I believe the existential crisis so many are experiencing has been caused by the pandemic, but perhaps not in the way one might expect when approaching the prob

I believe the existential crisis so many are experiencing has been caused by the pandemic, but perhaps not in the way one might expect when approaching the problem rationally. Yes, we are more isolated, and perhaps concerned for the safety of ourselves or our loved ones, or even for some abstract concept of community or society, but depression is characterized by anhedonia: the inability to feel pleasure. Are we all sitting around, so preoccupied by the crises of the day that we have become numb to pleasure? That doesn't describe depression, although perhaps anxiety. I would describe depression as the loss of most strong feelings, not only pleasurable ones, and that is why death becomes so alluring: fear of death has been numbed as well. No, an existential crisis is rooted in the meaning, or lack thereof, we are able to ascribe to our lives. And the pandemic has in many ways restricted our connections to those sources of meaning. Whatever stories we were telling ourselves about our life's purpose, the plotlines we imagined for ourselves, have been disrupted. The student has had their university all but taken from them. They cannot experience it in quite the same tangible way as they once did. The same is true for the worker who derives his meaning from labor. For many, that connection has been damaged, if not severed. It is the loss of meaning that accompanies the dawning realization that our sources of meaning were nothing more than illusions to begin with. We realize now that life goes on without these guiding influences; that the rituals we perform do not in fact earn us the favor of the Gods. We come upon the idea that perhaps life really is meaningless and that we were in fact only existing previously because of a foolish, irrational faith. It has been thrust upon us, entirely by happenstance (and not because of any rational deduction or brilliance on our parts), that we are fools, rubbing our prayer beads and voluntarily deluding ourselves into thinking that some bit of our finite, meaningless lives could somehow persist alongside the infinite. "For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite."