Tag Archives: existentialism

As per your suggestions, here’s a little history about existentialism:

Existentialism is essentially a school of thought which focuses on the idea that meaning comes from the individual, that existence precedes essence, and that it is important to find authenticity.

What all that basically means is:

1) Life in itself has no meaning

2) It is up to us as individuals to give our own life meaning

3) We should stop focusing on labeling ourselves and the world around us before we focus on examining what things actually are (this is the existence before essence bit). And

4) It’s important to find yourself and then live in accordance with yourself, ignoring all outside pressures and influences. This ties in deeply with the idea of individual freedom that is also a common theme in existentialism.

So as you can see, it’s not all bad. It’s actually a really great philosophy if you ask me – the downside is what comes before all of the things I listed. Because before you can set out on finding authenticity and giving your own life meaning, you’ve got to start questioning everything you’ve held as unquestionable truths.

This is scary. This is confusing. It’s actually kind of terrifying at first – thinking for yourself is difficult when you’ve been taught how to think since day one. And once you reject your old truths, you’re faced with the daunting task of finding new ones.

Where this blog finds me is in the very beginning stages of finding my new truths – back in my Junior and Senior year of high school I began the process, rejecting pieces of the reality I’d been taught to accept.

First was the idea of a “good person” – I’d always been a goodie-two-shoes but around when I was 16 I started questioning what made someone who broke the rules any worse than someone who followed them. I started to wonder if there really was a “good” and a “bad” – and I realized that these were ideas that came entirely from human perception, and that therefore I was free to create my own definition of the terms.

After that, I started questioning the path I’d been taught to follow – the whole “comfortable suburban consumer life” I’ve talked about before. I started to realize how utterly boring and safe that life was – and I also realized I never wanted to live it.

My senior year of high school, my AP Literature class did a unit on existential literature and that only accelerated my systematic questioning and rejection of my previously concrete reality.

I would say that was the peak point of my Existential Crisis – and man, it hit hard. I stopped doing my homework, I applied to less than half of the colleges I’d wanted to apply to, and more than once I found myself sitting at a train station seriously contemplating just getting on a train and leaving for a while. I mean, to most people that would seem absurd, but I was just thinking “why not?”

And I still find myself thinking “why not?” on a fairly regular basis. The absurd is a pretty engrained idea in existential thought – mostly because of the idea that life has no meaning that we do not assign to it. So if in my authentic state (which I am still quite a ways from finding) getting on a train to a random city was meaningful, and continuing with my school work and career was meaningless, by all means I should get on the train, no matter how absurd it may seem to an outsider.

I haven’t found my authentic state though; I haven’t figured out how to assign my life meaning, and I haven’t managed to define my own reality.  I haven’t even gotten over the initial fear and confusion of rejecting my old reality.

So that’s wehre this blog finds me, existentially confused and essentially grasping at straws as I attempt to sort out who I am and what on Earth I am going to do with my life. After all, existentialism is really just another way to find meaning and fulfillment – albeit an unorthodox one.

So it was Tuesday night, and I figured it was about time I got cracking on that speech I was delivering in 2 short days. You know, the one I’d barely thought about until right then, let alone picked a topic for.

The stress started to build – what do I talk about? Where do I even begin? A couple drafts and a few discarded ideas later, I was ready to throw my computer out the window.

My mind was going a mile a minute, desperately trying to come up with an idea that would 1) get me an A and 2) make me seem witty and creative (which is vain and dumb, but also honest), when all of a sudden I just stopped.

I’d hit my proverbial brick wall – the one I always hit when I put too much stress on any one thing, and suddenly I found myself asking that dreaded antithesis to productivity: “What does it matter anyway?”

From there, it’s always a downhill spiral. After “What does it matter?” comes “It doesn’t,” which boils into the question of “Why am I doing it in the first place?” to which, in my existentially fraught state, I never have an answer to.

The funny thing is that, before very recently, I’d never noticed that there was a pattern to all these “existential breakouts” (I call them breakouts because they’re kind of like acne – they’re unwanted and usually caused by stress….am I clever yet?). I kind of thought they just happened every now and then; no rhyme or reason.

But the truth is, my worst bouts of existentialism, of questioning the very nature of my existence and second guessing every decision I’ve ever made, are caused by the most common, mundane trigger they could have: major school assignments.

It seems that rather than using existentialism for “good” (contemplating what makes a good life, etc), I have been using existentialism as a way to weasel out of the pressure of school.

Rather than face that yes, this assignment is important and, yes, it matters, and accepting the responsibility of producing my best work, I prefer to throw away that pressure with the feeble excuse that “it doesn’t actually matter.”

After a year of believing this excuse time and time again, I’m feeling pretty gullible right now. And pretty lame, to tell you the truth.

Not to say the the entirety of my existentialism is based on what essentially boils down to a lie (which would be existential in and of itself in a way….but I don’t want to get into that right now), but a lot of what I imagined to be a genuine pursuit was just a way to shun responsibility for my own success of failure.

Talk about confused – now I’m not only questioning the very foundation of my own existence and beliefs, but questioning my reasons for questioning life. It’s enough to make your head hurt.

Your favorite Existentially Confused individual,

Kaitlyn S.

I thought this was over, I really did. The late nights spent staring at the ceiling wondering what I’m doing with my life, the unshakable notion that everything I do is a pointless addition to the same meaningless monster of human existence, the undeniably humorous angst that I’ve been unable to rid myself of since my senior year of high school. I thought I’d finally broken free of the unproductive afternoons spent typing “signs of an existential crisis” into google search, but I guess I was wrong.

The thing about existentialism that really sucks for a freshman in college is that:

1. You start thinking everything about school and education is pointless and is therefore wasting your time.
2. You spend a truly ludicrous proportion of time staring at walls, or ceilings, or otherwise uninteresting objects contemplating the meaningless nature of existence and feeling generally gloomy and angsty, which is certainly not conducive to working on the loads of school work that have been piling up while you were off feeling tortured and misunderstood. And
3. It’s hard to make friends when you end up trying to convince everyone you meet that their entire life is based on a lie.

So I guess you could say it’s been a rough transition.

But the existential part isn’t really new to me – that started back in high school. I think it was as I was writing essays for colleges I wasn’t even sure I wanted to attend, trying to piece together exactly what it was each university wanted me to be and attempting to fit myself into that mould. It was as I dissolved completely into the sadistic cult that calls itself “The College Board” that I had the sudden and crushing revelation that none of it mattered in the end.

Harvard or Penn State or community college or no college whatsoever – they all end up dead in the same ground, the same worms eat them, the same world moves on without them.

Depressing, right?

When you work with single-minded determination towards a future “something” on which you peg all aspirations towards happiness and gratification, you’re sure to be disappointed. And man, was I disappointed. Not only disappointed, I was pissed.

This was supposed to be the big pay-off, the moment when I could sit back and enjoy the work I’d put in. But instead it was the moment when I sat back and thought “shit, now I’ve got to work twice as hard for the next four years, and after that, I’ve got to work even harder”. It was never going to end.

What I’d assumed to be the finish line ended up to be the warmup… Oh.

So right there, between one 500-word-or-less essay and another, my entire reality came crumbling down.

So this is the diary of an existentially confused teenager, on the long road to somehow figuring out what “reality” is actually made of, if it’s made of anything at all.