It is now fashionable to hear of one existential crisis or another. Seemingly out of nowhere the word existential is now regularly heard from the mouths of news entertainers, pundits, and politicians. One asserted that the planet has an expiration date of 2030, and with no edible food, no potable water, and no breathable air, soon after will follow the end of the existence of that most endangered subspecies of living things: Homo sapiens sapiens. We will no longer exist. Much like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, only cockroaches will remain. My ears perk up, not because of the doomsday predictions, but because of the surprising resurrection of that word, which I thought had permanently disappeared with the post-World War II era I grew up in, along with avid readers of Walter Kaufmann’s mélange of essays and excerpts from philosophy and literature Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre and quirky plays such as Waiting for Godot or J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which captured the existential crisis of growing up better even than the ego psychobiographies of the ego psychologist Erik Erikson.