People have been saying the same thing for over a century. Take the following passage from Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, written in the 1920s:
> I belong to a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other
faiths. Our fathers still had the believing impulse, which they transferred from Christianity to other forms of illusion.
Some were champions of social equality, others were wholly enamoured of beauty, still others had faith in science
and its achievements, and there were some who became even more Christian, resorting to various Easts and Wests in
search of new religious forms to entertain their otherwise hollow consciousness of merely living.
> We lost all of this. We were born with none of these consolations. Each civilization follows the particular path of
a religion that represents it; turning to other religions, it loses the one it had, and ultimately loses them all.
> We lost the one, and all the others with it.
> And so we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live. A ship may seem to be an
object whose purpose is to sail, but no, its purpose is to reach a port. We found ourselves sailing without any idea of
what port we were supposed to reach. Thus we reproduced a painful version of the argonauts’ adventurous precept:*
living doesn’t matter, only sailing does.
> Without illusions, we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who can’t have illusions. Living off our
inner selves has diminished us, for the complete man is the one who doesn’t know himself. Without faith, we have
no hope, and without hope we have no real life. Having no idea of the future, we likewise have no idea of today,
because today, for the man of action, is nothing but a prologue to the future. The energy to fight was stillborn in us,
for we were born without the fighting spirit.
> I belong to a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths. Our fathers still had the believing impulse, which they transferred from Christianity to other forms of illusion. Some were champions of social equality, others were wholly enamoured of beauty, still others had faith in science and its achievements, and there were some who became even more Christian, resorting to various Easts and Wests in search of new religious forms to entertain their otherwise hollow consciousness of merely living.
> We lost all of this. We were born with none of these consolations. Each civilization follows the particular path of a religion that represents it; turning to other religions, it loses the one it had, and ultimately loses them all.
> We lost the one, and all the others with it.
> And so we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live. A ship may seem to be an object whose purpose is to sail, but no, its purpose is to reach a port. We found ourselves sailing without any idea of what port we were supposed to reach. Thus we reproduced a painful version of the argonauts’ adventurous precept:* living doesn’t matter, only sailing does.
> Without illusions, we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who can’t have illusions. Living off our inner selves has diminished us, for the complete man is the one who doesn’t know himself. Without faith, we have no hope, and without hope we have no real life. Having no idea of the future, we likewise have no idea of today, because today, for the man of action, is nothing but a prologue to the future. The energy to fight was stillborn in us, for we were born without the fighting spirit.