The pointlessness of my existence would often hit me in the midst of some ordinary task—buying groceries, boarding a train—and I would become paralyzed by confusion and indecision. Any discrete action, detached from a larger context, comes to seem absurd, just as a word considered on its own, removed from the flow of language, quickly becomes meani

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Existential ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all. People (at least in relatively prosperous countries where more urgent needs don’t intervene) talk about anxiety, dishonesty and the fear of commitment. They worry about being in bad faith, even if they don’t

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