the new yorker

in the beginning, the universe began to exist for the sake of existing but then things got boring so it proceeded to produce beings supremely incompatible and ill-suited for inhabiting it - beings who desperately crave meaning, who, driven by an uncanny desire for accomplishment and significance, keep trying to understand / furnish / improve / subjugate / destroy it, who continually question their purpose and place in it, who despite their best efforts to make a home of it and carve out a comfortable existential niche for themselves, are more often than not plagued by an unshakeable and profound sense of alienation. the end