Let's hit the dictionary and tell the folks what they've won:
in⋅ane
[i-neyn] 
Show IPA | 1. | lacking sense, significance, or ideas; silly: inane questions. |
| 2. | empty; void. |
| 3. | something that is empty or void, esp. the void of infinite space. |
So all of the sudden, we make things need significance. It seems as though we need significance somewhere. This is where good people hit religion, often. That's not such a bad juxtaposition, that's not a bad alignment. There is nothing too too wrong with religion as an ideal, I think. Religion is fine by itself. The problem is that religion is not supposed to be by itself almost by its nature. How could you take a set of ethical laws and then abstain from using them?
This is inane. This whole life is inane.
Existentialism is a philosophical school (literally belief in existence). They believed in created meaning.
existentialism
A movement in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, with some forerunners in earlier centuries. Existentialism stresses that people are entirely free and therefore responsible for what they make of themselves. With this responsibility comes a profound anguish or dread. Søren Kierkegaard and Feodor Dostoevsky in the nineteenth century, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Camus in the twentieth century, were existentialist writers.
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Cite This Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences,[1][2] took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual[3][4] and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point for philosophical thought. Existential philosophy is the "explicit conceptual manifestation of an existential attitude"[5] that begins with a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.[6][7] Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophy, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.[8][9]
Sartre's phrase that I remember, and I don't even remember where I remember this from, but it's "We're damned to be free." Which is close to this dictionary.com definition.
This is a pretty cheap introduction to Existentialism, but here is a beautiful poem by Rainer Maria Rilke to take your mind off of it:
The First Elegy
If I cried out, who
in the hierarchies of angels
would hear me?
And if one of them should suddenly
take me to his heart,
I would perish in the power of his being.
For beauty if but the beginning of terror.
We can barely endure it
and are awed
when it declines to destroy us.
Every angel is terrifying in that way.
So I hold myself back,
and let my scream for help
be swallowed by sobbing.
Oh, to what, then, can we turn
in our need?
Not to an angel. Not to a person.
Animals, perceptive as they are,
notice that we are not really at home
iin this world of ours. Perhaps there is
a particular tree we see every day on the hillside,
or a street we have walked
or the warped loyalty of a habit
that does not abandon us.
...
Oh, and night, the night, when wind
hurls the universe at our faces.
For whom is night not there?
Longed for and softly disappointing,
it envelops each solitary heart.
Is night easier for lovers, who
can hide from their fate in each other?
Do you still not konw how little endures?
Fling the nothing you are grasping
out into the spaces we breathe.
Maybe the birds
will feel in their flight
how the air has expanded.
Can you see? Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.
As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?
Were you not always distracted by yearning,
as though some lover were about to appear?
Let yourself feel it, that yearning.
It connects you with those
who have sung it through the ages,
sung especially of love unrequited.
Shouldn't this oldest of sufferings
finally bear fruit for us?
Is it not time
to free ourselves from the beloved
even as we, trembling, endure the loving?
As the arrow endures the bowstring's tension
so that, released, it travels farther.
For there is nowhere to remain.
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