Philosophy (if it’s psychologically ‘resonant’) tends to be better at filling that gap. It rarely concerns itself with empirical research, preferring instead what I see as a vertical approach: an opportunity for an individual journey of deep understanding (although this may then extend into a scheme for transforming society at large).

Hope, writes the moral philosopher Kieran Setiya,18 “keeps the flicker of potential agency alive.”

What if life is like a story and you and I are in the theater of our own minds, looking out the cameras of our eyes, and the story unfolding feels either meaningful or meaningless based on what we decide to make happen in it? And what if, if we trust fate to write our stories, it feels meaningless, but if we accept our own agency and structure our