TDoD is one of the, if not the most, impactful book I have ever read in my life. With its exact, blunt, objective style and its lack of shame in discussing the deepest and most intimate aspects of man. This book will always be on my desk and a point of reference for everything I will do in my life and every difficult moment of depression and anxiety. This is not the secret sauce for happiness, this does not exist, but rather a map of the human psyche with the most human admission that there is no way out, or better that there is, but that outside is no place for sanity.

This is a little spoiler, but below the paragraph that touched me the most.

“Finally, then, we can see how truly inseparable are the domains of psychiatry and religion, as they both deal with human nature and the ultimate meaning of life. To leave behind stupidity is to become aware of life as a problem of heroics, which inevitably becomes a reflection about what life ought to be in its ideal dimensions. From this point of view we can see that the perversione of “private religions” are not “false” in comparison to “true religions”. They are simply less expansive, less humanly noble and responsible. All living organisms are condemned to perversity, to the narrowness of being mere fragments of a larger totality that overwhelms then, which they cannot understand or truly cope with - yet must still live and struggle in. We still must ask, then, in the spirit of the wise old Epictetus, what kind of perversity is fitting for man”.

Man will never be able to overcome the fear of death, even if he achieved immortality it would still be a "this-worldly" immortality. No, we are fated to live, as it were, inside of some Kafka novel playing characters who are themselves part of an evolutionary process which they can't possibly understand in any really meaningful way, outside of a scientific explanation, and because of this hopelessness they, by necessity, must seek illusions in premade categories of denials. Society has them prepackaged for us, even before we are born, in things such as "work", "family", and "love" but these things are only illusions meant to perpetuate the idea that what man does matters. The final line from Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death sums up our situation nicely I think, "and darkness and decay......held illimitable dominion over all."