Urban Hannon
I guess you could say I was ahead of the curve as a kid, in literature and long division and, as it turned out, in existential crises. Mine came in middle school. I became terrified that life was meaningless. I became terrified that God wasn’t real. Most of all, I became terrified that I would grow up to become (a phrase my CFO father has never forgotten hearing from the lips of his eleven-year-old son) a “corporate slave.”
David Fincher’s Fight Club, released in 1999, both captured my despair and solved it. The unnamed narrator, played by Edward Norton, is plagued by a crippling boredom at the end of history. Filling his apartment with more and more pathetic Ikea furniture, he uses consumerism as a coping mechanism for the tedium of his dreaded cubicle. His only remedy for insomnia is auditing crisis support groups and chasing the emotional release he gets from pretending to be at death’s door, until he meets Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden, who shows him a new way to chase dopamine—but we’re not allowed to talk about that. Durden describes the malaise like this:
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