“Yes, stuff is hitting the fan right now, and the world is terrible, but if you look at it through 13 billion years, you see: O.K., this is a tiny blip,” she said. “There have been other times of chaos and destruction.”

‘I deleted all the news off my phone’

The tipping point for my own bleak terror began when — I know it’s dumb but — Bitcoin fell. That was the last great fun we all had, and it turned out to be a bust almost beyond measure. The days of goofiness were done, I felt. The news alerts were getting to be a lot. I had, as they say, feelings of powerlessness.

And I had no idea, really, how to find a therapist. The last one I saw I had discovered by searching on Yelp: “best therapist + gay + five stars.” So who am I to judge efforts at smarter matching than that? When I started to notice the raft of therapy start-ups, it struck me as a reasonably healthy trend.

As Allie Stark, a wellness coach in the region, said: “There’s a beauty in existentialism. It’s also very paralyzing.”

Tech workers are starting to be more open about mental health in their own industry. Justin Kan, the chief executive of Atrium, a law-tech company, has been vocal over the last year about his personal struggles and the pleasures of therapy. He found he felt better when he stopped getting so much new information.

“Something that helped me was I deleted all the news off my phone,” Mr. Kan said. “I don’t have the stock market app or Twitter anymore. And that did improve my mood.”

This being San Francisco, there is a longstanding local group for existentialism. The Existential-Humanistic Institute, founded in 1997, is a collective of therapists and philosophers who have been puttering along in mostly quiet private practice for years, working with clients who are struggling not only with relatively ordinary issues but with their very purpose on earth. Interest in their approach appeared to spike along with the rise of Donald J. Trump.