This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

When Edwin Arlington Robinson published his first book of poems in the late 19th century,

a critic decried the poems for their bleak outlook,

for painting the world as a prison house.

The poet responded, the world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten,

where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.

In time, Edwin Arlington Robinson would go on to win the first Pulitzer Prize in poetry. In one poem

that would later be celebrated in song by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, he tells the

story of a man named Richard Corey who had every advantage in life.

The poem told from the perspective of people who admired and envied Richard Corey

goes like this. And he was rich, yes, richer than a king, and

admirably schooled in every grace. In fine, we thought that he was everything

to make us wish that we were in his place.

But things were not as they seemed.

Beneath Richard Corey's success lay a hollow emptiness.

The poem ends this way.

So on we worked and waited for the light and went without the meat and cursed the bread. Richard Corey, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head.

Today on the show we explore the puzzling phenomenon of people who have all the

ingredients to live a happy life yet find themselves drifting through it

empty invisible directionless.

Philosophers may call this an existential dilemma.

People of a certain age might describe it as a midlife crisis.

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