Diary of an Existentially Confused Teenager

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.