Here at the chateau, questions of the meaning of life have been surfacing a lot lately. Maybe I'm getting my mid-life crisis in early. Maybe it's the fact that my employer keeps instigating rounds of redundancies. More probably, it's the result of a wife who keeps enrolling in philosophy courses at uni. Every now and again she comes home and tells me about thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, the 20th century German who argued that an authentic human existence belongs only to those experience angst in the fact of life's emptiness. Heidegger argued that the individual is always in danger of being swallowed up by the quotidian, of losing him or herself in everyday objects and routine.

¶ 10:42 AM