Elliot Vaughan hosted Existential Hotline open 24/7 during the festival, which deployed musings of mid-century French Existentialists to the caller’s insecurities and life decisions.

Jean-Paul Sartre gave Existentialism the tagline “existence precedes essence”. Who-you-are and what-your-purpose-is arise out of how-you-be. Elliots thoughts on these types of base philosophies are totally inconsistent, but he likes that 80 years ago some French intellectuals’ books started filling with mirrors & windows and bemused dissociation.

Simultaneously, the telephone—the perfect device of existential estrangement—was becoming commonplace.

Elliot never read Nausea, not linearly. However, he makes a lot of decisions by flicking to random points on random pages and doing whatever it suggests. It’s tea leaves as both a method and antidote to existentialism.