The gulf between minds, if other minds exist, prevents me from knowing just to what extent I can relate to other people. One experience I suspect most or all people share, though, is that of spontaneously being overcome by deep existential concerns at random times. Before I became a rationalist and experienced variations of this on a constant basis but without assumptions, I had moments or hours where a sadness or longing I could not put into words at the time would come over me, even as a child. All of the sudden, my thoughts and feelings were directed towards a desire to understand, savor, and express something I was not fully aware of about myself, something far deeper and more central to reality and human life than many typical conversations, behaviors, and thoughts of non-rationalists would hint at.
No one needs to have the constructive horrors of an existential crisis to at least periodically have intense existential pangs of sadness, desire, and excitement that force even those who care nothing for deep epistemology or abstract truths to at least momentarily face the explicitly philosophical side of reality. Flashes of concern for what one believes, how reality truly is, and how one will or should react can arise to haunt people for a short time. In some cases, people might be haunted for more than a short time, as hints of these existential pangs could follow them into regular life (as if there is such a thing as life without philosophical beliefs or outside the scope of philosophical truths!). How a person feels about this is subjective, but the ramifications and the things such pangs brush up against are far too deep compared to the trivialities of common priorities to be likely to prompt consistent rationalistic thought.
In fact, some non-rationalists who spend their time in the shallow pursuit of hedonism might be trying to actively flee from the painful enlightenment that can come from rationally pursuing truth at the expense of all else. Those who abstain from directly contemplating knowable truths or who have not yet discovered that the only true starting point is logical axioms and rationalism might be trying to put off whatever overwhelmed feelings an existential experience might have triggered, if not outright dread. Particularly existential feelings can inspire or terrify people--or even both at once. They are too personal and too tied to objectively foundational or otherwise deep truths and issues for most people to just completely ignore them.
Whether someone is terrified or intoxicated by these experiences or both, it is plain that these feelings are not shallow, and for some people, they might be the only times they directly think about more than emotionalistic motivations, personal preferences, and mere practicality. These experiences can be so powerful that even if one had never pondered major philosophical issues like the nature of truth, knowledge, of values or intentionally discovered any specific, demonstrable philosophical truths about them, one could be motivated by that experience to dwell on these things intently. Rationalists and non-rationalists alike can be penetrated to their cores by them whether or not they tell anyone else about their experiences.
A rationalist might or might not have these experiences, and if they do, there is no automatic frequency that they involuntarily surface. Either way, only a rationalist can truly understand the philosophical facts and issues brought up by these existential pangs in a consistent and intentional manner. No one else has anything but random assumptions with perhaps the occasional burst of rational clarity. Moreover, rationalists can live in prolonged, potentially constant states of existential pangs because of their awareness of core reality (logical axioms and their own existence) and the way that all epistemological and metaphysical matters of free will, morality, meaning, and psychology must be consistent with that core. Loving and savoring truth could bring difficulty even for rationalists sometimes, but they can appreciate overt existential experiences, seek them out, and, most importantly, understand what can be known of reality with or without existential pangs of emotion in their mind.
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