[xoxoxoBruce]

Stumbled on this today...

Erich Fromm could, in the mid-twentieth century, note that what separates humans from other creatures is not the upright posture, or tool wielding, or the ability to laugh, but rather precisely the fact that humankind is the only form of life blessed and cursed with the ability to query its own purpose. “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape,” Fromm wrote in Man for Himself, confronting what he regarded as the “paralysis of our productive powers” that issues from the experience of boredom as an unavoidable part of that problem. Boredom was, Fromm thought, an experience of everyday damnation. “I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures,” he wrote. “If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored.”

Kind of relevant.