r/Existentialism

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.

Is bravery the absence of fear?Or is it facing ones own internal issues?

Many people outwardly project confidence and exuberate an egotistical sense of self but on the inside are slowly dying from their own guilt and shame. To face a fight against another is easier than confronting themselves.

"I laugh in the face of danger. Then I hide until it goes away" - Simba

This quote resonates with individual passion for courage but humorously contradicts itself with dichotomy.

What is it to be fearless?

Sometimes I get this strange feeling when I see people completely revolve their existence around being “a girl” or “a man.”

Like everything becomes about being pretty enough, masculine enough, desirable enough, aesthetic enough, alpha enough.

And honestly, I understand why it happens. Identity makes existence feel more structured. It gives certainty in a very uncertain life. Humans want to feel seen, wanted, and like they belong somewhere.

So this is not hatred toward people at all. I see the pain and conditioning underneath it.

But still, something in me feels sad seeing humans reduce themselves to a role so deeply that they stop seeing themselves beyond it.

You are not just a girl.

You are not just a man.

Before all of that, you are a living being experiencing existence itself.

I don’t know. Maybe this sounds abstract, but it gives me this bittersweet feeling.

There’s a perspective about God and human existence that has been fascinating me more and more lately: what if “divinity” is less an external omnipotent being and more a symbol of what human beings can reach internally?

When someone truly recognizes their strengths, flaws, virtues, contradictions, fears, and potential, they almost enter a transcendental state. Not in the literal sense of “becoming a god,” but in the sense of moving beyond automatic existence and unconscious living. Maybe that’s what brings us closer to what we call “the divine.”

I increasingly see Jesus Christ more as a powerful symbol of the relationship between humanity and the absolute than necessarily as literal proof of an omniscient and omnipotent God. The death and resurrection can represent something deeply human: the ability to psychologically die and be reborn through suffering, to transform pain into meaning, and to find purpose even within chaos.

In that sense, the Bible can be viewed as a collection of existential symbols. Many of its stories seem to address questions that humanity still struggles with today:

Why is life unfair?

Why do we suffer?

Why do we seek validation?

Why do we judge others?

Why are we afraid of loneliness and death?

Maybe the human mistake is comparing ourselves vertically: either wanting to feel superior to others, or feeling inferior to them.

But rarely do we see ourselves inwardly — as fundamentally comparable in the shared human condition.

Every person sees us through a partial perspective. Our actions will always be interpreted differently depending on the experiences, values, emotions, and beliefs of the observer. Perspective is relative. We will never please everyone. So we often try to please the majority because it gives us a sense of moral security — as if consensus automatically defines what is “good.”

But what if goodness begins first with inner honesty? If we genuinely believe we are acting from the best part of ourselves, maybe that is the closest thing to authentic morality.

For example:

someone may leave a stable career to pursue art, and some will call them irresponsible while others will call them courageous;

someone may distance themselves from family to protect their mental health and be seen simultaneously as selfish and mature;

a highly rational person may appear cold to some and wise to others.

Everything depends on the lens through which we are perceived.

And maybe that’s why I struggle to fully believe in the literal idea of an omniscient and omnipotent God who directly inspired every word of scripture through the Holy Spirit. When we study religions historically, we can see how they were shaped by cultures, fears, hopes, symbolism, politics, and deeply human needs.

That does not necessarily mean God “doesn’t exist.” Maybe it simply means that God is symbolic language for something greater:

consciousness,

transcendence,

truth,

unity,

meaning,

or humanity’s attempt to make sense of suffering and existence itself.

So perhaps the question stops being: “Does God exist?” and becomes: “What does it actually mean to move closer to God?”

Could it mean:

deeper self-awareness?

empathy?

humility?

inner transformation?

integration of suffering?

the ability to face reality without needing absolute certainty?

Maybe “God” is not something entirely outside us, but the highest form of consciousness, truth, and being that humans are capable of conceiving.

I’d genuinely love to hear different perspectives on this.

What is th​e place of hope in existentialism? When ​we look at the world today, it is easy to see fragmentation. Climate crises, geopolitical instability, and a pervasive sense of alienation can make it feel as though the very structures of our shared reality are fracturing.

It was precisely this condition that French philosopher and Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel diagnosed when coining the phrase "the broken world" (le monde cassé). Marcel observed a world characterized by functionalization, where individuals are reduced to their social or economic roles. In this critique, Marcel’s concerns regarding "technical efficiency" deeply echo those of Martin Heidegger; both thinkers warned that a purely technological mindset treats the world and its inhabitants merely as resources to be mastered, calculated, and manipulated.

In popular culture, existentialism is often equated with the darkness that this broken world produces - a philosophy of angst, absurdity, and the cold isolation popularized by thinkers like Sartre. But Marcel, as an existential-phenomenologist, radically contradicts this assumption. He demonstrates that existentialism does not have to end in despair. Instead, it can provide the precise tools needed to navigate a broken world with profound, defiant hope.

In this session, we will explore Marcel’s unique philosophy through his phenomenology - his method of looking at concrete, lived human experiences rather than detached, abstract theories. We will focus on his crucial distinction between a problem (something external that we can solve with technical efficiency) and a mystery (something we are personally entangled in, which transcends mere logic). For Marcel, true hope is not a naive, passive wish that things will simply "work out." It is an active and engaged existential response to a world that tries to reduce human existence to a series of technical problems. It is an act of communion and presence, rooted in what he calls the ontological mystery. That is, a deep, experiential realization that being itself cannot be fully captured by a broken world.

In preparation for the group, please read the following chapter "Hope and Existentialism": https://academic.oup.com/book/61728/chapter/541574012

>Although existentialist thought is often associated with a negative diagnosis of the human condition in such thinkers as Camus and Sartre, there is a more positive strand focusing on uplifting aspects of experience, directly challenging the alienation, loss of meaning, and invitation to despair that has come to be associated with the movement. This vision of the human condition is to be found especially in the work of French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. This chapter considers Marcel’s phenomenological analysis of what is called ontological hope, distinguishing it from ordinary cases of hoping, as well as from optimism and desire. It examines the choice between hope and despair and introduces related themes of communion, intersubjectivity, and the search for the transcendent. The chapter argues that Marcel’s thought illustrates the reserves within the human personality and community that help individuals respond in a positive way to the existential challenges of modernity.

We will also watch a short video on the topic to support our discussion. Let's pursue the question: how might a phenomenological approach to hope alter how we live, act, and connect when the horizon looks dark?

https://preview.redd.it/hs7hja6iw02h1.jpg?width=831&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e5aa83123edff0001169dedfc425d940a27573c5

This is an online discussion group hosted by Cece to discuss Gabriel Marcel's ideas and the place of hope in existentialism.

To join this meetup taking place on Friday May 22 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Look for other sessions in this series on our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

It's fair enough to read Camus or Nagel and understand the absurd logically, but it never really hit me until I experienced it independently in my own life. What was the experience that uncovered the Absurd for you?

Update: mod is a Nazi, please DM me your takes, I'm interested in hearing your experiences :)

I want to follow Christ, but I do not know whom to consult. I have achieved many things, yet I know it was always empty sub specie aeternitatis. I read what He said: sell everything and follow Me, depend on nothing, for God provides for the sparrows and the flowers. But I do not know where to look.

Christ, by my lights, calls me to leave my life, my children, my job, my money, my degrees, my entire existence. Before me stands a chasm of profound fear, yet I know I must leap.

Søren Kierkegaard, whom I love, is not enough. Religious doctrines are not enough. The charity I do is not enough. Giving away my services to those in need is not enough.

I write this from an iPhone in a sauna at a country club. I am nothing. I must slough off the skin of my life in His name. I am afraid.

Any advice would be treasured.

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 ...

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‘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?

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something I can’t quite resolve on my own. I am autistic and as expected have trouble with relationships overall and I’ve noticed that this tends to either attract people with bad intentions or push good people away over time due to differences in how we see the world. I also pull away myself when my needs aren’t being met, which I think is healthy, but it leaves me in this recurring cycle of loss.

The part I can’t figure out philosophically is this: I don’t want to build a life around just accumulating things, degrees, money, stuff. That feels empty to me. But the alternative, centering life around human connection, feels just as unstable when connection keeps proving itself to be temporary or conditional.

So what’s left? Is there a framework for finding meaning that doesn’t depend on either of those things holding up?
I’m not looking for stoicism 101 or “just detach from outcomes” takes. I’m genuinely asking if anyone has read something that engages seriously with the tension between needing people and knowing that needing people might cost you yourself. Literature, essays, philosophy, anything goes.

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.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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.