The Sensitive Young Man Question

And the Answer of the Occidental Buddha

Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton (1856)

Originally published by Michael Shindler on his Substack: Et In Arcadia We Go

What is a sensitive young man to do? This is the scalding hot question on every lip, at the start of every other think piece and the basis of at least a half dozen new political movements.

But that this question has suddenly come to predominate our discourse makes sense: if popular history among self-described sensitive young men is to be believed, just yesterday, as it were, in the not-so-distant past it was easier for their like to get by in life (without taking up work their temperament cannot abide). We hear, for instance, that the young Hegel lived for a period as a Hofmeister (house tutor), first to an aristocratic family where he labored on a book-length essay outlining a sort of Kantian Jesus,¹ and later to the family of a wine merchant where, perhaps in the spirit of that change, he swapped his temperate idol for a more Romantic Christianity defined by the …