Looking for a sunny start to your weekend? This isn't it. Nihilism and Existential Dread have cast their abysmal shadows across humanity for centuries. But is it all hopeless? What is meaning and how do we define it, find it, and understand it? At some point in our lives, we all experience an existential crisis which is, at it's root, an identity crisis and awful sense of hopelessness. But I think there's reason to hope. And I think the existential Russian novelists may be a bit more optimistic than we originally thought.

As mentioned in the episode:

• The go-to guy for French name pronunciation, Julien Miquel, and the pronunciation of "Simone de Beauvoir"
• "Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering." -Fyodor Dostoevsky
• "To live without hope is to cease to live." -Fyodor Dostoevsky
• "To love someone means to see them as God intended them." -Fyodor Dostoevsky