"We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, running over the same old ground.  What have we found?  The same old fears.  Wish you were here."
     So goes the chorus to Pink Floyd's song "Wish You Were Here."  Does this sound depressing?  Perhaps it is.  If we stretch our purview to the limits of this universe, however, we see that it is, in truth, what life is.  As Martin Heidegger puts it, we're just "thrown" into this world, without a choice as to where we are born and what we are born with and, as Paul Sartre adds, for this reason, we are lonely, very lonely beings in a vast and uncaring cosmos.
     If this universe is all that is, Pink Floyd, Heidegger, and Sartre are all indeed more than correct:  though every one of us is born uniquely, every one of us will live with the same hopes and fears, running over the same old ground, the material of planet Earth. And we wish all of us were here; social animals that we are, we want to be with each other.  We like community.  We are in this together.
     True enough.  But then why, if we are no more than errant cosmic dust, do we want so desperately to make existence meaningful?
    Are we really all that is "here"?