Contingency arises when routine and family cease to impose interpretive structure

Evidence

Lacking the routine or family which lend structure to most people’s lives, he spends his days in the library, or wandering about, or drinking beer in a café that plays ragtime music on the record player. He watches the townspeople doing their bourgeois, ordinary-folk things. Life resembles a lump of featureless dough, characterised only by contingency, not by necessity. This realisation comes in regular episodes, like waves, and each time it fills Roquentin with a nausea that seems to attach to objects themselves — to the world out there. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 335

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely defines contingency via Nausea’s central image — life as featureless dough lacking necessity — which is essential to any existentialist orientation.
• XREF: connects to: Contingency means structured forces compete with undetermined outcomes decided by practice; Abandoning responsibilities causes emotional conflict within families. — Hamlin Garland Munseys, A Daughter of the Middle Border, 295; Traditional social structures and orders can disintegrate over time (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Contingency means structured forces compete with undetermined outcomes decided by practice #corroborates (0.82)
• Abandoning responsibilities causes emotional conflict within families. #complicates (0.72) — Hamlin Garland Munseys, A Daughter of the Middle Border, 295
• Traditional social structures and orders can disintegrate over time #corroborates (0.70)