Minor everyday failures can trigger disproportionate existential discomfort

Evidence

Heidegger gives us a different way of understanding why, sometimes, it can be so disproportionately disheartening to have a nail bend under the hammer, and to feel everything turn against you. If you throw an apple core towards the bin and it misses, to borrow an example from the Philip Larkin poem ‘As Bad as a Mile’, it is not merely annoying because you have to get up and pick it off the floor. It can make everything feel awkward, questionable and uncomfortable. But it is in questions and discomfort that philosophy begins. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 239

Categorization

• XREF: The apple-core-missed-the-bin example and ‘questions and discomfort begin philosophy’ echoes the opening anecdote of an empty stapler and the reader’s interest in how breakdown moments open philosophical inquiry. — connects to: Small everyday failures can collapse into existential unease, and that unease births philosophy; Everyday attention lapses and memory failures have affective consequences of mindlessness. — Everyday attention lapses and memory failures; Nausea dramatizes the philosophy of being through daily experience rather than argument — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 83

Broader Connections

• Small everyday failures can collapse into existential unease, and that unease births philosophy #corroborates (0.95)
• Nausea dramatizes the philosophy of being through daily experience rather than argument #exemplifies (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 83