Interestingly, just a few years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger began to speak of a new cultural mood. It was no longer ‘anxiety’ that disclosed the underlying meaninglessness of the human situation but an insidious feeling of ‘boredom.’ In our blasé state, we are no longer distressed or shocked by Nietzsche's announcement, and this for Heidegger was a much more “shocking” problem (1999b, 73). To be sure, Westerners are not facing the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation or recovering from the visceral horrors of the Holocaust and two world wars. These events forced philosophers and writers of the time to confront the existential givens of absurdity, freedom, and death. Yet we work and live in a turbo-capitalist marketplace that is riddled with economic insecurity, inequality, and stress; we confront the global threat of anthropogenic climate change, unprecedented environmental devastation, and species extinction; and our inter-human relations are increasingly vacuous and impersonal, mediated by the ubiquitous presence of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Out of this disjointed and absurd situation, life's ultimate questions would seem to bubble to the surface and the words of the existentialists would resonate with renewed urgency to a new generation. But today it is our indifference, our lack of urgency that is so disconcerting.
The danger, for Heidegger, is that our boredom has become so ubiquitous and all-encompassing that it is now hidden, and this is why he is so concerned. The fact that we are bored with our existence but are unaware of our own boredom is what he calls “the greatest distress” (1999b, 87). But this brings us back to the enduring relevance of existentialism. By bringing us face-to-face with the ultimate questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘How should I live?’ existentialism has the power to pull us out of our busy, listless drift, forcing us to confront the choices and actions that make us who we are. It reminds us that regardless of how distracted and consumed we may become in our day-to-day lives, we cannot escape the anguish at the heart of the human situation, and that only by facing this anguish can we identify what is truly at stake for us. To this end, existentialism always creates the possibility for a confrontation that allows me, in Kierkegaard's words, to find a truth ‘for which I can live and die.’
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