Blaise Pascal died at 39 in 1662, and before that he wrote a sentence that today reads like a diagnosis of the entire condition: all of humanity's unhappiness comes from a single thing - the inability to sit quietly alone in a room.

He had no phone, no screen, not one of our excuses. And yet he noticed exactly what psychologists now measure with experiments: the moment external stimulation disappears, something we do not enjoy shows up - our own thoughts.

Psychologist Violeta Acedo points to a study by Timothy Wilson in which participants preferred to receive an electric shock rather than be left alone with their thoughts. That is not a metaphor and not a joke. People pressed a button to shock themselves, purely to avoid sitting in silence.

What surfaces when we stop has names: boredom, restlessness, impatience, guilt. And behind them, the queue of things we have been avoiding - unresolved problems, postponed decisions, conversations we never had. It is no wonder we run. What is strange is that we are convinced the running is called productivity.

Pascal called this divertissement - the diversion we use to avoid facing questions with no comfortable answer. Around here the same thing is called "don't stop or you'll lose your mind". The Balkans have their own ways of running from themselves, and most of them happen in company, loudly, with music.

Acedo's advice is modest to the point of shyness: five to ten minutes with no phone, no television, no music, just to see what comes up. Not meditation, not a programme, not an app that measures your breathing. Just a chair and silence.

It is not much. But if a man who died almost four centuries ago identified the problem, and we still cannot last ten minutes without a screen, the question is not whether the advice is enough. The question is why we still have not tried it.