Re: Digital Tools Help Users Save Energy, Study Finds

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

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different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose
themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold
and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of
men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own
chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with
pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town. A
commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found
insufferable not to budge from the town; and men only seek conversation and
entering games, because they cannot remain with pleasure at home.

But, on further consideration, when, after finding the cause of all our
ills, I have sought to discover the reason of it, I have found that there is
one very real reason, namely, the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal
condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it
closely.

Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things
which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the
world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel,
if he be without diversion and be left to consider and reflect on what he
is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall
into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally,
of death and inevitable disease; so that, if he be without what is called
diversion, he is unhappy and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who
plays and diverts himself.

Hence it comes that play and the society of women, war and high posts, are
so sought after. Not that there is in fact any happiness in them, or that
men imagine true bliss to consist in money won at play, or in the hare which
they hunt; we would not take these as a gift. We do not seek that easy and
peaceful lot which permits u