We cut the wires, find ourselves in free-fall, as if our true home were the undimensional solitudes, the rift in the Great Nebula. It is reserved for man alone to find his very existence questionable, to experience the whole dubiousness of being. Even if man's hunger and thirst and his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, 'he' is not satisfied. In contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then, they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction, he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals, and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity of human life.
Contemporary man is prey to a recurrent sense of dissatisfaction.
He is intermittently bored, frustrated and neurotic. Life is only occasionally there to be simply lived. In some traditional societies identity might readily be constructed out of the material of paramount reality. Individuals could display themselves by showing commitment to the arrangements and routines of everyday life. But contemporary consciousness is informed by a sense of reality as something which is not completely our own.