwise, why must the grass appear greener on the other side? As Pascal reiterates again and again, paradox and contradiction comprise the human condition, incredibly complex and at immediate war with itself.

Our only recourse is self-knowledge. By facing up to who we really are, followed by coming to terms with our inherent imperfections, we arm ourselves against having to lead careless, heedless lives swamped with self-deception. Escapement by way of losing oneself through distraction, though an easy and painless solution to the fixed misery eating away at our insides, is by far the most dangerous path to pursue. We must dare to brave delving inward in order to surface more refined, more complete, more enlightened individuals:

Adherents of escapism, we actively exercise our right to scurry away. We run from people, from thoughts, from emotions, from ourselves, hurrying hither and thither like rodents in a rat-race. Fearing disappointment and hurt that encompass reality, we choose rather to engulf our emptiness with distraction, with amusement, and with diversion. Never content with the solace and peace to be found in contemplation, centering, and prayer, we allow noise, play, extravagance, hedonism, debauchery, insobriety and other ills to reign supreme and run amok in our internal universe. Tuning ourselves out, we invite demise in: "Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversion, and thoughts for the future? By continually advocating escapement, we subject our beings, composed of three elements, heart, soul, and spirit, to further alienation, when all it really seeks is to be whole, serviceable, and united in vitality. Only when vigorously engaged in the process of re-encountering our essences do we live earnestly--with flavor and gusto. Everything else is merely half-life, or a would-be, unrealized existence.

More often than not, our energies are expended in senseless pursuits. Perturbed by idleness, alarmed by silence, we find refuge in recreation that robs us from the merits of inward speculation: "But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion" (36). Infected with an ADD-esque complex, the plurality of Human-Doings lead lives of irrational recklessness, foolhardiness, and--to exploit Thoreau’s choice expression, "quiet desperation." Incapable of sitting still and communing with their inner beings, men, women, young adults, youths scramble about blindly, like headless heedless chickens who’ve flown the coop, letting the blood run thin, run out, dying one minute at a time, leisurely paced. Even so, we cannot help but remain complacent, uninspired to become better than the average schmuck or schmuckette. Instead of warring against mediocrity, we avert our eyes from lackluster standards and deficient achievement, allowing society to fall upon itself, stumble, decay, and die.

At the same time, however, are we deserving, are we ready, are we desirous of Utopia, the ultimate escape? Disconcertingly, according to Pascal, we harbor masochistic tendencies: "What people want is not the easy, peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture" (136). Such is the paradox of the human condition. We are incapable of being pleased, for our hyperactive consciences, uncertain of what they need, of what they want, orbit egocentrically in circles. Drawn to romanticized nostalgia, or else dreaming about an embellished future, we lose perspective of the present, the only valid, though intangible, abstraction we rightly possess:

We are not only "unwise [to] wander about in times that do not belong to us" but also presumptuous to think we have control of the future and of the past. Yes, even the past, for re-memory, after all, is the condition of recalling, reviving, reliving, reinterpreting, reshaping, re-evaluating again and again former experiences, impressions, thoughts, feelings, and facts. Ensconced in this circular asylum of wavering between the past and the future, we embrace escapism to quell adverse feelings of emptiness gnawing at our bowels. Distancing ourselves from the misery we shoulder, we are wont to abandoning immobilizing reality for a charmed life rooted in illusion. The custom of recollecting the past and divining the future parry sentiments of entrapment, bondage, and frustration. By exercising escapism, one moves outwardly away from the center of direct experience, and into the periphery of passive quasi-existence. In due course, vaguer and more volatile become the consequences and repercussions of negligent, decadent, and unconscious living.

Associated with good, pleasure, ease, and contentment, perceptible happiness is mankind’s aim and end. Of all the state of minds universally shared by people, happiness is the most coveted, and therefore, is the most elusive of state of beings. We wish to dictate our lives according to the beat of inner tranquility and the pursuit of profound euphoria that are often all too absent in actuality. Instead, an overwhelming sense of loneliness, angst, alienation, despair, and decay pervades the heroism of modern day existence. As Pascal asserts without end, ironically, the pursuit of happiness ensconced in obscure objectives is sad, in light of the likelihood that we are incapable of securing it.

In the final analysis, fundamentally, we are trapped: "Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched" (29). Uncertainty certainly reigns supreme. Humanity’s state, after the Fall, is characterized by estrangement, listlessness, disquietude, stress, anxiety, skepticism, doubt. Unlike nature, which is blameless and ingenuously ordered, humans inclined to introspection are resolutely conscious of their suffering. In Eden Garden, God trusted man with the capacity for reason, conscience, and thought. Negligent of obedience and duty, we blew it. Poof. Such paradoxical statements compel me to ask: "What, then, are we to do?" The most important thing is to keep being, to keep moving, to keep striving. No matter how heinous a boulder life asks you to shoulder, haul the heft. To compensate for confiscating paradise from us, God equips his proteges with the strength to endure, even when the going gets roughest. As the sagely woman in Candide maintains:

Unfortunately, I, along with commendable philosophical titans, can only posit half-baked—if even that, answers. In modern society bereft of Delphic oracles, no one is sanctioned to generating the perfect equation nor the absolute solution to the problem of life, where the only rule is that there are no rules.