Kindle Notes & Highlights
For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.*
existential vacuum and the fact that man, no longer told by drives and instincts what he must do or by traditions and values what he should do,
“pursuit of happiness.” When this pursuit originates in a frustrated search for meaning it is aimed at intoxication and stupefaction. In the final analysis it is self-defeating, for happiness can arise only as a result of living out one’s self-transcendence, one’s dedication to a cause to be served or a person to be loved.
Even if a lovingly caressing hand is waking us up—its motion may be ever so gentle, but we do not realize its gentleness. Again, we only experience an intrusion upon the world of our dreams, an attempt to finish them off. Likewise more often than not death appears to be something dreadful, and we hardly suspect how well it is meant…
