We are haunted by Martin Heidegger. Even if you’ve never read a word of his dense philosophical texts, his ghost walks beside you, shaping how you imagine your place in the world. His spectral influence permeates our modern consciousness, guiding how we understand our relationship to reality, technology, and meaning itself. Heidegger’s philosophical project emerged as a desperate attempt to resolve the existential crisis that had been brewing in Western thought explicitly since the Romantic era—a crisis most eloquently articulated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who recognised the growing chasm between subjective experience and the objective world.