In our Cartesian dichotomy of mind and body, we are understandably detached from our feelings. We are raised to control our “uncivilized” emotions, to suppress our unconscious desires as bestial and barbaric, and to puritanically compartmentalize our now taboo sexual lives. Still more discomforting is our tendency to combat such problems with maladaptive strategies: buttressing ourselves with authoritarian institutions that cater to our desires to be led by the absolutes of “authority and miracle” but only perpetuate our problem of dependence averting inner confrontation with campaigns of busyness, self-pity, or intellectualization and suspending our attentions from illuminating revelations to concerns of immediacy. And while the latter-day influence of science and reason is both momentous and pervasive, in expelling such “absurdities” as witchcraft, we also expelled our connection with imagination, wonder, and mystery, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The products of an industrial age, we lead vacuous lives of routine, while competitive rewards are few and far between and emptiness springs from powerlessness in a world at scale. In the twilight of religion, we inherit our values from long anonymous men while the vitality of their traditions is lost to us. May points out that we are in a transition age. But often individual difficulties are symptomatic of epidemics at large. An individual may be bereft of adequate stability, the progeny of worried parents, or the victim of cruel life events. But with psychological acumen, May attempts to shed light on these sources.

At the core is a loneliness and a floating, ubiquitous anxiety whose sources appear nebulous. These “hollow men” who are strangers to themselves, feel largely insignificant, harbor resentment towards the monotonous treadmills of life, fear abandon and isolation, suffer from directionless and despondency, and have little to look forward to.

May begins by identifying the common threads of modern men who possess attitudes of passivity, apathy, and boredom.

Man's Search for Himself by Rollo May