Emptiness, when once experienced, can become a way of avoiding effort, work, and responsibility. It becomes an excuse, or a justification, for noncreative living. If all is vanity, if there is no new thing under the sun, if there is no joy to be found anyway—why bother? Why try? If life is just a treadmill—if we work eight hours a day so we can afford a house to sleep in, so we can sleep eight hours to become rested for another day’s work—why get excited about it? All these intellectual “reasons” vanish, however, and we do experience joy and satisfaction, when once we get off the treadmill,
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