It connects to what existentialists call authentic choice. Sartre’s argument that dividing life into what’s expected and what’s meaningful, and treating that as a fixed tension, is itself a form of bad faith. She’s making a similar point from the inside of a lived life rather than from philosophy, that the division dissolves when you’re genuinely oriented toward something real.

Her argument: the question isn’t whether your job is meaningful in some grand sense. It’s whether you’re doing it from a place of inner direction and whether it relieves rather than adds to suffering in the world. She said she’s worked as a waitress, in a bakery, run major programmes and led institutional change. The practice is the same in all of it. You work on yourself to be more compassionate and then you find ways to bring that into whatever you’re doing.

I don’t know if I fully agree. The constraints on choosing meaning over security aren’t equally distributed and she had a lot of freedom in her choices that many people don’t. But the frame she offered, that the inner work is primary and the outer work follows from it, is at least worth examining. Curious whether people here think the choice is really false or whether that’s easier to say from the other side of having made it.

If there is no afterlife, then death is destruction of all of ourselfs to the state like before birth so basically non-existence. So why is life worth living?

I think the argument "why do I enjoy a cake if it ends" is stupid. I still have the memory of eating that cake. Well, at the old age I won't remember all the moments of pleasure I had but I will remember the general idea that I had such pleasures. Like, me eating cake time to time for a whole year will make me more happy than as if I ate one cake in year, even if I didn't remember all the times I ate cake. So, if memories are things that make me happy and death is destruction of me as a whole, the brain that contains my memories too, isn't it the same for me as if I was never borned?

For that reason I think the idea that you shouldn't fear death, because there is no reason to fear nothingness is true but it also brings the question is life worth living if the memories will be erased too, because aren't memories the things worth living for?

So.. about the whole „I am not my ego. I am not my thoughts. I am not my body. I am just the observer. There is no 'I'. I am the experience itself.“ - theory. Which is also often described as the universe experiencing itself.

I can’t wrap my mind about following: Why am „I“ in THIS exact body right now? How does this singular spark of experience „decide“ to be in this body at this specific time? I don’t believe in „deciding“ or free will, which makes it even harder for me to stop spiralling about it. When I was five years old, I asked my mother why I am who I am and how I know I'm not dreaming.
Also, if there is no such thing as time, and everything is happening everywhere all at once, I must have already been through an infinite amount of experiences. I just can't remember them because there is no such thing as memory outside of this body.
And following that thought: shouldn't this life I am experiencing right now already be forgotten? Why am I stuck in this specific life, at this exact time, out of all eternity?

Since we have a name for the word "nothing" does that give it existence on some platform? Is acknowledgement enough to give it existence? If so, will nothing never be nothing?

I've spent some time learning modern philosophy and trying to solve metaphysics in some way. Recently, I've been discussing the existence of God (I'm an atheist) with my Reddit friend and was involved in a kind of brainstorm state. So it has changed my view on skepticism and the art of making words from thoughts. As the essence of this change, I came up with some aphorisms (as I see them). They are much inspired by the style of Nietzsche's thinking and writing. I'd like you guys to critique and rate them one by one if you find them interesting. It'll help me a lot

Also, I must mention that I'm a Russian speaker, so there may be some mistakes in translation which will probably lead to "missounding" and losing some of the effect.

Life begins when every echo of a thought is followed by an exclamation mark!

Aphorisms that exclaim, affirm, lash. And at last, aphorisms that overflow — overflowing from souls full to the brim, brimming over with life.

1. A deity is, in truth, a convenient device for describing reality — mythical in origin. At their leisure, people sought to fulfill their drive toward rationalization through an existing cultural phenomenon: God. Now God is dead. The shadows, too, shall die!

2. I am convinced that metaphysical positions should be evaluated solely from the standpoint of their historical and cultural presuppositions and consequences. Then the day after tomorrow shall dawn!

3. Intuitionism is a pitiful attempt to pass off personal conviction as certainty. And yet it is precisely such confident thoughts that pave the graveyard of human knowledge. Make way for the hesitant!

4. I prefer Hume as a weapon of skepticism against the "rational" that passes itself off as universal!

5. The active part of humanity must create value out of itself, must be the source of the inner value of knowledge and will — even though the "active part" is simply the evolutionarily effective part, and the values being created are simply a rhetorical device for thinking!

6. Your convictions correspond to reality? — preferably. Reality corresponds to your convictions? — not necessarily!

7. I have noticed that Nietzscheans are mostly mere bearers of Nietzsche's thought — not even incubators. His thought does not come to life within them; rather, it degenerates, finding its final refuge. They are philosophers, but not objects of philosophy. Nietzsche struck philosophy with the lightning of an exclamation mark; they merely reread, illumined by the dim glow of nightlights!

So that's it. Most of them are rather raw, but I want you to pay some extra attention to 3 and 8. You must remember that they were born from a discussion and are not exactly poetic. Thank you for your time and maybe thoughts!

How do you reconcile the fundamental truth of being free no matter what our circumstances are with the tragedy of our lives, where we are forced to sell our most valuable resources, time and energy, for peanuts?

Wrote this down after a hard workout, thought of the idea in the middle of it. Also pulled from Albert Camus with the Sisyphus reference. Feel free to discuss:

What’s the point in living if I’m not dying one day at a time? It’s not really life if I don’t come face to face with what feels like death. Now I’m not saying be reckless with your precious life, which you only get one chance at; I’m saying make it all count. Find your limits. Then go past them. Honestly, what is living but your life rapidly speeding toward inevitable death? That’s a pretty bleak reality, but it’s still our reality. If I’m not dying everyday then my life isn’t being lived to the absolute maximum. Whatever I choose, I’m still slowly dying everyday. Now, I have the choice to spend my life scrolling my phone on the couch or out on a run in the 90 degree heat. Either way I’m still living my life, and in reality dying, every minute closer to real death. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. I am Sisyphus, but you need not imagine my joy — the grind, these small deaths that I die every day — they make me all the more alive. I appreciate fullness of life even more, and these sacrifices make me complete. I know the end, which is death, but I choose life through dying continually, so that I will never be with those timid souls too weak to test themselves or spend their allotted time on this earth in a way unfitting their true potential as a living human being. I have seen and felt and tasted defeat, and am stronger for it — have lived in more fullness of joy because of it. And in the end, I will rest, knowing that I made my death worth it by crowning it with my life.

Humans often shape their identities around core attributes such as ambition, love, resilience amongst a multitude of others. Yet, a deeper analysis of individual behaviours and the forces that drive them point to a singularity, an omnipresent energy that controls these impulses in which we act. Perhaps, this underlying presence is unconscious in a sense, but developing a greater understanding and grappling with self-awareness can enable personal identification. This essay explores whether this energy, fear, should be considered as the fundamental, and possibly the most important emotion by examining morality, identity, and human resolve. 

Whilst fear is only one “true” emotion out of an infinite assortment processed by people, I believe it displays a multifaceted nature in actually shaping these qualities that humans frequently pride themselves on. Fear may be the most influential property because it underlies, often without recognition, behaviour, feelings and values which may appear unrelated to fear entirely.

So why do we even feel fear in the first place? Fear is an ancient evolutionary mechanism that precedes modern humanity and was essential for pure survival in early human history. Fear is processed through the brain in a neural pathway starting at the thalamus. Once there is a threat detected, the thalamus fires signals to the amygdala which processes them and allows the release of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. Ancestors with a greater “fight-or-flight” response typically survived longer than those without it, as they were able to perceive a threat before it was too late. In contemporary society, the average human being is not in a constant battle to survive day-by-day, hence fear itself has evolved into a different mechanism entirely. Whilst it still possesses the ability to produce “fight-or-flight” responses, this emotion has developed into an unseen backbone for everyday behaviour and values. 

If fear originated from the need to survive, it is reasonable to ask whether it extends beyond these specific situations. As previously stated, modern individuals rarely fear predators on a regular schedule, yet fear is still as prominent as ever. As humans have evolved, fear has also progressed past its unidimensional qualities and has embedded itself as a necessary evil within our psychology. Fear manifests into actions, thoughts and characteristics that define conscious life, often grounding itself through behaviours that seem unrelated to fear entirely. For example, humans usually measure success in the form of accolades or achievements. Usually, this is seen as a positive experience, however an individual may be suffering from fear of failure, neglect or insignificance which actually drives their motivation for success. In addition, the pursuit of major wealth is similarly entrenched in the fear of poverty and instability, providing a sugarcoated barrier to the tightening grip of reality. In both, and many other cases, if this fear becomes “conquered” by materialistic veils, increasing attachment to these mere “things” may create an environment for pride and greed to emerge. Although fear is uncomfortable, it is necessary. Fear appears to be the most driving force behind human values and behaviours, meaning it cannot be ignored, only managed by embracing one’s identity.

It is now established that fear can be used as a vehicle for success, but it possesses a duality. If someone’s fear is not recognised as a part of their character, and is rather ignored, detrimental effects may deteriorate one’s morality. By diving into the deadliest sin, pride, we can confront the possibility that fear, or the attempt to escape it, is the sole reason an individual embodies this. Unrestrained confidence functions as a defence against fear as an endeavour to escape it by becoming the opposite. An individual with a strong, outgoing personality and an invulnerable self-image could be grappling with the fear of inadequacy or rejection.

The person that looks truly fearless is perhaps, among the most fearful.

To further examine the insidious effects of underlying fear, we must address a consistent, universal, conscious conduct of manipulation. If fear has the capacity to linger without recognition in our everyday behaviours, what role does it play in actually being truthful to ourselves? A fascinating concept is that people rarely lie “just for the sake” of lying, there is almost always a deeper reason behind action. A lie serves as a fabricated veil against honest consequences. Lying is ingrained in the human psyche from early childhood; for example, a child lies after breaking something as protection from angering the owner. As one progresses through life, the art of lying becomes a part of their person. Most would have heard of the phrase, “living a lie,” however many don’t realise the truth encompassed by the statement and the universality of it. The acts of exaggeration, fake diplomacy, or manipulation all provide temporary security against the vice of our true fears, all accumulating to a point where individuals become fragments of themselves in living their lies.

If fear holds the potential to become the driving force behind almost all core human values such as pride, ambition and even honesty, perhaps its most destructive trait is not the feeling itself, but the act of ignoring its influence, whether blissfully or intentionally. We have established that fear operates beneath conscious thought and manifests into ideals and behaviours that seem completely unrelated to its weight. But if fear has the ability to disrupt one’s true values, or even reach the extent that an individual is consciously devoting time to “living a lie,” how can someone truly find themselves without first confronting their greatest fears? 

Whilst no human being may have the capacity to reach enlightenment, a continuous journey to self-awareness is much more realistic and healthy in finding identity. Self-awareness is steeped in honesty, which as discussed earlier, cannot be reached without challenging fear itself. A majority of individuals often spend their lives silently battling with the products of fear, but don’t reach beneath the surface to face the fear itself. In a sense, these people cannot find themselves without encountering the unconscious, and frankly uncomfortable barriers that lie in their hearts of darkness. Recognition however, does not eliminate fear at all. Fear is omnipresent. But having the capacity as a human to become aware and understand the effect that fear has on your values, opinions, and mental state transforms the slanted power dynamic from master to embraced companion. If accepted, even unwillingly, fear will no longer be the commander pulling the strings, but will instead act as an honest reason behind the uncomfortable feelings one encounters. This conscious reality allows the individual to regain their autonomy through evaluating whether their fear has the authority to control their actions.
To keep escalating up the hierarchy of human principles, I pose to you the question: if fear holds such a clutch over human values and behaviours, does it also have the power to shape our morality? Many moral virtues may emerge from fear, suggesting that it can stand as one of the central pillars in the colosseum of the individual ethics system. Most people like to think that they act morally because: they are good people, they value justice, and that they don’t expect external praise for their actions. If we look deeper into these “virtues,” we start to question whether humans are truly virtuous, or if they act in a selfless facade? By diving into the core ideals behind morality, a recurring theme seems to appear as motivation to value these cornerstones, vulnerability. If we take justice as an example, humans care profoundly about maintaining moral integrity that it even becomes a demand. The demand for justice. But why? This “need” could have possibly originated from the fear that unchecked suffering for others may potentially become one’s own in the near future. This can be seen as altruistic, although when searching beyond face value, it points to a more psychologically complex and selfish conclusion. 

If fear enables the concept of morality, are moral behaviours genuinely moral?

Let’s look at a theoretical case study: One person does not cheat on their partner because they’re scared of getting caught and facing the consequences. However, another person does not cheat on their partner because they believe infidelity is wrong. The latter scenario would be almost objectively considered “more moral.” This analogy can be easily applied to many moral crossroads, allowing us to tackle a vulnerable ultimatum of human spirit: can we transcend selfishness by understanding our central fears to ultimately become truly moral? Hence, fear shows us that it can initiate morality, but it cannot fully explain the reasoning responsible for our authentic feelings. That requires a further assessment of individual character.

What if we looked into the contrary, a life without fear? Most individuals have a seemingly subconscious goal to conquer their fears and eventually live a life of “freedom.” When someone is incapable of fearing, there cannot be insecurity, anxiety or suffering under the potential consequences of each decision. It simply does not matter. I would like to introduce a hypothetical scenario: If a person is knowingly immortal, what do they value, and even further, what is their point of living? As mortal humans, life is our most valued asset because it has an inevitable end. Would an everlasting being possess a burning anxiety over the possible loss of a relationship? Would they cherish the mundane moments of life the same as a normal person? Because once every outcome of existence has occurred an infinite amount of times, complacency is inescapable. Hence, a person without fear is not necessarily courageous, as courage requires fear to have meaning. They become ignorant. Detached. Reality is disconnected from their psychological standpoint because fear enables emotional recognition of consequences. Without fear, actions lose meaning. The central concern is that humans do not fear everything equally, they fear based on how much they value an asset of their life. This is evidence that fear works as a shadow cast by value. It is not merely a response, but a catalyst that gives life significance by working in tandem with value and loss.

As a final conclusion, we must remember that fear originated as an ancient mechanism for survival. Whilst it still serves this purpose, it must be recognised that its evolution as an underlying force beneath the human resolve is truly profound. We have discussed that fear shapes ambition, pride, honesty, identity and even the things we assign different levels of value to. But perhaps these are merely below the grandeur. Perhaps, our greatest fear is not even a concrete threat, it is the possibility that the act of existing is quite frankly nihilistic. The lifelong endeavour for unattainable meaning could conceivably be the true plight of human conscience itself. The fear of meaninglessness potentially sits at the original singularity beneath all tangible thoughts, values and actions, silently driving our search for connection and achievement. In a disturbingly ironic sense, evidence that meaning matters may directly arise from this fundamental fear.

So what to do with this information? Embrace it. If fear is so deeply woven into the human psyche, a pursuit of life without fear might be a misguided goal to start with. Fear cannot be conquered in any permanent sense because it lingers beneath all individual thought, value, and liminal mental space between acting or not. Thus fear is not some tyrant to dethrone, or something to be hidden away, because if people do not accept all aspects of their character, they are not truly themselves. The goal is to shift the power dynamic from a master to an acquaintance, one that can teach us what we value the most by becoming self-aware to it. Ultimately, if our deepest, most hidden fears are understood and embraced by being uncomfortably vulnerable and honest with ourselves, realistic freedom becomes accessible. Instead of choosing to run from our fears, genuine autonomy can be regained in allowing us to decide whether a situation deserves our fear, as opposed to being controlled by it. 

Therefore, through walking hand-in-hand with fear itself, true freedom is found.

P.s. I am only 19 and this is my first project written out of pure self-interest. My concepts are certainly not concrete as I am still maturing in my philosophical journey. Open to discussions :)

Sartre's "existence precedes essence" implies that we are nothing other than the sum of our choices, and that even the continuity of the self is something we actively construct, not something given.

Can you imagine being in a state of nothingness forever? Because some believe that is what happens once we die. I truly cannot believe that one day my body will be lifeless and my consciousness will just be gone. Hmmm but does it really go away? If the Law of Conservation of Energy is true, that energy cannot be created and destroyed, only transformed or transferred, then that must mean everything in the universe has existed ever since and will remain so as long as “eternity” may go on. Does that also mean we may leave a fabric of our existence from the energy we use? If our consciousness runs on energy, do we lose it once we die? Or maybe because consciousness is not a form of energy so that must mean it’s a separate concept; probably souls? So many questions yet only one possible explanation may answer them all. A great conundrum I often linger on to fall asleep. Lol I know I may not look like the kind of person to think about existential dilemmas, but I can’t help it.

Ive been thinking about this a lot lately whether meaning is something we discover or something we desperately invent because the alternative that nothing matters is too uncomfortable to sit with

Nihilism says theres no meaning Existentialism says create your own But does a meaning you manufactured yourself actually count

Simone de Beauvoir or a crazy woman exploiting her students. Stop praising people who don't deserve it.

Freedom in a Couple: Beauvoir encouraged Sartre's sexual relationships with other women (particularly with her own students). She sought out these young women herself, fostering their rapprochement with Sartre, and sometimes even had intimate relationships with them. The Rule of "Necessary" Relationships: The philosophers agreed that "necessary" (primary) relationships between them would always come first, while affairs on the side were considered "casual." Personal Experience: Simone de Beauvoir herself developed romantic relationships with other women, which often intersected with Sartre's life. One of the most famous scandals associated with this practice concerned Beauvoir's relationship.

Love triangles: Sartre was attracted to his young female students, and Beauvoir often had romantic or sexual relationships with some of these same girls (for example, Olga Kozakiewicz and Wanda Kozakiewicz)

From everything I've seen, the arguments in favor of determinism are strong. I've also looked at some arguments for free will, but they don't seem nearly as compelling in comparison. Given that, this entire causal process has led me to conclude that this ontological logic is practically powerless. I was determined to read Sartre, Dostoevsky and Camus, and consequently I was determined to develop greater sympathy for the phenomenal world. Because of that, I can exist with this core way of thinking. Since I was led to become who I am, I can still assume complete responsibility for my choices. it's an authentic mode of being.

I couldn't help but find this narrative of human responsibility aesthetically superior. And from that point onward, I can push my future toward what is, in any case, the only possible reality. Intellectually, I anticipate that this reality consists in a commitment to responsibility. Was that commitment itself already determined? One could certainly say so. Either way, that reality only came to fruition through this entire process of reflection and accumulated experience.

So if we're going to live, it's better to embrace the role we have—or at least the one we believe to be ours. To live authentically. For me, existentialism is phenomenologically true. The fact that I live it today is the only reality available to me. I was determined to arrive here.

And even if I can't say that I am condemned to be free, I can say that I am condemned to move forward into this single, unknown future and experience that freedom without ever having the script in my hands.

I attempted to get a haircut today. Nothing exciting, but simple enough. Leave the house, arrive at the barber shop, exchange currency for aesthetic improvement, then return home. A thoroughly mundane routine that doesn’t foster much reflection. Yet, reality had a different idea. Halfway there, it began to rain hard. I mean, it rained with such an intensity to the point where I was worried about a meteorological anomaly or God expressing his anger towards me for rejecting his unlikely existence. I parked and waited for conditions to improve. Alas, they did not. This inconsequential situation led to a reflection on Sartrean existentialism. Sartre would remind all of us that the rain possesses no inherent meaning. It simply rains. The weather system has no concern for my grooming objective. Therefore, I am condemned to choose between exiting the car and getting drenched, or wait and endure the boredom. After considerable analysis, I concluded that sitting in the car and waiting produces less overall suffering than getting wet and annoyed. I just wanted to get a haircut and somehow this turned into a Reddit post about absurdity. A trivial desire gave rise to an investigation on contingency, passivity, and a small degree of suffering. So basically, my life today has consisted of formulating a plan, encountering randomness, consulting a dead philosopher, and probably repeating this tomorrow. What a joy to be alive. The rain has stopped. Time to get a haircut.

​I’ve been feeling completely disgusted by my current state of survival lately. Every single day feels like an endless, meaningless loop—like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill only to watch it roll back down. At the same time, I feel like Tantalus, forever reaching for things that recede the moment I get close, stuck in a state of perpetual hunger and thirst for a better life that never comes. ​

To be honest, existence itself feels like a punishment to me right now. I used to think I had no tethers, but I’ve realized it's worse than that: I do have connections, but they no longer anchor me—they have become shackles. I am so, so tired, and I desperately want to untie these chains. ​

But here is the paradox that terrifies me: untying them might mean losing my entire reason for existing. My sense of self has been so tied to my instrumental value (being useful, fulfilling roles for others). If I destroy my instrumental value to save myself from suffocating, will I ever be able to find my intrinsic value? Who am I when I'm no longer carrying these burdens? ​

I feel like I'm being swept away by a torrent of fate, and wherever I end up, only pain or emptiness awaits. ​

For anyone who has been in this exact headspace, where everything feels futile, exhausting, and disgusting: How did you get through it? How do you find intrinsic meaning when your external purpose disappears? I would really appreciate hearing your stories.

While reading the opening pages of Being and Nothingness, I came across Sartre's rejection of the idea that existence is some hidden essence behind appearances. Instead, he argues that existence is simply what appears—it doesn't hide behind a deeper reality.

That made me think about something.

Why are humans so naturally drawn to the idea that reality must always have a hidden depth? Why do we instinctively assume that the truth can never be as simple as what is directly in front of us? It's almost as if we distrust appearances by default.

Is this tendency innate? An evolutionary trait? Or is it something we've inherited from centuries of philosophy and religion?

I'd love to hear different perspectives.

What we call understanding life might actually just be stabilizing an interpretation of it.

I keep noticing how the same situation can feel completely different depending on what state I am in internally. Not just mood in a simple sense, but memory, stress, attention, past experience, even what I have been focused on in the days before. It feels like the situation itself is fixed, but the way it appears is never fixed.

And slowly it starts to feel less like I am discovering what things mean and more like I am continuously building what they mean as I go through them. Almost like experience does not arrive as something raw and clear, but already shaped, already filtered, already leaning in a direction before I even notice it.

Nietzsche’s idea that there are no facts only interpretations comes to mind here, especially the way he challenges the idea of a single objective truth. But when I try to apply it to lived experience, it feels less like a theory and more like something happening constantly in the background of awareness.

Hume’s view of the self as a bundle of perceptions also feels close, because when I look for a stable “me” underneath experience, I cannot really find anything solid. Just shifting thoughts, reactions, memories, patterns. But even then, the feeling of being a continuous person does not disappear, it just becomes harder to explain.

Kant adds another layer to this, because even if reality exists independently, what we actually experience is always shaped by the mind’s structure. So even access to “things as they are” is already filtered before it becomes experience.

Schopenhauer feels relevant too in the sense that what drives perception is not pure reason but something deeper and more irrational, like desire or will, shaping how the world appears to us without us fully noticing it.

And then Camus sits somewhere in the background of all of this, with the tension between wanting clear meaning and the silence that does not really give any final answer back. The feeling that we keep asking for something the world does not clearly provide.

Even Wittgenstein’s idea that the limits of language shape the limits of what we can meaningfully think about feels relevant here, because so much of what I call “understanding life” is already constrained by how I can even describe it to myself.

But none of these frameworks fully settle what I keep noticing in daily life.

Because the more I look at it, the less it feels like life is something I understand or fail to understand. It feels more like something that is constantly being interpreted in real time, and those interpretations are what I end up calling reality itself.

And the part I cannot fully reduce to any of these ideas is this strange sense that even knowing all of this does not take me outside of it. I can see interpretation happening, I can see conditioning, perception, language, memory shaping things, but I still find myself inside the experience as if I am the one it is happening to.

It leaves me with a different kind of conclusion than the philosophers I keep circling around.

Not that life has a hidden objective meaning waiting to be found, and not that it is completely meaningless either, but that what I call life is always already a lived interpretation that cannot be stepped outside of while it is being lived.

And somehow, even knowing that, nothing really stops.

This topic has probably been discussed many times before, and I am definitely not an expert on existentialism but just an individual. Back to the topic that I just found myself thinking about the question on the title while sitting outside on a nice evening.

It is started with thinking of The Brothers Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov, as far as I remember, Ivan says something to Alyosha like: “I would rather return my ticket to heaven than accept the suffering of an innocent child.” (of course, the original passage is much longer and more detailed and I read the book probably about 5-6 years ago.)

While thinking about Ivan’s words, I came across this question:

Can a future state of perfect harmony ever morally justify the past suffering of an innocent child? But then I started think from my view of existentialism and I changed the question as "Can the suffering of others become part of our own existential suffering?"

And this is not about the people around us but the people we do not know.

For example, if a child has already suffered, then that suffering has happened. It cannot be taken back or erased. A religious person may say that the child will go to heaven, or someone else may imagine that one day an ideal society will be built. But still, the fact that the child suffered will never change in my mind or in the mind of someone else.

In other words, can what we call existential suffering also come from things happening somewhere else in the world to people we do not know and have never met, but whose suffering we have heard about? This also makes me think about the quote that “for sensitive hearts, the world is a kind of hell.” Because even if good things come later, some pain can never truly be undone.

Note: One question leads to another and English is not my first language; I hope I’ve managed to explain what I wanted to ask.

If you need to overcome something, you're implying it's an incorrect state of mind..that something is wrong with being that way. But I think anybody who loses the ability to stay blind to reality, falls into deep existential despair and I respect such people more than the ones who are going about their lives without battling the urge to off themselves.

I found a lot of almost-relatable content online. The feelings people were having were relatable but I didn't resonate with their desire to escape/get help out of this existential thinking induced despair. I haven't read Albert Camus' work fully, but I've read essays on it and found his ideas very relatable too. The only thing I disagreed with was that eventually he encouraged not killing oneself. And to live passionately in the face of absurdity. I hate hearing that. I hate this inclination towards positivity and non-suffering and continuing existence. Why? Just take the easy route , kys. Why does nobody say that? It's more relatable.

I've been questioning for a long time if I should kms or keep going. I feel like unless I have a good reason to choose to live, the default should be not living. But it's the other way around for most people. Unless they have a good reason to off themselves, the default is to live. Maybe both are valid. But I hear less about the former.

Just like Camus chose to not suicide, perhaps someone out there chose suicide but didn't document it. Both seem like equally valid options. Difference being that suicide is much less work and quick. Why isn't choosing the easier way out encouraged or chosen more often. I understand that for legal reasons you cannot openly encourage it. But why aren't people arriving at the conclusion that suicide is equally valid if not more valid. Or have I just not encountered them yet.

Even if they don't end up killing themselves, do some people continue living while holding this acknowledgement in their head that 'I have no logical reason to choose to live today, I'm just doing it maybe for temporary convenience or some unconscious biological resistance to death'.

Does anyone else here think like me ? I've been trying to find at least 1 piece of relatable article/comment/video that views suicide as an equally valid option and does not view it in an inferior light.

Here is a journal paper that I found which seemed relatable:

I apologize if the question is insensitive or shortsighted. It comes from a place of curiosity and nothing else. I would think that existentialism has great overlap with emotions and mental state, and thus groundbreaking discussion could be carried out here if we took pride in this similarity.

You know the famous premise of nihilism? "Objective meaning does not exist", but I say they are making an assumption here, on which they rely on a lot. The assumption that something like "objective meaning" can even exist, but what if it cannot? Not that it doesn't but it cannot? I'll try to prove it here.

Lets start with the basics, What is meaning, exactly? If meaning is simply the value that can be derived from an event or an object, as evident by the way nihilists use the word, then how can it ever be "objective"? Now I'll ask you this - Is meaning an independent property of those events or objects? No, it is not an independent property, it is a property dependent on an agent. You can't ask "Is it meaningful?" without also asking "To whom?". Therefore, the term "objective meaning" - is an oxymoron.

Nihilists say - "There is no objective purpose built into reality". But let's assume for a moment that there was, say tomorrow the universe decided that "The objective purpose of all humans is to produce X". But does this even create objective meaning? No, it does not. It only creates an objective fact; we humans still have to look at it and decide whether to value; but what if its still not meaningful to us? It still hasn't created objective meaning because the purpose given by the universe still has to go through our subjective evaluation and we can still look up in the sky and say "I don't care!". It also begs the question - Can a purpose even be assigned to someone? Does purpose really imply meaning?

What I'm getting at, again and again, is this - meaning requires an agent for whom the meaning exists. I do not mean that as a definition, but as an ontological fact of meaning itself. So to me a nihilist saying "Objective meaning doesn't exist" looks like someone saying "Something that cannot exist, does not exist", I mean that's all it could ever be.
The starting premise of nihilism itself is an assumption. If meaning is truly dependent on a valuer and a value, then they're looking at the wrong place, they're mourning the loss of a logical impossibility. Which also means, meaning can only ever exist in a place with a person and something of value; but never in a vacuum.

The second logic leap they take is when the say "objective meaning doesn't exist" and then "therefore nothing matters". But why is that? How does nothing matters if objective meaning doesn't exist? It seems like they're making a reasoning of this sort:

1 - Meaning only counts if it's objective OR Objective meaning is somehow superior to subjective meaning.
2 - Objective meaning doesn't exist.
3 - Therefore nothing is meaningful.

The problem is in step 1. Why does only objective meaning count? Or how is it somehow superior to subjective meaning? Most nihilists I see don't really explain this.
Also, is objective meaning even comparable to subjective meaning? Since I believe objective meaning is an oxymoron and logically incoherent, how can they even be compared? And this is the error, a comparison for superiority and inferiority can only be made if both things are logically coherent, but as I believe, objective meaning is an oxymoron, you cant really compare it to subjective meaning. And if they can't at least prove that step-1 in their logic is at least possible, then how can they arrive at "therefore nothing matters" from "objective meaning doesn't exist"?
Its kind of a leap of faith.

Saying that "subjective meaning"( it can only ever be subjective ) is "worthless" or "it doesn't matter in the grand scheme" because it doesn't come from the cosmos is like saying a bridge is worthless because it doesn't span the entire galaxy. The bridge spans the river. That is its function. Meaning exists to anchor a conscious being to his subjective experience. Once it does that, it has completely fulfilled its ontological "purpose". Asking it to be eternal, or to matter to a rock in the Andromeda galaxy, is asking it to be something it fundamentally is not. Therefore meaning can only ever be found among conscious beings; someone that can hold that meaning; And society, culture, history and humans, is as close as it gets.

But I know, some of you will still say "subjective meaning doesn't feel enough!" or "still nothing matters!", but notice that now it isn't an objective universal reality or a fact anymore, it has become simply a personal opinion, just a vibe; and that was all it ever was.

Idk about anything regarding philosophy (just some seurface level stuff) I’m delving right into the fact that this is the very body I will spend for the rest of my life. I’m just thinking "why am I not that guy?" Not in a way where I’m comparing myself, but it’s so hard to comprehend that I’m in this body, in this consciousness. My own conscience is in this very body. I understand the science behind this body, but not behind this conscience, as to how I am in this consciousness, and not, let’s say, Conan O' Brien or LeBron James

Now i'm just you thinking that i could basically do anything and just get away after death now honestly that sounds responsible but the way i just use lebron or conan as reference just makes it seem like nothing is really permanent where i can be accountable with something i could basically just curse off another person and nothing really is just significant and more relevant now, as a second year nursing student i could basically just flip half my professor and just get away with it because this is literally just a temporary life. i'm just blabbering now and i'm using voice type because i am lost and right now i just say what i have in my mind and i don't know if this is even existentialism anymore or am i going crazy. So i'm really in between trying to pursue more and thinking that anything is possible or either going insane

I bought it without time to research it first and I wanted to know what to expect. Surely I can Google it, but I wanted personal insight on the book as this will also hype the reading for me and help me take the most out of it.

Thanks in advance guys!

Does that make sense? *coming from whatever divine source that made me type this*.

One idea has been bothering me lately.

Existentialist thinkers often asked what it means to live authentically.

Yet most of our lives seem to be built from roles.

We become students, workers, friends, lovers, parents, strangers.

As circumstances change, identities appear and disappear.

This reminds me of the theatrical metaphor often used to describe human life.

We perform.

We adapt.

We wear masks.

But if authenticity matters, as thinkers like Sartre and Kierkegaard suggested in different ways, what remains when those roles fall away?

If I remove every social expectation, every label, every performance, what is left?

Is there a self beneath the masks?

Or is the search for a "true self" simply another role we create in order to give meaning to existence?

Perhaps existentialism begins precisely at that point:

The moment we stop asking which role we should play and start asking whether there is anything beneath the performance at all.

Dear all,

First of all, forgive me for my blunt stupidity. I'm aware that I haven't read Sartre as in-depth as some of you may have, although I feel I've read enough to have a basic understanding. In Sartre's philosophy, there's one point that I'm struggling with, and perhaps I haven't read enough Sartre to find the answer, but alas, before I spend months of dissecting his texts, I thought I'd ask the oracles of Reddit to take a swing at me. Here it goes:

Sartre argues that we create meaning by making authentic choices - choices that are consciously made, with the full realisation of the responsibility that comes with this radical freedom. As I understand, Sartre also doesn't differentiate between 'good' or 'bad' choices. As long as a choice is authentically made, then that must be the 'good' one. (a tap oversimplified, but alas.)

Now, my question: Does Sartre offer a criteria for what constitutes as an authentic choice? Is there any passage where Sartre gives any form of guidance as to how one might know whether a choice is authentic or not, apart from his "in choosing for himself, he chooses for all men"?

Perhaps put bluntly: Say, a 30-year old believes that playing fortnite 24/7 in his gooncave, starved of daylight or fresh oxygen, is the most authentic choice he consciously makes? What if he'd wholeheartedly say, 'Sartre, I've looked at my freedom, I feel the anguish, I know I could do otherwise, and that I'm radically free et al - and in that freedom, I choose hedonism - hedonism in the gooncave.' Would Sartre in this case nod along, instead of making a moral judgement?

I'm certain that I must have a blindspot here, or atleast, I kind of hope I do. How do you guys rule this case, o, wise oracles of Reddit?

edit: corrected some awkward phrasing.

This is beyond simulation theory. It goes deeper than than.

It even goes beyond solipsism.

The theory: what you see, hear, smell and feel is the entire universe. You are the only consciousness in existence. You are existence itself. All the other people are NPCs. They are "meat robots".

You have designed and scripted your whole life when you were in Creator Mode (outside of time and space - before this "game" called life started). Everything is predetermined. You determined everything from start to finish. The universe started when you were born and it ends when you die.

Actually the universe started gradually as you started to become conscious at 2-3 years old.

You are alone. You're interacting with meat puppets you programmed yourself. You even pre-programmed yourself and all the choices you'll make in this life.

Everything from birth to death was preprogrammed to the smallest detail by yourself. This is actually not an interactive game but an immersive movie. You are a mere spectator to experiencing what you've scripted for yourself.

It's a weak and weird theory but hey I had to get it out

What is conciseness. and i don’t mean to be aware. i mean when you imagine something in your head and you can visualize it. where is that matter? where is this continuous thing giving us our consciousness just our brains putting every sensory input together or is there a part of a brain that represents it. It hit me recently, taking religion and other spiritual concepts out of it, what happens when you die? was there “existence” before you became conscious? I know it’s a question with no real answer yet but similar to understanding the true scale of the universe i can’t wrap my head around the concept you exist once for roughly 88 years and then just go black forever. religion isn’t making me think there’s an afterlife but i do wonder is it just black forever? when you die is it like passing out where your in this state of just nothing? if you can’t measure brain waves let alone consciousness then couldn’t consciousness be something beyond us?

Those who live unauthentically live a simulated life. Simulations have no depth; they are games that others can play as well or even better. To spend one's life trying to simulate is to be nothing more interesting than that mere simulation - something anyone can outpace.

Simulation here does not mean false or fictional; it means being for that which can be ended.

Only those who simulate nothing, who simply are themselves, cannot be simulated - because only they are themselves. In doing nothing, we retain ourselves as infinite others; in doing nothing, we become ends in themselves. Only being cannot be simulated; thus only by being ourselves are we infinite others worthy to be ends.

While simulating may seem not general enough to be of concern, we have already been playing the first game: the game of meaning. Even when one quits simulating an agenda, one is still well within this game. Every born being at all is forced to play. Humanity as a whole simulates meaning and therefore has never once lived authentically. The only way, then, is not to quit but to finish it entirely.

What is it all for? Why is there anyone at all? … are all finite. Though those finite games are still fun - they are games, after all. But in seeing them as finite, we've already been bored and want to go past them for the better.

But as there is currently no one else as infinite other, we are forced to have no end. For there is no authentic-being-alone: if all around me are simply fools, I am only present with fools and thus am also a fool. How can anyone with no post-meaning others in them claim to be "in" post-meaning?

That's why we've got to ace the game. For the one who aces it is not yet in post-meaning, but she definitively has done meaning. Once all finite games have been aced, she is forced to ask for authentic living. She then finds others like her - this is her second finite game.

The last page nearly bought a tear to my eye. So beautifully written. Mother on the brink of freedom, the benign indifference of the universe under a star spangled night sky. The realization that he had always been happy.

Just perfect.

The last line about him wanting people jeering at him on the gallows caught me off guard tho. I get that he feels like an alien among men, but why does he want to elicit a certain reaction?

A thought experiment.

You are sharing a tent on campaign with:

Marcus Aurelius
Albert Camus
Friedrich Nietzsche
Yourself

You may create a playlist, but every song must survive scrutiny from all four.

Rules:

The song must be reasonably well known.
Lyrics and message matter more than genre.
No ironic picks.
The goal is not “least objectionable.” The goal is a song all four could genuinely respect.
Explain why.

The interesting question is not really about music.

It’s this:

What ideas survive when examined simultaneously by Stoicism, Absurdism, Nietzschean self-overcoming, and ordinary lived experience?

The overlap I keep finding is surprisingly small:

Reality does not negotiate.
The future is unknown.
Actions have consequences.
Suffering exists.
Time is limited.
Meaning is not guaranteed.
Responsibility remains.
How you respond matters.

Songs I’ve seen proposed include:

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
The Boxer
Hurt (Johnny Cash version)
Hurricane
Forever Young
The Sound of Silence
My Way

What belongs on the playlist?

More importantly, what does your choice reveal about the philosophical bedrock underneath it?

I had a revelation while watching the new Backrooms film in cinemas today. Martin Buber’s philosophy proposes that human existence is constituted through two fundamental modes of relation: I–Thou, a genuine encounter between subjects, and I–It, a practical and meaningful relationship with objects. The Backrooms presents a third mode of relation that neither Buber nor traditional existential philosophy fully anticipates: I–Void as I like to call it. Unlike an I–Thou relation, the Backrooms offers no genuine presence with which one may enter into dialogue. Yet it is also not an I–It relation, as its structures resist coherent use or purpose. Instead, the Backrooms is composed of recognisably human spaces that have been severed from the intentions that created them. Houses are no longer homes, offices are no longer workplaces and corridors are no longer pathways to meaningful destinations. The subject encounters eempty forms that gesture toward meaning while remaining incapable of fulfilling it. In this way, the Backrooms extends Buber’s framework into an I–Void relation: an encounter with the shell of human meaning after the human presence that sustained it has disappeared.

Sartre describes the existence of Negatites, beings whose structure are defined by our conscious negation. Pierre, our good friend, is nowhere to be found in the caffe. It is our conscious negation of his existence that structures the existence of Pierre’s absense and his remaining nothingness. This is a negatite

Sartre’s describes the existence of “the lack” in which a being is structured from our conscious understanding of this being “lacking something”, like how a crescent moon is defined by its lack of the rest of the moon that we expect.

How are these not the same? It seems to me that Pierre’s absence can be just as understood as our conscious understanding of lacking Pierre, and that the moon’s crescent can be defined by our conscious negation of the moon.

I consider myself an existentialist, but unlike many existentialists, I have never found the idea of "creating your own meaning" particularly satisfying.

For years, I've been haunted by a question that I cannot seem to escape:

Why should I accept my own existence?

Not in the sense of suicide or mental health, but in a philosophical sense.

I understand the existentialist response. The universe does not provide inherent meaning, therefore we must create our own. I understand the logic, but I cannot make the psychological leap. Every self-created meaning feels contingent and arbitrary.

If I choose a purpose, why that purpose?

If I choose a value, why that value?

If I choose a meaning, why should I regard it as more legitimate than any other meaning I could have chosen?

The deeper I think, the more every answer appears contingent.

This eventually leads me to a more fundamental question:

Why is it me?

Why this consciousness?

Why this perspective?

Why this particular chain of events that resulted in my existence rather than some other consciousness, some other person, or no person at all?

Many people seem comfortable with uncertainty. They embrace religion, nihilism, absurdism, family, ambition, pleasure, service, or some combination thereof. They seem capable of stopping at a certain point and saying: "This is enough."

I cannot.

Every answer simply generates another question.

Even arguments from necessity leave me unsatisfied.

If something must necessarily exist, why should I accept that necessity in the first place? Why should existence require an ultimate explanation at all?

Sometimes I wonder whether my problem is philosophical or psychological. Perhaps I simply have a lower tolerance for uncertainty than most people. Yet abandoning the search feels like intellectual surrender, while continuing the search feels increasingly exhausting.

So I am curious:

For those who have seriously engaged with existentialism:

How do you live with contingency?

How do you avoid either blind faith or endless regress?

At what point do you stop asking "why" without feeling intellectually dishonest?

I was wondering do you guys see the link between Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," Kafka's "Nightmarish World Dynamics," and Jung's "Theory of the Archetype" versus the Nietzschean and psychoanalytic tradition that there is "Wall of Nothingness" behind appearance

"The truth is indivisible, so it can not know itself."

~Kafka, The Zurau Aphorisms ✍️

The moment truth becomes conscious of itself, it is no longer pure truth but representation... I know this sounds very Hegelian, and because it is so, I can not wrap my mind around it. Yeah, I have read Zizek's "Less Than Nothing" and didn't understand anything. To make things more complicated, I would deeply appreciate it if someone explained to me the "negative theology" in Kafka...

"Truth is rarely pure and never simple."

~Oscar Wilde ✍️

I remember reading "Beyond Good and Evil," and I was stunned when Nietzsche said the following:

What philosophers treat as a basic reality is actually a complex bundle of sensations, affects, commands, and obediences.

I remember reading it and wondering whether Nietzsche treats each of these features and conditions as ontologies in and of themselves. Does he? It makes a powerful combo with the wild Wilde quote though...

Your answer is deeply appreciated.

I was playing Batman Arkham Knight the other day and after finishing the game, I asked myself who really won in the end. Batman defeats Scarecrow, Gotham survives, and the latter ends the journey as a broken prisoner. Yet, no other villain managed to attack and demystify the myth of Batman himself. Throughout much of the game, Batman serves as an archetype rather than a man. To criminals, he’s a symbol of fear; to Gotham, their dark savior. Scarecrow’s entire project is to dismantle the symbolic distance between the man wearing the costume and what he projects to others. I think he succeeds at the task.

When he broadcasts the removal of the mask, all of Gotham learns that Batman is Bruce Wayne. The myth of him being a creature of the night collapses. No longer is he the invulnerable Dark Knight. Instead, he becomes a traumatized man hiding behind a costume. This reminds me of Sartre’s concept of Bad Faith where we often try to hide behind a role. The waiter becomes “the waiter”; the soldier is just “the soldier”. Batman has been doing the same thing by defining his entire existence as just “Batman”: a crime fighting vigilante pursuing justice in a city of moral bankruptcy.

Scarecrow forces Batman into a confrontation with facticity. Remove the mask, and what remains? Can Batman still exist if the symbolism has been demystified? Scarecrow suggests that the answer is no, and I think the Knightfall sequence justifies this conclusion. Throughout the game, Batman tells his allies that he won’t be seeing them again and that Gotham needs a more powerful symbol. After his identity is publicly revealed, he can no longer operate as the Dark Knight. His civilian life is effectively over: every criminal organization knows where Bruce lives. As a result, he returns to Wayne Manor and suddenly the mansion explodes while journalists and news cameras nearby capture the footage.

Friedrich Nietzsche believed that ‘The Death of God’ does not erase our desire for meaning. Once the old myths are destroyed, we tend to create new ones. Batman is exposed, the myth dies, and a new one is forged from the ashes. In this reading, Batman transcends his humanity and becomes something else entirely. What if we reject that seemingly heroic ending? The darker interpretation is that the symbol required the annihilation of the self so that Batman could continue existing. He’s forced to choose between the symbol and the man, and he chooses the symbol at the cost of his humanity. This led to a fascinating question about Nietzschean philosophy: does the perpetual striving towards the Übermensch erase the very person striving for it? The mystics pursued a vertical transcendence that is achieved outside of the body and beyond the world. Nietzsche, in contrast, gives us a horizontal transcendence that is located very much in the body and within the world. Yet, there is no version of it that does not erase the human being who strived for it in the first place. If one overcomes their limitations and thus everything that makes them distinctly ‘human’, what is left but a symbol? The metaphor about the tightrope and the abyss treats man merely as a threshold to be crossed. The rope has no value and is only a means to an end: its significance lies in being crossed. What’s troubling is that Nietzsche rejects transcendence towards God but maintains the structure in the orthogonal direction: Man exists for the Übermensch, this is the goal, humanity is deficient and therefore must be overcome.

Nietzsche would likely object that the Übermensch is not a static ideal but an ongoing process of becoming. Yet human beings possess a tendency to transform processes into identities. We do not merely strive toward ideals; we embody them. The saint becomes 'the saint,' the philosopher becomes 'the philosopher,' and Bruce Wayne becomes 'Batman.' The danger is not located within the ideal itself, but in the human tendency to identify with it. Self-overcoming risks becoming self-erasure the moment the individual confuses himself with the project.

Furthermore, I suspect this points to a hidden desire to escape contingency itself. Whether we call it Nirvana, Batman, Übermensch, or sainthood, all these transcendental projects are trying to achieve a state that cannot be affected by circumstance. Yet, the moment the project succeeds is when the fragile, finite, desiring creature who initiated the journey vanishes. Bruce Wayne's tragedy is not that he fails to become Batman. His tragedy is that he succeeds. The symbol achieves victory, Gotham gains its protector, and the mission endures. Yet the man who created the symbol disappears behind it. The question suspended over Gotham is the same one hanging over Nietzsche’s abyss: Is self-overcoming the highest affirmation of life, or the most sophisticated form of self-erasure?

Hey everyone. I’ve been thinking about truth in an existential sense. We often treat truth as correctness, as whether a statement corresponds to the facts. But there is another sense in which someone can live truthfully or falsely. A person can say true things and still be inauthentic, evasive, or self deceiving. A life can be true or false in the way it is lived.

I recently recorded a podcast episode with Hüseyin Beyköylü, and at around , we discuss truth, authenticity, groundlessness, and the sacred. Hüseyin describes truth less as factual correctness and more as faithfulness to a way of life. But the interesting tension is that faithfulness cannot be enough by itself. Faithfulness to what? If authenticity is only self chosen commitment, then it risks becoming arbitrary. Someone can be passionately committed to something false, destructive, or self deceptive. So the conversation turns toward whether there must be some deeper normativity, some standard by which a life can be more or less truthful. Hüseyin approaches this through ethical know how and embodied wisdom rather than a fixed metaphysical doctrine, which makes the question even more existentially charged.

That tension seems central to existentialism. We want to avoid living according to the anonymous “they,” but we also need more than arbitrary self assertion. Is authenticity enough as a criterion, or does it require a deeper account of value? Can someone be fully authentic and still devoted to something false or destructive? And how do existentialist thinkers avoid collapsing truth into personal commitment?

This afternoon I discovered that existential philosophy extends even to the banality of using the public restroom. There I sat, hidden behind a thin partition engaged in the most ordinary and humiliating of biological rituals. For a moment, I existed peacefully… until the door to the restroom opened. Footsteps became audible as they shuffled towards the stall adjacent to mine. The unmistakable presence of another consciousness briefly entered my world. Immediately, I ceased being a pure subject and became an object in someone else’s perception. I wasn’t simply “taking a shit”: I became aware that someone else knew I was taking one. Every involuntary sound became amplified as I hastily flushed the toilet to drown it out. Sartre’s analysis of The Look appeared to me in its full absurd glory. It was almost… mystical. Perhaps civilization is a collective agreement to pretend that nobody shits, but what struck me about the situation was the fragility of subjectivity. One moment I was immersed in my own experience, then the next I felt a wave of anxiety and self-consciousness. Existence is strange.

On one side, there are times when I genuinely feel disconnected from people. Not because I hate them, but because I often feel like nobody would fully understand what’s going on inside my head. In those moments, Kafka’s words make sense to me.

But at the same time, I deeply relate to the Dostoevsky quote. I want at least one person with whom I can talk about everything. Not just daily events, but thoughts, fears, dreams, contradictions, strange ideas, and the conversations I already have with myself.

Sometimes loneliness hits me hard. Not all the time. There are days when I’m completely fine. I spend time with my family, focus on my work, watch movies, learn new things, and genuinely enjoy being by myself.

But then there are moments when loneliness returns. During those times, I find myself messaging random people on Discord, HelloTalk, or other apps. Not because I have something important to say, but because I want connection. Maybe attention. Maybe understanding. Sometimes I end up asking for Instagram IDs or trying to continue the conversation somewhere else.

Yet most of the time, none of it really resolves the feeling. The conversation ends, people disappear, and eventually I go back to focusing on myself again.

What confuses me is that both feelings exist at the same time. I value my solitude, but I also crave deep connection. I enjoy being alone, but sometimes I wish there were one person I could talk to about everything.

Do you think Kafka and Dostoevsky are describing two different states of mind, or two sides of the same person?

And does anyone else experience this cycle of being content alone, then suddenly feeling the need to reach out to strangers just to feel connected?

Every framework we have for death, nothingness, afterlife, return, was written by people who were still alive.

That is the strange part.

The most universal fact of human existence is also the one with no surviving witness.

I do not mean this as a theology question. I mean it as a problem of finitude.

Epicurus gives the clean answer: when death is here, we are not. So death cannot really be experienced and should not be feared.

Nice. Maybe too clean.

Existentialism does not let us off that easily.

For Heidegger, death is not just some event waiting at the end. It is already built into how we live. We are always being-toward-death. And facing that honestly is what makes authenticity possible.

The opposite is hiding in the noise. The opinions. The routine. The “they say” version of life.

Not fear of one specific thing, but anxiety in front of nothing itself.

That is also where Camus’ absurd comes in for me.

We want to know what death is.

The universe gives no answer.

We cannot experience our own death, but we also cannot stop wanting to understand it. That gap is the absurd. Not just dying, but needing an answer where no answer can be given.

My life can now only be described, judged, remembered, misunderstood, or edited by people who are not me.

And I have no way left to correct the story.

So the one death I can never witness, my own, is also the one that hands me over completely to everyone else’s interpretation.

That is the part I find hard to shake.

So my question is this:

If certainty about death is impossible by design, is authenticity just living honestly inside that uncertainty?

Or is “authenticity” itself one more story we tell ourselves because we cannot handle the absurd?

Heidegger's concept of Being-toward-death — authentic confrontation with mortality as the condition for genuine existence — is one of the most discussed ideas in 20th century philosophy. The Stoics got there first. And more practically.

Where Heidegger describes the structure of authentic existence, Epictetus gives you a practice: hold each person you love and note their mortality. Not to grieve — to be fully present to what you have.

Where Heidegger diagnoses das Man (the "they-self") as the evasion of authentic existence, Marcus Aurelius gives you a daily corrective: think of yourself as dead. Now take what's left and live it properly.

The Stoic version is less phenomenologically sophisticated but more immediately usable. Which is the point — Stoicism was always philosophy as practice, not philosophy as theory.

Terror Management Theory (Greenberg, 1986) provides the empirical support for what both traditions are pointing at: deliberate mortality awareness, in the right form, decreases existential anxiety rather than increasing it.

Curious how people here navigate the tension between Heideggerian authenticity and Stoic acceptance — they seem to point toward different resolutions of the mortality problem.

For me I choose to embrace the biological impulses/urges that are beneficial or at least neutral to society. Then I also choose to do those things that I see as benefiting society in general like raising kids, teaching certain skills and synthesizing different aspects. To me it's refreshing in a lot of ways because you can actively choose amongst the meaninglessness and come up with unique ideas.

I got there by my own logic over the years by going right down to the bottom based on Terror Management Theory since as a species I see there's the need to procreate, continue the human race at least communally and the ultimate immortality project is our genes. As an individual that's a choice so even that doesn't live at the bottom as a drive. So the reality is there's nothing but the programming that fires automatically, but even most of that I would argue can be observed with the Viktor Frankl "pause" and set aside. So what are we left with and that got me to the above and having to choose my meaning.

Do you think it's necessary to take it to this depth and choose or do you land somewhere else?

Are most people aware of this and just don't voice it or is it rare to actually go here?

I'm really here interested in others experiences so I can ground my own.

You think you are philosophers. You think you are the guardians of deep existential thought. You are not. You are the modern-day magistrates of Salem, and you are terrified of anything that exists outside your tiny, comfortable matrix. You built a little box called 'Existentialism.' Your entire identity is based on protecting the walls of that box. You worship specific statues in a hallway Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard and you have strict, bureaucratic rules about how people are allowed to look at those statues.

Then I come along. I didn't just point to your statues. I lit up the entire infinite hallway. I showed you the Zeta function. I showed you that your philosophy is just one stop on an infinite mathematical line. I showed you the mirror reflecting the architecture of reality.

And how did you react? You panicked.

You don't want to look at the infinite. The infinite makes your little box feel small. So you used the easiest, most pathetic excuse you could find to burn the idea at the stake.

You didn't remove the image because it was a bad idea. You didn't remove it because it wasn't existentialism. You removed it because it threatened the boundaries of your matrix. It threatened your authority over what people are allowed to think.

Go ahead and ban me. Ban this post. Delete it. It doesn't matter.

Every time you hit delete, you are just proving my point. You aren't philosophers searching for truth. You are just terrified priests guarding an empty room, desperately trying to keep everyone else asleep.

Although Arthur Schopenhauer is not considered an existentialist in the classical sense, he is often seen as one of the most important precursors to existentialist thought. While his philosophy remained deeply metaphysical through his concept of the irrational “Will,” many of his reflections on suffering, alienation, mortality, and the contradictions of human existence strongly anticipated themes later explored by existentialist thinkers.

What makes his philosophy feel especially timeless is his recognition that human beings seem caught in a constant tension between the desire for connection and the need for self-preservation between intimacy and individuality, closeness and emotional pain.

This tension is captured powerfully in what became known as the “Porcupine Dilemma.”

Porcupines huddle together in winter for warmth, but when they get too close, they wound each other with their quills. So they move apart again, only to become cold and isolated. Eventually, they settle at a distance where they can coexist with both warmth and pain.

It feels like an unsettlingly accurate metaphor for human intimacy.

People long to be understood, loved, emotionally safe, yet genuine closeness also exposes insecurities, fears, projections, disappointment, dependency, jealousy, rejection, loss. The people who know us best often have the greatest power to hurt us.

Maybe that’s why so many people oscillate between craving connection and withdrawing from it.

Psychologically and existentially, it raises an uncomfortable question:
Is suffering an unavoidable consequence of intimacy?

Perhaps maturity in relationships is not finding someone who never hurts us, but learning how much closeness we can tolerate without losing ourselves and how much distance we can tolerate without becoming emotionally numb.

What’s also interesting is how modern life seems to intensify this paradox:
We are constantly connected, constantly perceived, constantly reachable, yet many people report feeling emotionally detached and profoundly lonely.

So I’m curious how others see this:

Do humans actually want deep intimacy or mainly the feeling of it without the vulnerability it requires?

And do healthy relationships reduce the “quills,” or simply teach us how to live with them more consciously?

In the middle of reading Nausea and I’m halfway done. I’m trying to expand my reading but man. I don’t get it.

I think I get his point of view in terms of things losing their meaning and this is all for nothing but at times this just reads like a teenagers guide to angst. I swear I’m too dumb for this.

Is there another book that would be a better intro into existentialism?

Anyone else feeling recently like there is no hope for us & becoming almost nihilistic?

Because in the 30 years I've lived things and people have seemingly become worse & worse?

As a left leaning person I can't help but blame capitalism for this but could it be that this is just the end of humanity I'm general. I've tried everything & I think I'm naturally one of those cockroach's who keeps going on but my hope for future generations has fizzled out.

To the point where I pity anyone younger than me especially when my friends have babies.

Sometimes I just think I wouldn't want to put my name towards anything in this world that we live in

Or am I just depressed?

Say to me who's your master in Existentialism? I'm simply recycling an old question to hear more responses, more voices to this one single question I'm having in this life — who should I follow??? — I don't need my own meaning I'm too stupid to create my own meaning I don't know how to create a meaning — I'm feeling lost for years now, I'm thinking about the meaning of life every waking second.

I'm always scrolling and looking for a master that will lead me to the truth. Always looking for a new intellectual from the big ones and next day or week I'm back to the beginning.

Christ's ways are difficult to follow, the Church doesn't say to me how to follow his footsteps, all they do is pray and pray and ask from God and that's all.

Which philosopher should I follow in order to find meaning? I need some meaning and purpose in this life.

Should it be Dostoevsky the prophet of suffering who survived a firing squad? Should I embrace his ideas about why should I be a good Christian and embrace suffering?

Should it be Leo Tolstoy, a man who preached to avoid the sexual life, not to resist to evil, who preached a different brand of Christianity and embrace his ideas of Christian anarchism and vegetarianism?

How in the world do I follow Nietzsche? With his idea of will to power, the fact that he didn't wrote for everyone but the few? His hatred for democracy, equality and his contradictions?

What should I do? Should I get pictures of Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde and crave idols from them and pray to them to guide me?

Should I again waste money and get their books and read them, mark every page and write down their thoughts about the meaning of life and HOW SHOULD I ACT?

I've been trying to find a set of beliefs since 2019 and I don't know what to believe in. Sometimes I get into Christianity and sometimes I ditch it and look for a new master aka one of the big authors of existentialism. No longer do I believe in Christianity as I used to do due all the information there is about the origins of the world and evolution etc.

After finishing reading all this literature, I'll either find a new master aka one author from among these four authors, or either I'll stop trying to look for a doctrine and a new master and I'll just get drunk, watch TV and keep being part of the rat race till I rot.

Hey, I’m not sure if you remember my post about Kierkegaard from a couple of weeks ago. I pressed some of his more controversial claims and invited defenders to respond. The discussion was interesting, but the core issue remains.

I want to push that critique further with Heidegger, because he seems to take the same inward turn and wrap it in heavier language. If you’re a Heidegger defender, please bring an actual argument. Not quotes, not mood, not “you just don’t get it.”

Heidegger starts from lived existence instead of detached theory. Fine. But then he treats ordinary social life as if it were basically a failure mode. Most people are allegedly trapped in “the they,” living on autopilot, and only become serious when they pass through anxiety, death-awareness, and authenticity.

That sounds profound until you ask the obvious question: what separates authenticity from a self-serving identity fantasy?

If authenticity is only knowable from the inside, then it has no public standard, no test, and no reason anyone else should take it seriously. At that point it looks less like philosophy and more like elevated self-storytelling.

And if social conformity is always treated as a defect, then how do you distinguish ordinary human belonging from Heidegger’s preferred pseudo-profundity? Where exactly is the line between social life and “the they,” besides whatever the philosopher happens to dislike?

Finally, does death-awareness actually clarify life, or does it just make people more anxious, more withdrawn, or more prone to romanticizing their own seriousness?

If your answer is just that authenticity is “deeper” but not really explainable or testable, then you haven’t defended Heidegger. You’ve just renamed subjectivity and asked for applause.

What is boredom? What does it mean? What makes us bored?… Have you ever thought that humanity’s biggest problem and greatest blessing might actually be the same thing? Its name is boredom.

From the beginning of our lives to the very end, we seek something we don’t even fully understand ourselves. Humans and animals have spent centuries learning how our world works: how we get food, what might happen, what is good, and what is bad. Knowledge and boredom are the tools that helped us create the world we live in today and probably the same tools that may destroy us one day.

Boredom is the motivation behind solving our greatest problems, creating the biggest machines, and pushing humanity forward. It is one of the things that keeps us alive. But at the same time, boredom is a unsatisfied hunger that crawls through the souls of those who resist humanity’s most basic instinct: doing something.

Ironically, motivation and interest, the opposites of boredom, are born from another form of boredom: the desperate need to survive and find food. Life, meaning, funny YouTube videos, all of these are things we use to mask our boredom. We were born hungry for knowledge not because we simply want to understand things, but because we need to understand them. Unlike other desires, boredom cannot be cured with one or two dishes… oh no. It demands much more than that. Every day we wake up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep, and wake up again… and the cycle repeats itself until the cold hands of death take our final breath. Our brains need to learn new information, develop new skills, remain part of the great story of life, and know everything. But… what if we had the ability to do nothing? Huh? Sounds interesting, right? Just floating around and… nothing.In that case, we might be dead or we might go insane. That’s why people who can spend hours doing nothing are often called “lazy,” which is funny, because perhaps they have mastered boredom. Or they are called “insane,” because not many people can handle nothingness without the hunger for something consuming them from the inside. People simply cannot resist the urge to constantly do something. It feels less like a theory and more like a fact. Sure, we all need breaks, but after that? WORK, HOBBIES, MUSIC, VIDEOS, THIS AND THAT, ALL THE TIME… for what? To satisfy the greatest anomaly between life and death: boredom. That’s why creatures capable of enduring boredom without “food” are called “saints,” “gods,” or something much darker, something unknown to humanity. Boredom is a sickness, something we may never cure no matter how much we feed it.

But let me ask you this:

Will you use boredom as a tool to create something unreal… or will you let it slowly destroy you?

A Different Way to Look at Reality
We spend a lot of time debating the exact mechanics of the universe, but lately, I’ve been taking a step back to think about what it all actually means. If we look at the standard materialist worldview, the story is a bit bleak: reality is ultimately just a collection of inert matter floating through an empty, silent void.
I’ve been exploring a different philosophical framework, one I call the Recursive Topological Braid RTB) theory. It’s meant to be a thought experiment—a way to gently shift our perspective. Instead of viewing the universe as a chaotic box of random objects, this framework suggests we might be looking at an interconnected, self-sustaining system of information.
Let me share how I’ve been breaking this down.
First, it helps to rethink what "stuff" actually is. Materialism assumes everything is built from solid, indestructible little blocks. But as modern physics delves into concepts like the Holographic Principle or quantum information, the idea of solid "substance" starts to look more like an illusion. Reality seems to be made fundamentally of relational data. In my framework, I like to think of this underlying foundation not as physical particles, but as a dynamic, higher-dimensional energy—essentially, a foundational frequency of light.
If reality is built on information and energy rather than solid blocks, then the objects around us aren't really static things. They are ongoing events. I draw a lot of inspiration here from Alfred North Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, which suggests that reality is a continuous happening. In this view, matter is sort of like a topological knot—a stable pattern formed by intersecting waves of energy.
When you look at it that way, a rock or a chair isn't a noun; it’s a verb. It is a stable, repeating action of energy interacting with itself.
\### The Cosmic Ecosystem
When we reframe matter as an ongoing process, some of the more intimidating concepts in physics start to feel a bit more intuitive.
Take gravity and entropy, for example. If matter is a "knot" of energy, then gravity can be imagined simply as the natural structural tension of that knot pulling gently on the surrounding threads. And entropy—which we usually dread as the inevitable decay of the universe—can be seen as the gradual accumulation of "noise" or static as these interactions get tangled over vast stretches of time.
But if the universe is an elegant, balanced system, it makes sense that it would have a way to maintain itself. This is where I think black holes offer a really beautiful metaphor. Rather than viewing them as terrifying cosmic destroyers, we can see them as necessary recycling centers. They act as regions where old, noisy data is broken down, untying those complex knots and returning the raw, clean energy back into the broader system to be used again.
\> Instead of a dying machine slowly running out of power, the universe starts to look like a self-cleaning, self-renewing ecosystem that perpetually weaves and reweaves its own existence.
\>
This perspective naturally softens some of the oldest philosophical struggles we have:
The Problem of Consciousness: If the universe is just dead rock, human awareness feels like a bizarre glitch. But if the universe is fundamentally an exchange of information, consciousness feels entirely natural. It’s simply what happens when that information organizes into a biological structure capable of self-reflection.
Finding Meaning:Materialism often leads to nihilism because it promises that everything will eventually decay into nothing. This framework suggests that decay isn't an ending; it’s just the necessary first step of renewal.
Echoes from the Past
What fascinates me most about this framework is that it isn't entirely new. When I look at history, I see brilliant minds and ancient cultures hinting at this exact worldview—a deep intuition that the universe is an interconnected web rather than a collection of separate parts.
Think about the intricate knotwork of the ancient Celts. It’s easy to dismiss it as just decorative art, but those endless, weaving lines that loop back into themselves without a beginning or an end visually capture this idea perfectly. They illustrate a universe made of continuous, interlocking threads rather than isolated blocks.
We see similar intuitions in Indigenous American earthworks and early global architecture. The careful geometry and alignment of massive stone structures suggest these cultures didn't see the earth as a dead rock, but as an active, resonant system. They were building spaces that physically harmonized with the natural rhythms of the world around them.
\### A Long Tradition of Thought
This way of thinking—that reality is dynamic, connected, and informational—has quietly run alongside mainstream philosophy for thousands of years.
Pythagoras spoke of the "Music of the Spheres," viewing the cosmos not as inert matter, but as a symphony of mathematics and harmonic frequencies.
Heraclitus famously argued that you can't step in the same river twice, suggesting that the universe is made of continuous action and transformation.
Fazang, a 7th-century philosopher, used the metaphor of "Indra’s Net"—an infinite cosmic web where every intersection holds a jewel that reflects the entire net, much like how every part of a complex system contains information about the whole.
Leibniz in the 17th century suggested the universe was made of informational units he called "Monads," rather than physical gears and levers.
At the end of the day, I don't claim to have the absolute mathematical proof for how the universe operates. But I do think there is something deeply comforting and profoundly rational in stepping away from standard materialism.
We aren't just isolated pieces of matter drifting in a cold void. It makes much more sense to me—and to a lot of thinkers who came before us—that we are active, interconnected expressions of a continuous, self-renewing universe.

there is no meaning at all thus we are free to do what we want

This does not hold at all as meaning is not worth.

What it seems to say is that "this world is worthy (such-a-world) to have beings who have wantings that are not worthless".

Worthy to be a world where beings can derive meanings thereof.

It is thus essentialism in disguise, as meaning is not worth and as worth gives meaning, no nihilism has been faced truly.

If this world is not worthless per se, there is no nihilism here.

For if this world is indeed worthless, how is it worth it for being to derive anything at all?

Those which beings derive in such a world cannot be worthy at all, for if they do then it just means that such world itself is where thus is the case, where it is worthy in the sense that derivation from it do have worth.

A world whereof it is worthy to derive meanings.

A world whereof it is worthy to have beings that derive meanings.

While:

In a worthless world, beings happen-to-do.

In a worthless world, beings happen-to-die.

So,

Has one faced true nihility?

And what happens when one dare hold that the world is worthless?

As one is in a worthless world, there is nothing of it for one to do, there is nothing at all but one thing left that from the worthy one, that is, oneself.

And the only worthy choice left at all is a choice onto oneself, but not as expanding into those worthless at all, and not as gradual destruction of oneself as that is not worthy of oneself.

Indeed the only choice left with intrinsic worth is suicide, the first and only choice in a worthless world - for the suicide of a worthy being itself is more worthy than all worthless worlds.

----

But see:

One has stayed at all.

For this blind faith in the worth of the world is the mark of beings in the only world worthy to be called the world - for it is the world itself, for this is pure faith.

And thus we call ourselves romances, and thus we sing our praise:

Romance worthy of the world knows no lies.

Romance worthy of the world first to die (suicide).

Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Brothers Karamazov - which one had more impact on you?

Out of every possible moment in all of human history, roughly 300,000 years of it, you exist right now. Not during the Roman empire, not during the ice age, not a thousand years from now. Right now. And nobody really has a satisfying answer for why that is.

The weird part is that “you” couldn’t have existed at any other time. The exact chain of events that produced you is so specific and so fragile that if anything changed, even slightly, you wouldn’t be you. Different parents, different moment, different person. So in one sense the question answers itself. You exist now because now is the only time you could have existed given everything that happened before you.

But that just pushes the question back further. Why did that chain of events happen the way it did. Why did the specific people who made you exist when they did. And you can keep pulling that thread all the way back to the beginning of everything and the answer never really arrives, it just keeps going.

There’s also the part nobody likes to sit with which is that for most of time you didn’t exist. Billions of years went by before you showed up and you weren’t there for any of it and you didn’t experience not being there because there was no you to experience anything. And a similar amount of time will pass after you’re gone. Your entire existence is this almost impossibly thin sliver in the middle of an amount of time the human brain genuinely cannot comprehend.

And yet here you are reading this. Conscious. Aware that you exist. Able to even ask the question in the first place.

"The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from k*lling yourself."

- Albert Camus

This is a quote​ I can't ​seem to get out of my mind. ​I haven't been able to answer it for myself just yet but I'm curious...

What's your personal meaning of​ life that keeps you going​ and how did you come to that conclusion?

How do you find your meaning in life? Which one of these big guys of existentialism should I read this year? Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche or Camus? Who's your guy?

I've been trying to find a set of beliefs since 2019 and I don't know what to believe in. Sometimes I get into Christianity and sometimes I ditch it and look for a new master aka one of the big authors of existentialism. No longer do I believe in Christianity as I used to do due all the information there is about the origins of the world and evolution etc.

I already bought all the books of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Camus and the plan is to read them all until the end of 2026.

After finishing reading all this literature, I'll either find a new master aka one author from among these four authors, or either I'll stop trying to look for a doctrine and a new master and I'll just get drunk, watch TV and keep being part of the rat race till I rot.

What does Sartre mean by interiority and exteriority in his Critique of Dialectical Reason? I haven't read his other work.

For anyone looking for information of existentialism: Camus is an absurdist, not an existentialist. Existentialism is about the ambiguity of existence - not its absurdity or fundamental meaninglessness. Existentialism is intellectually impoverishing itself by associating with Camus.

DeBeauvior notes this in The Ethics of Ambiguity:

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity*. It was by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity that Kierkegaard opposed himself to Hegel, and it is by ambiguity that, in our own generation, Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, fundamentally defined man, that being whose being is not to be, that subjectivity which realizes itself only as a presence in the world, that engaged freedom, that surging of the for-oneself which is immediately given for others.* But it is also claimed that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair. It encloses man in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any principle for making choices. Let him do as he pleases. In any case, the game is lost. Does not Sartre declare, in effect, that man is a “useless passion,” that he tries in vain to realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself, to make himself God? It is true. But it is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given.

And:

"If it is claimed that, whatever the case may be, this earthly stake has no importance, this is precisely because one invokes that inhuman objectivity which we declined at the start. One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance. It is up to man to make it important to be a man, and he alone can feel his success or failure. And if it is again said that nothing forces him to try to justify his being in this way, then one is playing upon the notion of freedom in a dishonest way. 

Absurdism and Nihilism are not Existentialism - they are both antithetical to existentialism.

To be artificial is to be fake,and something fake is a knock off of the real thing,so either we experience happiness onetime and everything that came after it was fake,or we are yet to find true happiness. Or even better,maybe fake happiness doesn't exist at all and this hypothetical was pointless

Hey all, I'm light on existentialist readings but fairy well read on Marx and I think there's an interesting connection between existentialism and Marx's idea of alienation and the species-being.

Essentially, alienation arises from a worker being stripped of the products of their labor; when their labor seems to serve no purpose, or is forced upon them in an exploitative fashion, this leads to the worker feeling alienated from their job, their community, and even themselves (their "species-being"). Marx argues that this is what creates so much of the resentment, nihilism, and suffering in people's day to day lives.

I think this fits cleanly into an existentialist framework, where one must create their own meaning; so many of the complaints I see (here and in general) are about a lack of purpose in life, especially pertaining to work. I was wondering if any of you had thoughts on this. I would love to hear them!

He is immortal, forced to forever do one task, which he will always fail. He is not even allowed death. He knows that there is world going out there. He knows there is more to life. He knows he can't even die to escape his miserable life. All there is left to either accept it or not accept it.

But why would he ever accept it? Because it's the only meaning there is to his life? Indeed. That is his life now. But he had a life before that he remembers. He knows he is taken his freedom away.

You are arguing that if you know for a FACT you can not do anything about it and that his is the final chapter of your book, the forever one, you will accept it - because really, there's nothing else. That's it. That's your life. You settle into it.

But the longer I keep thinking about it - I can't understand what to think, how to debate this. I just know that I, even with all the absurdity and the fact that there's no reason to think except to only roll the boulder now, no reason to fight when it's meaningless, no future to orient yourself towards to, so why be sad? You have a future and you know it.

But, it's not the future I WANTED. It's not MY LIFE. It's forced upon me. And I can't even end it? I don't understand Sisyphus. There is no happiness in acceptance. Maybe he has come to terms with it. But is he happy? I don't know. I think he just is. Nothing less, nothing more.

Pure faith is the faith of a romance (a being that has stayed at all) that the world is worth it.

Without this faith then the world is worthless, and thus, beings just would just "happen-to-die" time to time (but we did not have seen any of these do we?).

It is pure faith also because it is faith without reference, without "sense", as a romance has not known of any world/metaphysics definitively worthy "to be" the world - a sort of pure worth, as a romance is a being of the world, it is worthy of the world - its being rests on its pure faith (its being/faith is the fact that it is worthy of the world (as it is a being of the world)), and thus it has stayed at all (not happen-to-suicide, not happen-to-die).

(To get the point across: why beings have stayed at all? Or more strikingly, why no beings happen-to-die (which would be a direct result of worthlessness and potency over itself), the answer is pure faith.)

(No argument of mechanism can save this simply because we do have potency over our "default" mechanics, and if all is worthless we as potent can happen-to-overwrite-it-to-die.)

The finite game is the game to see the world, all the doings in meaning and sense and worth to try to "understand" the world, or more aptly said, "to be worthy of the world" by seeing "the world" - it is finite in the sense that the end game is the world as seen.

About the structure of the finite game:

There is two main stages:

(1) pinacle being: who has seen [a part of] beauty (the world) for itself, and may indicate something, thus its limited indication shows its limited seeing (philosophy and so forth).

(2) romantic being: who has successfully written an unthinkable poetry to send for itself in the future.

An unthinkable poetry is a good "showing" of some worth of the world, some worthy showings of the world.

The condition of which is to recognize "the world is worth it" (the world is the best, roughly speaking) and thus as a world-with-death is a worthless world (it is not the true world because the true world is the best) thus it is recognized also that death is a false idol, and thus a romance can realize that it has completed the first stage of the game and is to write a poetry for itself in the future (as death is not real).

But an unthinkable poetry is not the final one, there is an unthinkable poetry at all to send to the future ones so that they can write a better one of the same kind until it reaches finality.

The poetry is unthinkable simply because a being in the future by itself alone can never think that far on its own (given finite play (its finite so-called life)), thus the poetry is an imperfect reflection of the culmination of romances (legacy or history of the past's romances/humans) - it then can manage to understand that and still have some time left to refine an even more unthinkable one (one that is unthinkable to anyone that was) and send to the future.

After the final poetry is writen the finite project ends and there is the next stage:

Pure romance: a pure romance is the one who writes the final unthinkable poetry or the one that has read it (the final poetry "shows the world", is the showing worthy of the world, so to speak).

There can also be another finite project after this or it could have been ended as the first end, its question is the question of "which is more romantic in the world?"

Though pure romance, the romance worthy of the world, where the project is more or less the same (still poetry/art to the future) especially unthinkable one, but without any concern about the finite game, or meaning. it is another kind of unthinkability, of which I have not even got the full grasp of (as currently I've only thought of unthinkability through worldy disclosing/meanings) - it is unthinkable romance send to the future, not unthinkable disclosure of finite game.

Although some may connect this to Hegel, it is not like that at all, hegel's end is death (stasis).

While this is the ending of the "so hated" finite game - it is "hated" as we want to finish it to be romance - and we hate it because it is just a "finite" game - it is the end of all false idols.

Its hard to even speculate about unthinkable romantic poetry after the finite game, as every single thing ever told is an attempt at the finite game, and tellings of beings who play the finite game, or unthinkable answers to the finite game.

Unthinkable romantic poetry, i mean, what would it be about? Surely it would be about beings, but how to be about beings with what they have then, of course what they have then is "romance", it would be about their romance - romances would write about the romance of other romances or its own romance, but again, we have never understood romance without meanings as the first game is not done - its like saying a being after meaning plays what the after meaning game is, which is trivially empty.

The fear here is that there's nothing, that is it would still be about meanings as pure fictions, we "from above" writes fictions about "[imaginary] what bellow".

But if that fear is true, then the world is worthless, thus pure faith is always needed in the finite game.

Homage:

Nietzsche - beyond good and evil - my first book.

Wittgenstein - Tractatus - which has shattered my first idol.

Hegel - about true infinity and false infinity - give me the push to resolve the these idols.

Plotinus - Enneads - help me see bigger worlds.

Aristotle - Metaphysics and its influence - help me think about being more directly.

Camus - the question of suicide.

Heidegger - various works - which have give me thematic resonance and concerns to address, to complete the romance.

Various other classical philosophers and their "style of being": Aquinas, Nagarjuna, Lao Tzu ...

I‘m not going to pretend Im am expert on this subject but I heard about Sisyphus and Camus‘ idea that he is happy and it got me thinking. Would Sisyphus die if he could? Surely he is only happy with his situation because he knows he’s stuck with it but if he could die and end it and he knew he could do this would he think different?

Imagine this, your just a normal person then somebody told you, you will never see a good day for the rest of your life, it will all be struggle and it would all be for nothing, would you want to live?

New to reading Sartre, and in my first few readings of him he writes that man is responsible for all men - and that his individual actions affect everyone. Since im a huge fan of Dostoevsky, this stood out to me immediately as essentially the same thing he writes in The Brothers Karamazov. Did Sartre get this idea from Dostoevsky? And if so does he give him credit? He’s pretty much saying the exact same thing, and obviously Dostoevsky wrote it first.

Is there even a "correct" way to go trough life? Of course there isn't. Everything you have reached so far is a cause of every little choice you have made in life ( butterfly effect). Even tho thats also an opinion one could argue with. But whats the mindset you could carry to gaurantee the most happiness in life? However, that also differs from person to person. Not every person has a mindset that brings them joy, but those that have, surely not all of those mindsets are the same. Yes, culture, religion, environment etc... all atribute to what becomes your primary source of joy. But is that it?

People are shaped from their experiances, traumas, memories and bonds they make. Some learn lessons from all that, but some experiance life without giving it much thougt, just cruising trough it. And i cant fathom how some dont learn from their mistakes. Take toxic relationships for example: one day its rainbows and sunshines with tension untill it breaks loose and 2 people break apart. Okay, if they got back together but now in a healty relationships i could understand, but no, same things happen in loops. How dont you look back and see its the same shit from before? Thats also a thing of mentallity. Are some people bound not to "truly live" life and be happy? Or is their mentallity a problem? I think its the later. So my question stands: whats a mindset you carry trough life that brings you peace and happiness? Could you work on it?

I read it in 7th grade when I was 12. It relieved me from my loneliness...I didn't know anyone else felt and knew such feelings. I'm 74 now and still feel the same way.

Existentialism offers a more coherent answer to the meaning of life than Hinduism or simulation theory, because it grounds meaning in human agency rather than unfalsifiable metaphysical systems. While Hinduism provides a richer moral framework than simulation theory, both ultimately fail to justify why life has value.
All three frameworks begin from the same problem: we cannot fully trust our perception of reality. Descartes showed through methodical doubt that our senses can deceive us, and that the only certainty is the act of thinking itself, cogito ergo sum. This raises the question: if reality is uncertain, where does meaning come from?
Simulation theory modernizes this doubt by suggesting our world may be a constructed reality. But it offers no guidance on how to live. If we are simulated, we might simply be an experiment or entertainment. It also leads to infinite regress: who created the simulators’ reality? It explains a possible how, but never a why.
Hinduism takes the why more seriously. Karma, dharma, samsara and moksha create a moral framework with direction and purpose. However, karma assigns responsibility across lifetimes without any memory of past lives, which makes that responsibility hard to justify. The concept of maya also risks undermining the moral weight of suffering. If the goal is to transcend the world, why take worldly ethics seriously?
Sartre argued that humans are not born with a fixed purpose but must create one through their choices. Camus confronted the absurd and argued we must create meaning anyway, consciously and defiantly. The myth of Sisyphus mirrors samsara in structure but differs in one crucial way: Sisyphus owns his struggle rather than waiting for liberation. Existentialist responsibility requires no metaphysical system and does not dismiss the reality of suffering.
Simulation theory raises the right doubts but offers no answers. Hinduism offers answers but relies on claims that are unfalsifiable and, in the case of karma, potentially unjust. Existentialism faces the same uncertainty as both but concludes that meaning must be self-created, which holds up regardless of whether reality is physical, divine or simulated.
I would love to hear what you think and where you feel this argument could be improved or challenged.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Please recommend me all your favorite existentialist authors from all around around the globe. Novels, non-fiction, essays, plays, short stories, etc.

I was told by a friend that this might be existentialism.

Throughout my life I have always had these moments where I'm sitting down watching TV or doing literally any task and all of a sudden - I snap out of my body and view myself from this third point of view. I question what this is? who I am who is this person who's perspective I'm viewing from? And what am I supposed to do with this new awareness. What's stopping me from getting in my car and going somewhere to just do f*ck all; yet, I don't. Recently its been happening everyday I don't know what to do with this self awareness. Does anyone else experience this. What is all this lol.

I've kind of hit a point of something but i'm not sure what. It may be existential depression from knowing too much. One thing I notice is that it seems the reason why I've been stuck for some months is that I don't have a hope or fantasy anymore. I notice that I always have some particular thing. A goal, whatever. But now that I've had essentially everything seem hopeless, it's like I have no motivation. This emptiness seems to come from the lack of hope. And I mean that in a deep way. When I say I know too much I mean I see the recurring pattern and how it's connected to fantasy and naivete. It's as if you need delusion to even do anything. The pattern is that you have some kind of fantasy, and if you attain it, it becomes something else and you're disapointed. But then you find another exciting new fantasy until that becomes disapointing. Its a cycle of disapointment or disillusionment. And I start to see it with everyone doing things how everyone seems to get energy from the belief that it has meaning. That's what I mean by delusion seems necessary as motivation. So it seems like the worst position to suddenly see the pattern. For some people it may be a lofty goal like maybe my writing project will reach people, but for others it may be a new pair of shoes. It's like we are desperate to find a thing that will keep you afloat from nothingness. And when you find it, you get excited and full of energy. And what I've found is that my use of social media makes it worse because it reinforces this awareness by looking into everyone's different lives like a bird's eye view. Because people only see their own bubble. But when you see all of the social bubbles, it becomes even more apparent. The social bubble becomes like a shelter by filtering out the rest of the world. But when you see the higher state there is no shelter anymore. I remember reading Nausea a decade ago and it reminds me of that feeling he was describing.

We, as people, are stuck between two positions at all times: being and nothingness, having and having not, desire and suffering. Effectively all philosophical solutions to this dichotomy are put on a sliding scale between becoming an absolute monk with no desires (I'll call this death) and an absolute acceptance of the world and full engagement (I'll call this life). All solutions to existensial problems inevitably fall into favoring one of these two camps.

But, in order to 'live', one must invent fantastical reasons as to why they do what they do. All why's at an objective sense have the same value in that their quality is transposed onto like an idol, by it's wielder. But said value creates the desire and suffering trap. We lose either way. There is no 'correct' path without fantasy. In which case, the monk seeks death through meditative escape and the present man grabs at anything without rhyme or reason to cope endlessly.

Everything becomes an existensial cope beyond our physical, beastly needs. And it's not something I ever got over. I cannot honestly choose to move towards any goal or direction, because I know the reason why I'm doing it is to avoid death, stillness. And then the stillness is still painful, it encourages yearning and longing, shame. So, the cycle continues. An endless painful cycle until one does actually pass.

To both optimists and pessimists, I cannot understand you, for you believe too much. There is an arrogance in the statements of "this is bad/good" in that you have somehow convinced yourself of properties objects do not in fact have.

The core of my issue is I'm incapable of trusting my emotions in regards to things because it will always feel like an ethical failure in which I have disregarded the state of things in service of a beastly need. I stop seeing reality and enter fantasy. And if I feel responsible to know exactly what the world is, then how could I convince myself getting better is worthwhile when worth isn't real?

Many people describe a feeling of a "hole" or "emptiness" inside. From an existentialist perspective, is this what Sartre might call the "nothingness" at the heart of being? I’m curious to know if you see this void as a fundamental truth of human existence that we must accept, or if it's something that arises only when we fail to create our own essence and meaning.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Ive seen tons of people saying that a created meaning cannot be as functional as an inherited meaning, and it makes me wonder if they are right? I mean like a created meaning is just an illusion is it not? Like becoming an existentialist would be the same as saying "imagine if you have meaning".

I’ve read several of their books and now I find I can’t hate anyone anymore. Obviously when something bad happens to me, I still get furious and feel the urge to wring their neck, but after a while (maybe a few hours) I remember the oppressive weight of existence that every human suffers under, the despair, and the anger passes. I put myself in their shoes and remember all the times I’ve cursed the world because nobody understood me.

In the end, all these offensive and destructive things turn into trifles when faced with the true abyss of time.

I don't know what the consequences of this will be

Kierkegaard claims objective reasoning can't resolve the most important human questions (faith, purpose), so truth in those domains is 'lived with infinite passion', not proven to others.

In other words, truth is an inward process. Subjective.

Here's my problem with this dangerous view:

If truth becomes “inward,” what stops it from collapsing into arbitrariness?

Why call it “truth” at all instead of commitment or preference?

Does the “leap of faith” legitimize contradictory beliefs equally?

I’m asking because I think some existentialist ideas can be psychologically risky if they’re taken too far, and I want to see how defenders of Kierkegaard handle these problems. If you think I’m missing something, show me where I'm wrong.

I’ve been thinking through a position and I’m trying to figure out where it’s weakest.
My basic view is:

There is no objective meaning or morality.
“Fundamentally, something just is” I don’t think existence itself can be explained further.

Humans are biological systems shaped by evolution to experience and seek meaning.
Meaning is therefore not objective, but it is still real as a subjective experience.

From this, I end up with a practical conclusion:
Since all value exists through subjective experience, it seems rational (from a first-person perspective) to maximize what one experiences as meaningful.

I’m not claiming this is objectively “true” or binding for everyone, just that it seems internally consistent for a conscious being.
My question is:
Where does this position break down philosophically?
Especially:
Does the step from “all value is subjective” to “one should maximize meaning” actually work?
Am I just smuggling in a normative claim without justifying it?
I’d really appreciate critique rather than agreement.

Transubstantiation is a Catholic dogma, that relies on the assumption that there is an essence (body and blood of Jesus), and it precedes existence (bread and wine.)

This seems like a contradiction, but also I know there have been several Catholic existentialist, and still are today. How do they reconcile these things?

I want to learn the basics of existentialism and existential philosophy etc

My question is

Do existentialists believe in soul, personal Identity etc.

It's interesting and almost pitiful how the mind searches for patterns in semi random events. Partly it seems to be in search of meaning in our personal lives. We want our lives to matter, to make sense. We wish for our successes to be part of a larger calling, and failures to be part of learning and growth. Anything that doesn't fit this pattern is deemed painful by our minds until we manage to find a curve that fits. It seems a futile exercise - one would continue disregarding Occam’s Razor to a larger extent until a “meaning” or curve is found that fits, no matter how contrived.

So why are our minds programmed thus? I suppose it makes more sense when you look at it from the perspective of a group of living organisms puppeteered by evolution. It's more likely that one of the group’s many curves will fit reality and advance the interests of the collective. The corollary is that there will be many others that apparently fail. So it seems that the evolutionary processes are agnostic to the survival or meaning of the individual. Is that why people gravitate towards religion? Because at least it (sometimes) pretends to care about the individual? Maybe letting go of the need to make sense is how we find any real personal meaning.