“Perhaps there are two kinds of people: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern, from mismatching socks to nuclear holocaust, negligible.”

—John Updike, Self-Consciousness

(By the way: I am closer to the first kind of person, although I started off as the second. I don’t think this kind of temperament is permanent.)