Their problems though are epistemological not psychological, collective not individual. Being unable to distinguish reality from illusion is an a priori part of the human condition. We are doomed to not fully understand but our only hope, our Ariadne's thread out of the labyrinth, is to try. After 1975, Phil and I corresponded only occasionally. Sometimes years would go by between letters.
Life has a way of doing that.
The only real difference was that the latter weren't nearly as much fun to read. We still must cope with the same epistemological problems that have confronted human beings since the beginning of time. But language is deceptive. My own pursuit of the epistemological question took a rather peculiar twist after that brief but intense period of correspondence with Phil. Let me use a book called The Bell Curve as an example.