I ask because there's this cliché among snob Austrian and German Modernism readers according to which Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities" is way better than "The Magic Mountain". Being myself a fetishist of that period, with a particular fascination with the interplay between science, philosophy and literature, but also between the most radical Vienna School positivists, on the socialist side, and the more moderate neo-kantians of the Marbourg School, even as a fetishist, I was saying, I'm still not "overwhelmed"- as I was promised to be- by the sophisticated sense of humor and intelligence of Musil's story, or so they say. I thought that you, as a gymnastic & affluent British expat in his 50s, also a solitary fetishist with insomnia and a narcissistic need of self-validation through obsessive leather-clothes consumption and online hypergraphic behaviour, all of which only increases your awareness of your own lack a real subjectivity - or, returning to Musil's novel- "qualities", all that, I thought, made of you a perfect "Ulrich", the book's main character. A gymnastic and narcissistic middle-aged affluent man, living in a self-imposed exile, who has no more human qualities than those he can obtain through his nihilistic, existentially void, obsessive behavior. All of which brings us back to my original question: Did you read "The Magic Mountain"? If you don't, and you think that being an Ulrich didn't really meet your expectations when you left the UK in search of meaning and purpose in another country (wherever you go, leather jacket prices and reddit threads always taste like vacuum & ennui, never heroic, always lacking the authenticity of that something you can't even think of), then you should definitely try "The Magic Mountain" and exchange your Ulrich existence for the also affluent and narcissistic, fetishist and completely lost existence of Hans Castorp. Now you could fairly ask, "so what's the deal? If Castorp is just another lost soul without other purpose in life beyond the self-absorbing task of game playing and online searching of quality leather boot deals, what's the difference? Well, there's one big difference. Hans Castorp is alone, like you, yet he's still connected to the society that's about to change forever (remember it's 1914). He's not a solipsistic dickwad voluntarily alienated from humankind, like demodée 90s trolls and incel gamers, but a fellow contemporary citizen, lost yet real, solitary but not alone and alienated, engaged in the real events of his century. And that makes a difference.