On not being able to stay put
“All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
Pascal is not recommending solitude. He is diagnosing why we avoid it: sitting still with nothing arriving is the one condition in which a person meets their own situation undisguised, and most diversions ever invented exist to prevent that meeting.
He wrote before screens, which is the part worth noticing. The machinery has improved beyond anything he could picture. What it is keeping at bay has not changed at all.