Why would the difficulty of finding meaning afflict men more than women?
I suppose because the fact that nearly the whole universe of jobs is open to women is a tremendous gain in possibility for them. For men, there’s been no corresponding gain. In fact, we live in this world that for reasons that are kind of hard to explain, [though] I think Hannah Arendt has gone some distance in explaining them, it seems that meaningful action is harder to take than it has been in previous historical times. I think this is the sense even of people who have no historical sense. It’s something that they feel. Are you saying that the role that men have historically been expected to play has been muddied by the fact that women are now able and often expected to play the same role? I don’t think this has anything to do with women. No? No. I think it’s something that men sense more acutely than women because men have been actors in the world, as a whole, for more generations than women have been. I think there’s got to be a reason that the slacker — the person who feels that
