Kieran Setiya

Loneliness triggers a physiological stress response, the inflammation
associated with “fight-or-flight,” a cause of decline in physical well-being.

that loving someone for himself is loving him for his character. That just isn’t so. You are not your character, an assemblage of quirks and traits, virtues and vices, all of which you can outlive. You are a particular, concrete human being, not defined by the attributes you have. Being loved for yourself, therefore, is not being loved for qualities that make you you, and being valued as a friend is not the same as being admired.

The very essence of life is human contact, and the affirmation of existence that comes with it. Losing that contact, you lose your sense of identity. You become nothing. . . . I became invisible even to myself.” We need the affirmation found in love.

In Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s books, Earth is part of a galactic computer designed, ironically,
to find the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Notoriously, the answer is “42.”)

what truths could redeem the suffering we don’t deserve or repair the rife injustice of the world? How can we accept the universe?

pleasure now comes so rarely and, when it does, is indistinguishable from pain.

What we need are truths about the world, and the place of humanity in it

that tell us how to feel about the whole residual cosmos—ideally, ones that help us come to terms with suffering and injustice

The pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus found reality so preposterous that he could not help but laugh; his predecessor Heraclitus wept.

I’m a philosopher who writes about the question of how to live, and the trials of life had never seemed more urgent.