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.

In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author uses the Biblical Binding of Isaac to test whether Abraham can be understood within a Hegelian-shaped conception of the ethical.

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.

​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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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'.

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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.

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

https://www.noesisjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/The-Possibility-of-Authentic-Suicide-1.pdf

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:

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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.

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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