There is a particular kind of vertigo that arrives, usually uninvited, in an ordinary moment — washing a dish, waiting for a train — when it occurs to you that no one is going to tell you how to live. That the script you half-assumed existed does not, that the choices are yours, and that you cannot give them back. Existentialism is the philosophy that takes this vertigo seriously, refuses to soothe it with easy answers, and asks what it might mean to live well inside it rather than in flight from it.
Existence precedes essence
The slogan most associated with existentialism, from Jean-Paul Sartre, sounds abstract until you unpack what it denies. For most of history, the dominant assumption was the reverse: that essence precedes existence, that there is a human nature, a purpose, a design, written into us before we arrive, the way a paper-knife is designed for cutting before any particular knife is forged. To know what a thing is for is to know how it should be.
Existentialism removes the designer. We exist first — thrown into the world, particular and unfinished — and only afterward, through our choices, do we make ourselves into something. There is no blueprint to consult and no nature to fulfil. We are, in Sartre’s stark phrase, condemned to be free: condemned, because we did not choose to exist, yet free, because once here we are wholly responsible for what we become. The weight of that responsibility is the central fact existentialism asks us to face.
We are condemned to be free: we did not choose to exist, yet once here we are responsible for what we become.
The discomfort of an open life
Freedom is usually marketed as pure good news, and existentialism’s contribution is to notice how heavy it actually is. If there is no script, then every choice is genuinely mine, and I cannot offload the responsibility onto God, nature, society, or my upbringing without a kind of dishonesty. The student who says “I had no choice” almost always did. The adult who insists “this is just how I am” has usually chosen, repeatedly, to remain that way.
This is why anxiety, in the existentialist vocabulary, is not a malfunction but a kind of truth-telling. The dizziness you feel at the edge of a real decision is the felt experience of your freedom. Søren Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom” — the vertigo that comes not from the height but from the awareness that you could, in fact, jump; that nothing external compels you either way. Most of our strategies for numbing that anxiety are, on closer inspection, strategies for pretending we are less free than we are.
Bad faith and the comfort of roles
Sartre gave a name to that pretending: bad faith. It is the lie we tell ourselves to escape the burden of freedom, and it usually takes the form of treating ourselves as a fixed thing rather than a choosing being. His famous example is a waiter who performs “being a waiter” a little too perfectly, as though the role were his essence rather than something he is freely doing. We all do versions of this. We hide inside our jobs, our diagnoses, our histories, our temperaments, saying in effect: I am this, and so I cannot do otherwise.
The roles are not the problem; we need them to function. Bad faith is the deeper move of mistaking the role for the whole truth, of using it to disown the freedom that is still, uncomfortably, ours. The existentialist asks us to hold our roles honestly — to know that we are playing them, and could, at real cost, play otherwise.
Authenticity is not self-expression
The word “authenticity” has been worn smooth by overuse, reduced to a brand value or a licence to do as one pleases. In its existentialist sense it means something far more demanding. To live authentically is to live in full acknowledgement of your freedom and your finitude — to choose with open eyes, owning the choices as yours, rather than sleepwalking through a life you treat as having happened to you.
This has several uncomfortable implications worth stating plainly:
- You cannot borrow your values wholesale. Inherited beliefs only become truly yours when you have examined and re-chosen them.
- Every choice forecloses others. To choose this life is to grieve the lives you will not live; authenticity includes bearing that loss honestly.
- There is no one to blame. The authentic person stops outsourcing responsibility, even when doing so would be comforting.
Authenticity, then, is not about expressing a pre-existing true self. There is no such self waiting to be uncovered; there is only the self you are continually making. Authenticity is the honesty of the making.
The absurd, and Camus’s reply
If there is no given meaning, a hard question follows: why go on at all? Albert Camus made this the starting point of his work, calling the collision between our hunger for meaning and the universe’s silence “the absurd.” He refused two tempting escapes. The first is suicide, the literal surrender to meaninglessness. The second is what he called philosophical suicide — the leap into a comforting belief that dissolves the absurd by pretending the universe answers us after all.
Camus proposed a third path: to live in the absurd without resolving it, in a state of lucid revolt. His image is Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever, and his startling conclusion is that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. The meaning is not in reaching the summit, which never lasts, but in the conscious, defiant embrace of the rolling itself. We make the meaning by how we meet a world that offers none.
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Why this still matters
It would be easy to file existentialism under mid-century gloom — black turtlenecks and Parisian cafés, a fashion that passed. But its central problem has not passed; if anything, it has intensified. The old sources of ready-made meaning — inherited faith, fixed social roles, lifelong institutions — hold fewer of us than they once did. More people than ever stand where the existentialists stood: free, unscripted, and faintly dizzy about it.
What existentialism offers is not consolation but companionship in that condition, and a particular kind of courage. It says: yes, the vertigo is real, and no, there is no script — and this is not only a loss. It is also the space in which a genuinely chosen life becomes possible. The same freedom that frightens is the freedom that lets you become responsible for something, commit to someone, build a meaning that is yours because you made it rather than inherited it.
Freedom and other people
Sartre’s most quoted line — “hell is other people” — is almost always misunderstood as simple misanthropy. What he meant is subtler and more unsettling. Other people see us, and in being seen we are turned, momentarily, into an object in someone else’s world: fixed, judged, defined from outside. The waiter becomes “a waiter” partly under the gaze of the customer; we feel ourselves congeal into whatever others take us to be. Hell, in the play where the line appears, is three people who can never stop defining one another, with no escape from the mirror of the other’s judgement.
This makes freedom a social problem, not merely a private one. My freedom meets yours, and the two cannot be neatly reconciled, because each of us is forever turning the other into an object of our own perspective. Yet Sartre also saw that other people are the only ones who can confirm our existence as subjects, who can love and recognise us. The gaze that imprisons is also the gaze that acknowledges. We are caught, then, in a permanent negotiation: needing others to be fully ourselves, and threatened by them for the very same reason.
Beyond despair: the ethics of ambiguity
If existentialism stopped at anxiety and bad faith, it would be a diagnosis without a prescription. Simone de Beauvoir supplied the missing ethics, and in doing so rescued the philosophy from its reputation for gloom. In her account, the very freedom that isolates us also binds us to one another, because my freedom is meaningless in a vacuum: I can only realise it in a shared world, among others whose freedom my own depends upon. To will myself free, she argued, is necessarily to will the freedom of others — and so existentialism, far from licensing selfishness, generates a demanding solidarity.
De Beauvoir named our situation one of ambiguity: we are at once free subjects and finite, embodied creatures shaped by circumstances we did not choose. The mistake is to flee this ambiguity in either direction — to pretend we are pure freedom unbounded by the world, or pure object determined by it. The ethical life consists in holding both truths and acting from them: accepting that we are conditioned, and choosing anyway; recognising that others are as free and as constrained as we are, and refusing to treat them as mere obstacles or instruments. This is a far cry from the caricature of the existentialist as a solitary brooder. It is, in its way, a philosophy of responsibility for one another.
The weight, carried
The weight of choice does not lift; existentialism is honest enough never to promise that. But weight carried consciously is different from weight that crushes us in the dark. To know that you are choosing, that the life is yours, that no one is coming to hand you the answer — this is frightening, and it is also a strange dignity. It returns your life to you as something you are actively doing rather than passively undergoing.
Perhaps that is the most useful thing existentialism can offer the next person struck by vertigo at the kitchen sink: not an escape from the dizziness, but a way to stand in it upright. The choices are yours. They always were. The invitation is to make them as though you mean them.
It helps to remember that the existentialists were not writing from comfortable detachment. They thought through occupation, war, exile, and resistance, in a century that had stripped away every comforting illusion about human progress and human nature. Their refusal of easy meaning was earned in conditions that made easy meaning impossible. That is part of why the philosophy still grips us: it does not flinch, and it does not console with anything it has not tested.
What it offers, in place of consolation, is a kind of adult dignity. To accept that no one is coming with the answer, that the choices are ours and the responsibility cannot be handed back, is frightening — and it is also the precondition of taking your own life seriously. The vertigo at the kitchen sink is not a malfunction to be medicated away. It is the felt sense of a freedom most philosophies spend their energy denying. Existentialism asks only that you stand in it with your eyes open, and begin, from there, to choose a life you can call your own.
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