Finding Healing in Existentialist Thought
How philosophy can foster freedom, authenticity, and community
Part 1: Challenge
I want you to take a moment to think about what it felt like the first time you left home as an adult. Let’s say this was when your parents dropped you off at university for the first time. Think about the smell of the room, where the furniture was placed, the sounds you heard, how it felt to be you at that point in time. Take a moment to soak all of that in.
When your parents leave and you’re sitting on your bed, suddenly you feel pangs of an unfamiliar sense of dread and confusion. What are you supposed to do now? Do you stay in your room, leave? If you stay, how long should you stay? If you leave, where do you go? And why? You weren’t prepared for this. Wasn’t this point of your life sold to you as carefree, easy, fun? What happened?
If I can distill Existentialism into one feeling, thought, image, or metaphor, it’s this moment that captures it best. Continue to try to get in the headspace of those chaotic times. Dread. Anxiety. Angst. Confusion. Nostalgia. Directionlessness. Loneliness. Alienation. Grief. Spiritual homelessness. Loss of innocence. This is where Existentialism begins.
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” Soren Kierkegaard wrote; and all we understand when we’re first thrust into adulthood as we look backwards is a world that we can now see is an illusion — a world of happy ever afters where we go from point A to point B to point C in a straight line — university, a high flying career, doctor, lawyer, business person, marriage, the white picket fence. You have now been cast out of your Garden of Eden and you know nothing will look the same ever again.
On the macrocosmic level, there was a point in history when the developed world shared our childish naïveté in progress — the Scientific Revolution, the renaissance, that optimistic term The Enlightenment. We were pushing the limits of human potential: Sir Isaac Newton unlocked natural laws of the universe with his Principia Mathematica, Galileo’s telescope, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Michelangelo’s marble statue of David epitomized human excellence. Explorers like Christopher Columbus hit upon new lands and discovered new worlds. Reason was divine, the darkness of the medieval ages were over and finally we could live in harmony with the cosmos.
Or so we thought. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, we got arrogant, ignorant of the great shadow human accomplishment cast upon itself. Friedrich Nietzsche likened himself to a madman wailing in the street that God was dead while the townspeople laughed him off. The point wasn’t that religion itself had collapsed or that atheism was true, but that the vital force behind religion had withered and decayed. Technological advancement coincided with spiritual decline. Calculating means-end thinking overshadowed awe and enchantment; the optimism of the Enlightenment dimmed. And so a crisis of meaning began.
The core idea of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence. There is no human nature or human design that dictates how our lives will go. We are not rational animals guided by reason, like Aristotle thought, or destined to follow God’s plan. We are not like tables or chairs or toys manufactured with some blueprint in mind. This would mean there is some fictitious human essence that precedes our particular existence — no, we are thrown into existence at birth first and only after that do we ourselves determine our essence through actions and choices. Jean-Paul Sartre frames this freedom as viscerally nauseating — return to that image of being alone in your dorm room overwhelmed by all the choices you have before you. We crave an authority to tell us what to do that no longer exists. We are condemned to be free — condemned because we paradoxically feel the pressure to do the right thing and also can’t grasp what rightness even means. Is it about getting good grades? Dropping out of school? Joining the military? Getting married? Staying single? As Simone de Beauvoir observed, it’s not even just our own selves we’re grappling with but society’s expectations of who we should be. Life feels like it’s moving too fast and we get vertigo just thinking about it, navigating through an unending tangle of moral dilemmas.
We begin to look at our lives with ironic detachment, like we’re the main character in some absurd tragicomedy. Anything we accomplish is fleeting and it’s as if we’re being punished by rolling up a large boulder up a mountain, only to watch it fall down again in an infinite loop like the Myth of Sisyphus. Our existence is flawed and finite — we are at the mercy of petty feelings, unhealthy attachments, irrational behaviours and the possibility of death looms over us at all times. Or in other words… Life’s a bitch and then you die.
Flaws, mortality, dizzying freedom, responsibility? No thank you — I don’t want to think about that. Naturally, we suppress the pain and look for escape: partying, shopping, drugs, alcohol, infatuation, porn, sex, food, ambition, success. Being an individual is lonely, so we compulsively check Twitter, x, Instagram, and TikTok, scrolling like we’re old ladies at a Vegas slot machine, searching for the cheap comfort of the herd. Really, social media itself is mostly just the projected existential dread you yourself are trying to get away from.
To fit in with the crowd, we take a break from being ourselves, but the break keeps getting longer and longer until we forget who we were to begin with. To maintain a semblance of security, we say and value and do what the herd says we should say value and do, and the algorithms reflect back what we say and value and do until the distinction between self-herd and algorithm all blur together and we’re not sure were we end and they begin.
We start making excuses, pretending that we aren’t actually free to choose who we become. No it’s not my fault I’m messed up, it’s my parents fault! Or I know I keep on pushing people away and I’m a jackass but that’s just my personality! Or I know I’m in this terrible job or marriage or circumstance but there’s nothing I can do about it! So we dig ourselves into an ever-growing hole of bad decisions and excuses.
How do we get out?
Part 2: Catharsis
Let’s return to that metaphorical or literal dorm room where Existentialism begins. You feel terror, you want to be anywhere else but here. But instead of rolling with a terror like we did earlier, let’s take a step back this time and sit with it for a moment. Painful emotions aren’t neuroses that make us different or bad or lesser than for the Existentialist but clues into the human condition that should be revered, not rejected. Being in their presence means we’re doing something right — so let’s consider that possibility: what could be going right for you in this state of terror? Knowledge — you feel overwhelmed because you are being introduced to an important truth you were ignorant of beforehand.
In Plato’s Allegory of the cave, prisoners are chained facing a wall their entire lives. There’s a fire in the background and a puppeteer making images with their hands so as to cast shadows on the walls — shadows of trees, mountains, people the prisoners take to be real. How would they know any differently?
One day, one of the prisoner’s chains are broken. She turns around and immediately sees everything she was told was the truth was a lie — the fire, the puppeteer, the images. She sees a rolling abyss leading outside. The Unknown. Determined, she slowly walks out of the cave, but her eyes are burning — what is this new light coming in? Finally, the prisoner makes it outside of the cave and sees the world as it actually is for the first time: actual trees, actual mountains, actual people. With one last burst of courage the prisoner looks up at the sun, pushing through the pain until her eyes adjust. She stares down and sees her reflection in the river at her feet.
The reward of existential reflection is authenticity. An authentic life is one that stops making excuses for what’s wrong and sees the present as an opportunity to exercise freedom. Existence precedes essence: that’s a lot of pressure, but we’re missing the point if that’s the only way we look at it. Existence precedes essence means there is no essential flaw in our character, that our past mistakes don’t have to replay on an infinite loop like a broken record — it sure will if we pretend we aren’t free, but it doesn’t have to.
We’re raised on this idea that there are clear delineations between heroes and villains, cowardice and courage, happiness and misery, but we forget that these identities are fluid and can change in an instant. Courage requires taking something that you’ve been cowardly a thousand times before and saying — this time it’s going to be different. Heroism requires being tempted by something that had corrupted you a thousand times before and saying — this time it’s going to be different. It can always be different. We’re not at the mercy of an imprisoning essence — the existential dread we feel for the first time is the key first step to understanding this.
For better or for worse, what authenticity means for us will be different from what authenticity means for anyone else and there will be no clear way to determine whether we are doing the “right” thing besides our own subjective intuition. It’s easy to get carried away in the wave of trends being thrown at us at every moment — read this book, listen to this person, care about this current event, think this about the economy, think this about success or relationships or the ideal life or about your future. Take a step away from all that noise — how do you feel? That’s what matters — listen to that voice and you may be surprised with what it tells you. Existence is a never-ending crescendo of dilemmas — should I do this or should I do thats — but deep down, you always know which decision to make: it might not be “rational” or normal, there might be some tough consequences, you may have no idea what’s going to happen next; but if a Leap of Faith was safe or easy, it wouldn’t be a leap and it wouldn’t be faith.
Sitting with terror breeds empathy. We don’t numb our feelings with distraction and shut off from the world but feel with direct precision the enormous difficulty it is just to get through the day in one piece. You become naturally drawn to people who share your empathy and reflect it back at you and stay away from those who abuse your empathy like a drug and hoard it for themselves — who has time for that negativity? Slowly a community takes shape that’s close-knit, but not homogeneous: you feel secure enough to be vulnerably, irreducibly you without being judged or mistreated.
For the last time, I’ll ask you to remember was it was like facing adulthood for the first time. Think about how much growth came out of that pain. Freedom, authenticity, community. You courageously walked out of the shadows of your cave, saw the light, and now you see the reflection of who you really are.
