Maybe it's you, Chuck, or maybe it's me with my relative success as a lawyer and formerly a professor, but I don't experience this yawning void, etc., of which you speak. I think what's called for is materialist analysis of the appeals of fundamentalism, not existentialism. jks
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No. We (you, me, Ali) share the creation of our own worlds of intellect, sensibility, arts. Maybe in your case social conscious rendered as law. These are the materialist answer to the void created by the cosmic critique of the Enlightenment---the hole that Romantics so desperately tried to fill.
The difference between us, is probably not just measures of success, which counts plenty, but also, that I haven't or can't forget this yawning absence. The reason is I am surrounded by it in the people I work with---their working class lives, or their poverty, their disabilities, disaffections, oppressions, and their inner struggles are made palpable to me.
Chuck Grimes