Something about being alive must always have made us feel uncomfortable. It's not just the new millennium or virtual reality or stock option angst that is responsible. From their early existence, humans must have felt the disquieting sensation that just thinking, feeling, making sounds, and moving around—all the existential prerogatives—didn't quite express or sum up the whole experience of being alive. Being alive was more than just waking up of a morning ready to outwit a mastodon. And this eerie sensation—that life was somehow more, well...multi-layered—evolved into an urge to express existence's dense weave and in the process corroborate life and ourselves. (I mean, either it was that, or else early man understood that those experiential categories—feeling, moving, etc.—actually did sum up all of life, and the result was such despair about the grinding finitude of existence that something more was needed to console or distract him. I, of course, suppose otherwise.)
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