Patients who fall into [existential frustration] usually complain of a sense of futility and meaninglessness or of emptiness and a void. In Logotherapy, this condition is termed "existential vacuum." As to its etiology it seems to me to be due to the following facts. First, in contrast to an animal no drives and instincts tell man what he must do. Second, in contrast to former times, no conventions, traditions and values tell him what he should do. Soon, one may predict, he will not even know what he basically wishes to do. All the more he simply will wish to do what other people do, or he just will do what other people want him to do. That is to say, he will fall prey to conformism or totalitarianism. [ . . . ] This existential vacuum constitutes the mass neurosis of our age.
Viktor Frankl, The Feeling of Meaninglessness
