No offense to anyone who is all "yay, life!" but as people learn more, as the blinders fall off, as we are encouraged to question tradition and establishment, what we see at the end of the line doesn't look great. Miserable health if you make it to retirement, disposable marriages, your social institutions crumble. Forget the church and the Elks lodge, we can't even keep bowling leagues and book clubs together. Life starts seeming absurd and has for a long time. Think of that bit in Con Air, where the too-aware serial killer says ""What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years, at the end of which they tell you to piss off? Ending up in some retirement village, hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time."

Everything has been first chisled, then jackhammered, and finally bulldozed away. No rocks to fall on us and hide us from the grim end of Terror Management Theory, no sense in planting a tree which we might never sit in the shade of if it will be scorched to a stick in some kind of global warming furnace. We ought not to be surprised, then, if so many elect to reach for non-thought, for entertainment and distraction, because staring into the abyss can get old. We used to have protections, elaborate and impermeable to questioning, which protected us from seeing how unappealing the inevitable decline and end can really be.