Violent and Vigorous Occupations

Blaise Pascal and the Moral Meaning of Our Hobbies, part 1

We make a lot of our hobbies. We read the self-introductions of strangers on the internet—their collections of fine bourbon, their skill at manual lathe working, their passion for Parisian cafe culture—and our own lives seem uninteresting. Do these people make a living in the cafes, like a modern Gertrude Stein? Or are they really like me, more like Andy from The Office than Ernest Hemingway? I can’t say if it’s a new thing, but it’s certainly notable, the way we define ourselves more by our avocations than our vocations.

Come to think of it, a lot of my friends are picking up new hobbies. One started golfing, one scuba diving, another flying. One is building a boat in his backyard, which puts the matter in biblical proportion. I picked up race car driving. Could this be what I was meant to be, my platonic form? Or maybe it’s not that deep. Have I mistaken fleeting pleasures for true happiness? At 50-years-old and 118 miles-per-hour, everything is fleeting. Race car driving is dangerous, but not the way most people think. Bodily risk is not the chief danger. Neither are our hobbies dangerous because they take us away from our jobs, as my Calvinist conscience sometimes tells me. They are dangerous because they distract us from rest.

Our hobbies are dangerous because they are diversions, says Blaise Pascal. A diversion takes your mind off something else, especially unhappiness. “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things (Pascal in Peter Kreeft ed. Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées, paragraph 133, page 170).” Pascal’s got me there. I don’t like to be unhappy, even less to think about it. I’ll do almost anything not to. I’ve tried drugs (legal ones), sleeping pills, counseling, neuro-feedback, bourbon, ZYN, CBD, magnesium, melatonin, Arrested Development, poetry, prayer, coffee and Facebook, some things that I have forgotten and some that I am ashamed of. I don’t like to be unhappy, and the entertainment-internet-therapeutic complex knows it.

What makes Pascal different than me and my abettors is that he leans into the unhappiness. Unhappiness is good news. Call it the gospel of unhappiness, and this is the message: unhappiness has a purpose. (I mean “happiness” as soul-ish wellbeing or peace of mind, not pleasure.) The purpose of unhappiness is, simply, to tell us that there is something wrong. Our diversions prove it. “If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it (Pascal, Pensées paragraph 165, page 169).” When you are at work, dutifully doing your duties, why do TikTok, EBay, news, sports, or worse, lure you away? Is it because you are so extravagantly happy, so rapturously joyful at your labor, that you can’t bear it any longer? There is a sickness in our souls. Diversions are dangerous because they mask it.

How do diversions mask our problem? “When men are reproached for so eagerly pursuing something that could never satisfy them, their proper answer, if they really thought about it, ought to be that they simply want some violent and vigorous occupation to take their minds off themselves. . . .” Driving works this way for me. For a few minutes, every other concern is obliterated. If driving doesn’t do it for you, maybe it’s some other violent and vigorous pastime, like jumping out of planes. Without any clothes on.

“Skydive naked from an aeroplane! . . . my heart! my heart! jumpstart my heart!” - Mötley Crüe

Or porn. “But they do not answer like that because they do not know themselves. They do not know that all they want is the hunt and not the capturePascal (Pensées, paragraph 136, pages 173-174).” Porn is about the hunt, not the capture, says Anthony Bradley. Pascal looks at the person top-down, so to speak, from the transcendent-spiritual point of view. Looking bottom-up, from the earthy, bodily angle, something similar is happening. Porn works by the dopamine cycle. The more we get, the more we want, and the less we are satisfied. We desire, we search, we hunt, but neither dopamine nor distractions satisfy.

“If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad. . . . If it makes you happy, why the hell are you so sad?” - Sheryl Crow

Diversions are not just hobbies or illicit pleasures. Pascal doesn’t refer to scuba diving or sports car driving, but he does mention dancing, gambling, hunting, and billiards. There are worse diversions, to be sure, but he doesn’t stop there. “The only good thing remaining therefore is to be diverted from thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their mind off it, or by some novel and agreeable passion which keeps them like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show, in short by what is called diversion. That is why gaming and feminine society, war and high office are so popular.” (Pensées, 136, p 172-173)

We would probably count gambling and “shows” as diversions, but war and politics? They are work, the proper work of kings. Aristotle says that politics is the highest work (or “craft” or “art”, Nicomachean Ethics 1.2.5). Pascal differs. He lumps these forms of work and “occupations” together with other, unseemly activities. If the higher forms of work are diversions, then the lower ones probably are too. Let me state Pascal’s point in the most provocative way that I can: work, race car driving, sports betting, and porn share a similar moral status. They are all diversions.

This is hard, but I want to join Pascal in leaning into this discomfort. Jesus’s teaching is not unlike it. “Watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the cares of life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap (Luke 21:34).” Dissipation and drunkenness are obvious vices, but “cares of life” are not. The “cares of life” might be our chores. After all, Jesus rebuked Martha for doing the dishes. The man who worked hard, saved his money, invested it, and grew his business? Jesus says to him, “Fool, this night your soul will be required of you (Luke 18:20).” So much for delayed gratification. Jesus and Pascal just don’t value work the way that we do.

If work and hobbies are both diversions, what is the alternative? The alternative is rest. Rest belongs to the complex of things that also includes peace and happiness. The source of mankind’s unhappiness is our inability to rest in peace. “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that the does not know how to stay quietly in his room (Pascal, Pensées, paragraph 136).” In rest we come face to face with the ultimate, mortality and meaning. That’s where the real search for happiness begins. (I have offered preliminary definitions of work and rest here.) But the search goes awry. At the very time Pascal was writing, Rene Descartes did in fact shut himself in his room. As if to prove Pascal right, that we don’t know how to rest, Descartes turned in on himself, incurvatus in se, and proclaimed, “I think therefore I am”—and set us on a long, failed bid for happiness. He should have said, “God thinks, therefore I am.”

Driving on a racetrack puts a lot of stress on the car. Things wear out. Some things wear out faster than others. Cars are said to be either “high” or “easy” on “consumables”, things like brakes, tires, fuel, and money. Our souls are consumable too. Our avocations and our vocations consume them. We feel a vague uneasiness about how we spend our spare time. Should we be watching so much football? And yet, so often our hobbies define us. I’d rather you think of me as a race car driver than a desk jockey. In part two of this essay, I am going to argue that Pascal hasn’t painted the whole picture. There’s more to hobbies than diversion. There is meaning too. The more meaning the better, and some hobbies might even be more meaningful than our jobs.