The aim then should be to ensure that our lives have as many meaningful events as possible. We must avoid moods in which everything goes leaden. Anyone suffering from such a mood might sulk at the edge of the carnival, like Hamlet seeing nothing but futility of the world, the skull beneath the skin. It is sad when we become like that, and probably we need a tonic more than an argument. The only good argument, in a famous phrase of David Hume, is that this is no way to make yourself useful or agreeable to yourself or others.
