With the collapse of metaphysical and theological foundations and sanctions for traditional morality only a pervasive sense of purposelessness and meaninglessness would remain.
Apologists for the Beats, among them Paul Goodman, found the joylessness and purposelessness of modern society sufficient justification for both withdrawal and protest.
There is the squaddie, Chris Joe Dempsiee), for example, freshly back from Afghanistan, who in his short-lived friendship with Stephen exposed the scar – and blood-lust – that war has left on him: "Combat, there ain't nothing like it," he said, revealing the sense of purposelessness that a returning vet might feel back home.
The apparent purposelessness of the balloon was vexing.
There is a yawning purposelessness to the play, stretching out as far as the eye can see; what the eye can't see is where the action really is.
Such vehicles, Crawford says, leave us nothing to do, making driving a chore and ultimately yielding a kind of purposelessness.
As directed by David Leveaux, they talk in a blurred rush of words, as if velocity of speech might disguise their feelings of purposelessness.
"The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s," he writes.
The Romantic vision, on the other hand, celebrates the purposelessness of play along with the innate gifts of the child.
He also takes a stab at the verbal embellishment, just this side of laughable, that characterized the film: "New York City is a jazz bebop conversationalist of a metropolis.... Let arbitrary be our co-pilot and purposelessness our destination".
Men and women are both effectively indicted, though women generally with a fonder touch; Wagman's women are mostly aware of their purposelessness, while her men are full of egomaniacal purpose but blithely unaware that their egomania will end in femicide.
