# Existentialism Explained
Paris, 1945.
Sartre stands in front of a packed lecture hall, delivering "Existentialism is a Humanism." The war's barely over. People are still pulling bodies from the rubble. And here's this guy in thick glasses saying we're *condemned* to be free. That there's no cosmic instruction manual. No divine safety net. Just us... and our choices.
The audience loses it. Half of them, anyway.
The Communists say he's wrecking collective action. The Catholics say he's championing moral chaos. And Sartre? He defends himself by claiming something nobody sees coming: this is the most *hopeful* philosophy you'll ever hear.
Because if there's no essence... no fixed human nature... then you can't say "people are naturally selfish" or "women are naturally passive" or "this is just how things are."
Everything's negotiable.
Including you.
That's the existentialist trick right there. The philosophy everyone thinks drowns in despair? It's actually swimming in possibility.
But I'm jumping ahead.
Let's go back to where this really starts.
Copenhagen, 1843. A guy named Søren Kierkegaard is writing by candlelight, scratching out page after page of what becomes *Either/Or*. He's just broken off his engagement to Regine Olsen — the woman he loves — because he thinks marriage would turn him into a *role* instead of a *person*.
This isn't abstract philosophy for him. It's torching a life he wants because he wants something else more: to be an individual.
He's stuck on a question that won't let him sleep: what does it mean to be *you*? Not a member of a church. Not a citizen. Not a role you perform. But the specific person who has to wake up tomorrow and decide what to do with the day you've been given.
In 1843, this borders on heresy. You're supposed to be a good Christian, a good Dane, a good husband.
Kierkegaard says no. Those are categories.
You are *existence*.
He introduces this thing he calls the leap of faith. Not about religion specifically, though that's how he used it. It's about the moment when logic runs out... and you still have to choose. You stand at the edge of what you can prove, what you can calculate, and you feel this vertigo he calls "the dizziness of freedom."
Then you jump anyway.
Not because you're certain. Because you're *alive*.
And here's what's strange: Kierkegaard wasn't trying to start a movement. He wrote under pseudonyms. He died basically unknown. But his ideas were sitting there like seeds in frozen ground.
Jump forward.
Friedrich Nietzsche is writing *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* between 1883 and 1885, walking alone in the Swiss Alps, and he drops what might be philosophy's most famous grenade:
God is dead.
Not as in atheism won. As in *we* killed him. We stopped living like cosmic meaning was guaranteed, and now we're standing in the rubble trying to figure out what comes next.
Nietzsche's answer? The Übermensch. The Overman. The person who *creates* their own values instead of inheriting them.
He's got this thought experiment called eternal recurrence: live as if you'd have to repeat your exact life — every choice, every moment — forever. Would you change anything? That's his test for authenticity. Are you living a life you'd choose again?
Here's the thing nobody tells you: Nietzsche wrote this while his mind was already starting to fracture. He'd collapse completely in 1889. So he's racing against his own dissolution, trying to figure out how to live without guarantees.
It's not abstract.
It's urgent.
People said it was too individualistic. Maybe. But it planted this idea that meaning isn't *discovered*... it's *made*.
Which sounds empowering until you realize: that means you can't blame anyone else when you make it badly.
So here's the turn.
All of this — Kierkegaard's leap, Nietzsche's self-creation — it's still mostly academic until the 20th century hits like a freight train. Two world wars. The Holocaust. Hiroshima.
Suddenly the idea that life has no inherent meaning isn't a philosophical puzzle.
It's Tuesday.
Enter Jean-Paul Sartre.
1943. He publishes *Being and Nothingness* — seven hundred pages written partly while he's a prisoner of war — and existentialism becomes a formal movement.
Sartre's big idea is *bad faith*. The way we lie to ourselves to escape freedom. You tell yourself you had no choice. You were just following orders. Just doing your job. Just playing the role society gave you.
But Sartre says no.
You chose. You're always choosing, even when you pretend you're not.
The famous example: the waiter who over-performs being a waiter. Too attentive, too formal, moving with exaggerated precision. He's trying to *become* the role so completely that he disappears inside it. No self, no choice, no responsibility. Just the waiter-machine.
We all do this.
The professional who says "it's just business." The parent who says "I'm doing what parents do." The citizen who says "I'm just one person."
The Milgram experiment in 1961 would make this visceral. Stanley Milgram gets ordinary people to administer what they think are electric shocks to strangers — up to lethal levels — just because a guy in a lab coat tells them to.
Two-thirds go all the way.
They surrender their responsibility to authority. Classic bad faith. They chose to obey, then told themselves they didn't choose at all.
But Sartre isn't just pointing fingers. He's saying this freedom is *terrifying* because it comes with total responsibility. You can't blame your genes, your upbringing, your circumstances.
You're condemned to be free.
That's the phrase. *Condemned*. Because you can't escape it, and you can't share it, and everything you do matters because you're the one who did it.
Think about that for a second.
Every time you scroll past something you could have acted on. Every time you stay quiet when you could have spoken. Every time you choose comfort over truth.
Those aren't things that happened to you.
They're *you*, happening.
That 1945 lecture where he defends existentialism? He's responding to critics who say this philosophy is nihilistic. That it drains life of meaning.
And Sartre flips it: this is the *only* philosophy that takes human dignity seriously. Because if there's no God writing the script, then you're not a puppet.
You're an author.
And yes, that's heavier. But it's also the only thing that makes your choices actually *yours*.
Now, shift gears.
Let's talk about Simone de Beauvoir, because she takes existentialism somewhere Sartre didn't quite get to on his own.
1949, *The Second Sex*. She applies existential freedom to gender and writes one of the most quoted lines in feminist philosophy:
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
She's saying gender is a *project*, not a destiny. Society hands you a script — here's how women act, here's what women want, here's the space you're allowed to occupy — and you can perform it or you can refuse it.
But either way, you're choosing.
The catch? Your freedom is always *situated*. You're not making choices in a vacuum. You're making them inside systems of power that try to convince you that you have no choices at all.
And here's where it gets personal: de Beauvoir is writing this while living with Sartre in an open relationship that everyone judges. She's choosing a life that doesn't fit the script, and she's paying for it in gossip and scandal.
So when she writes about women's freedom, she knows exactly what it costs. She's not theorizing from a distance.
This is where existentialism gets messy.
Because if we're all radically free, what about oppression? What about people whose choices are genuinely constrained by poverty, by violence, by systemic discrimination?
Postmodern critics hammer this hard. They say existentialism is too focused on the individual, that it ignores the structures that limit freedom before you even get to the choosing part.
Fair criticism.
But de Beauvoir's response is basically: yes, *and*. Yes, structures exist. And you still have to choose how to respond to them. Oppression is real. Your response to it is still yours. The woman who says "I can't leave" and the woman who leaves — they're both making a choice inside impossible circumstances.
Acknowledging the structure doesn't erase the agency.
It just makes it harder.
Then there's Albert Camus, who technically rejected the existentialist label but belongs in this story anyway.
He's obsessed with the absurd.
Here's the setup: life has no inherent meaning. Humans desperately need meaning. That tension? That's the absurd. We're Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, watching it roll back down, pushing it up again.
Camus says the only honest response is to live fully anyway. The struggle itself is enough. In *The Myth of Sisyphus*, he writes:
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Not because the task is meaningful. Because Sisyphus is alive and pushing, and that's what existence *is*.
Wait, really? Happy?
Because here's Camus's move: Sisyphus *knows* the boulder will roll down. He's not deluded. But the moment he walks back down the hill to push it again? That's his moment. He's conscious. He's choosing.
The gods meant it as punishment, but Sisyphus turns it into defiance.
The rock doesn't win.
And here's a stat that'll mess with you: a recent survey found that nearly half of Americans believe life has no inherent meaning, but seventy percent still believe in personal purpose.
We're living the existentialist split. We've accepted the first part — no cosmic blueprint — but we're still building meaning anyway.
We're all Sisyphus now, and we don't even realize it.
Even stranger? A study in the *Journal of Humanistic Psychology* found that people who embrace existential anxiety instead of avoiding it report higher life satisfaction and lower rates of depression.
Confronting the void doesn't destroy you.
It wakes you up.
Turns out the thing we're most afraid of — meaninglessness — might be the thing that forces us to actually *live*.
This is where Viktor Frankl enters.
1946. He survives Auschwitz and Dachau and writes *Man's Search for Meaning*. He develops logotherapy, a therapy based on finding meaning even in suffering. He watched people in the camps who kept their dignity, who helped others, who found reasons to survive.
Not because the situation was meaningful.
Because they *made* it meaningful.
Frankl tells this story: a man in the camp is about to give up. Frankl asks him what he's living for. The man says his daughter, who escaped to America.
Frankl says, "Then live so that when she thinks of you, she's proud."
The man survives.
The meaning wasn't in the camp. It was in what he chose to be inside it.
Critics say logotherapy oversimplifies complex psychological conditions, that you can't just "meaning" your way out of clinical depression.
But Frankl's not saying suffering is good. He's saying you're not powerless inside it. And that distinction — between pain and powerlessness — might be everything.
Jump to now.
Existentialism is having a weird renaissance. Existential therapy is growing as anxiety and depression rates climb. Therapists are helping people sit with the discomfort of freedom instead of medicating it away. Training programs report a forty percent increase in requests since 2020.
People are asking the old questions again: Who am I? What do I want? What's my responsibility here?
And then there's AI.
Philosophers and tech people are asking existential questions again: if machines can think, what makes us human? If algorithms can predict our choices, are we still free? If we can design digital identities, what's authentic anymore?
Here's the connection nobody's making: existentialism and AI are facing the same problem from opposite sides.
Existentialism says you're free and that's terrifying.
AI says you're predictable and that's terrifying.
Both are asking: what's left that's actually *you*?
The debates are live. Some people say existentialism is outdated, that it can't handle collective problems like climate change or AI ethics. Others say it's more urgent than ever — that in a world of infinite options and algorithmic nudges, we need a philosophy that reminds us we're still the ones choosing.
So what do you do with this?
Here's the thing you can actually use: next time you catch yourself saying "I had no choice," stop. Ask if that's true or if that's bad faith.
Not to beat yourself up. Just to see it clearly.
Because existentialism isn't about guilt. It's about agency. You're more free than you think, and that's both terrifying and exhilarating.
One concrete step: write down one thing you've been saying you "have to" do. Then rewrite it as "I'm choosing to."
See how it feels.
Because the second you own the choice, you can change it.
Sartre was right. This *is* a hopeful philosophy. Not because life is easy. Because you're not stuck. The script isn't written.
You're writing it right now, this moment, with what you do next.
And that, despite everything, is a kind of freedom worth having.