ABSTRACT
To track the configurations of unhappiness that are expressed at the level of everday life by people in our time, this chapter takes two complementary approaches. I utilize the particularities of various cases, repeatedly unraveling the operation of their underlying cycles of cause and effect, to throw into relief the universal problematic condition which permeates them – human self-alienation, or the state of living in estrangement from one’s essential human nature. At the same time, I take the opposite tack of clarifying the specific routes along which that universal condition casts its shadow as the ‘life problems’ of individuals.
