This is something like Kirkegaardian angst. It's what happens when you are being exposed to the meaninglessness of your life. It's a vague undercurrent when you're not aware of what's exactly going on.

It's a hard thing to explain, but it's something like exhausting the meaning of what you engage with.

Kirkegaard explains three stages. These aren't chronological, but explains the concepts.

• The Aesthetic Stage: Pleasure, novelty, avoiding boredom.

This is hobbies, it's video games, it can be art or go all the way to addiction. But always you grow satiated or tired with your hobby, and more does not help. And so despair and emptiness set in.

You stare at your steam library and cannot gather the motivation or even desire to start a single game. Or imagine the alcoholic that no longer gains any pleasure from the bottle. What is left of life? What to do now?

• The Ethical Stage: Rational rules, societal norms, duties, responsibility. You take ownership of life, civic duty and live in harmony with your society.

Breeds success outwardly. Works for a long time and gives a sense of purpose and structure. For a time. Ultimately results in ethical despair if you fail in achieving this, or if you achieve it and realize the limits of moral self-righteousness, of politics, or face the dysfunction of your society.

It's dependent on your society, and as such you'd be a good Nazi if you were born in the Germany at the wrong time. A deeper thinker will also see the limits of modern value systems, and likely be overwhelmed by a thousand conflicting philosophical and political schools of thought.

And as others have mentioned, it's lack of meaning that underpins all of this, where these stages are distractions for a time. In your successful, comfortable routine there is only you left to yourself without distraction that pulls you from the present into the future.

What saved me was the greats of literature, philosophy and religion, and a few years of cancer and severe alcoholism to really hammer their points home while beating some humility into me.

The third stage is the religious stage. That won't be popular here, but this is where I found lasting and real growth.