What Is Existentialism? Sartre, Kierkegaard, Camus and Why Your Existential Crisis Is Normal

Last updated: October 23, 2026

Existentialism is the philosophy that starts from one awkward fact: you exist before you know what you are for. Nobody hands you a manual. There is no factory setting called “your purpose”. So, existentialists say, you have to make yourself through the choices you make, and you cannot outsource the responsibility for them to God, your parents, your genes or your boss. That is the whole idea in two sentences. The rest of this post is about why it caused a riot, why it feels so uncomfortable, and why it is oddly good news.

The riot was literal. On 29 October 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre gave a public lecture in Paris called “Existentialism Is a Humanism”. He arrived an hour late because he could not get through the crowd. Inside, the hall was overheated and overpacked, around thirty chairs were broken, the box office was wrecked, and fifteen people reportedly fainted. One paper ran the headline “Too Many Attend Sartre Lecture. Heat, Fainting Spells, Police.” It is probably the only philosophy talk in history that needed crowd control.

Existentialism in Plain English

Existentialism is a family of ideas, not a club with a membership card, but almost everyone in the family agrees on three things.

First, you come before your purpose. A hammer is made for hammering. A human being is not made for anything in particular, at least not in a way you can look up. Whatever you turn out to be, you become it along the way.

Second, that makes you free and responsible at the same time. If there is no script, there is also nobody to blame for how you play the part. Existentialists are allergic to the sentence “I had no choice”.

Third, freedom comes with a mood. Anxiety, dread, nausea, a feeling that things are absurd: existentialists take these feelings seriously as information about the human situation, not just as problems to medicate away.

What really sets existentialism apart is the angle. Most philosophy tries to describe the world from above, as if you could float outside your own life and take notes. Existentialists insist on the view from inside: one particular person, in one particular body and one particular century, who has to decide what to do on Tuesday. Kierkegaard put it in a sentence that sums up the whole movement: life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. You never get the full picture before you have to act.

How It Started: An Apricot Cocktail and a Riot

Existentialism as a movement started in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, and its origin story involves a cocktail.

Around the turn of 1933, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron were drinking apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. Aron had just come back from Germany, where he had discovered phenomenology, a new way of doing philosophy that describes experience exactly as it shows up, instead of theorising about what might be behind it. He pointed at his glass and told Sartre that with this method, you can make philosophy out of this cocktail. Sartre, according to Beauvoir, went pale with excitement. Philosophy about cocktails, cafés, waiters and park benches was exactly what he wanted to write. He went to Berlin for a year to study the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and the historian Sarah Bakewell later named her whole book about the movement after that drink: At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails.

The word itself came later. The Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel introduced “existentialism” in 1943, and Sartre at first waved it away. By 1945 he had adopted it, and Sartre and Beauvoir became the only major thinkers who called themselves existentialists without complaining. After the war, the label spread far beyond philosophy. Newspapers used it for the young people in black polo necks who sat in the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and went to jazz cellars until morning. Existentialism became a style before most people had read a page of it.

Then came that lecture in October 1945 and the broken chairs. Why did a philosophy lecture pull a crowd like a rock concert? Timing. France had just come out of the German occupation, where everyone had faced real choices about resistance, collaboration and looking away. A philosophy that said “you are always responsible for what you choose, there are no excuses” landed in a country that knew exactly what that meant.

Existence Precedes Essence, Explained With a Paper Knife

“Existence precedes essence” means that, for humans, being here comes first and being something comes later. You are not born as “a lawyer”, “a loser” or “a good person”. You become whatever you turn out to be through what you do.

Sartre explained it in that 1945 lecture with a very unglamorous object: a paper knife. Before a paper knife exists, someone has already decided what it is for. The craftsman has the idea, the purpose and the production method in mind, and then makes the thing. For the knife, essence (its purpose) comes before existence. Sartre’s point is that people are the reverse. If there is no designer who had you in mind, then there is no blueprint you are supposed to match. You turn up first, and then you define yourself. In his words: “Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.”

This is a bigger claim than it sounds. For two thousand years, most Western philosophy assumed that there is such a thing as human nature, a fixed set of features that tells you what a good human life looks like. Aristotle thought it was in our function as rational animals, Christian theology thought it was in God’s plan. Sartre says that for an atheist there is no such fixed nature to fall back on. That does not mean that humans have no biology or no shared situation. It means that nothing in your biology tells you what to do with your life.

This is also why existentialists get suspicious whenever someone says “that’s just who I am”. For Sartre, “who you are” is not a fixed fact sitting inside you. It is the running total of your choices, and you can still change the total. Simone de Beauvoir used the same logic for the most powerful “that’s just who you are” of her time, the idea that women are naturally a certain way. More on her below.

Facticity: The Cards You Were Dealt

The obvious objection to all this freedom is: but I did not choose where I was born, what body I have or how much money my parents had. Existentialists agree, and they have a word for it: facticity.

Your facticity is everything about you that is simply a given. Your date of birth, your height, your native language, your family, your past, the century you live in. Martin Heidegger described this as being “thrown” into the world: you did not apply for this life, you landed in it, already in the middle of things. Transcendence is the other half: your ability to relate to those facts, interpret them and decide what to do with them. A human being, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset put it, is a kind of centaur, half stuck in nature and half sticking out of it.

Here is how that works in practice. You cannot choose whether you have a stammer. You can choose whether it ends your interest in public speaking. You cannot choose to have been born poor. You can choose what that history means for the next ten years. The facts stay the same; their meaning is up for grabs.

Sartre himself became more modest about freedom as he got older. In a 1969 interview he said that he would now limit freedom to “the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him.” His example was the writer Jean Genet, who grew up as an orphan, was raised to be a thief, and turned into a poet. A man, Sartre said, can always make something out of what is made of him. His friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty had been pushing him in this direction for years with a neat formula: we choose the world, and the world chooses us.

Condemned to Be Free: Why Freedom Feels Like a Burden

If nobody wrote your manual, every choice is on you, and that is why Sartre called us “condemned to be free”. Freedom here is not a holiday. It is a job you cannot quit, because even refusing to choose is a choice.

Sartre borrowed his starting point from Dostoevsky, who has a character suggest that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. Sartre took the line seriously. Without a divine rulebook, there is no outside authority that settles what you should do. You cannot even hide behind your feelings, because you decide how much weight to give them. (Whether morality really collapses without God is a separate fight, which we cover in our post on Dostoevsky and objective morality.)

His favourite example came from occupied France. A student of his had to choose between joining the Free French forces in England, partly to avenge his brother, and staying home with his mother, who lived only for him. Christian ethics, Kantian ethics and gut feeling all gave him advice that pulled in both directions. Sartre’s answer sounds cold at first: “You are free, so choose; in other words, invent.” No theory could make the choice for him. Even asking Sartre was a choice, because the student knew roughly what kind of answer he would get from him.

Sartre had three names for how this feels. Anguish is the weight of knowing that your choice says something about what a human being should be. Abandonment is realising that nobody up there will sign it off for you. Despair is accepting that you can only count on what is in your own power. It sounds bleak. The upside is that nobody else gets to write your story either. If you want the full tour of what “absolute freedom” can and cannot mean, our post on absolute freedom sorts the versions.

The “Dizziness of Freedom”: Why an Existential Crisis Is Normal

An existential crisis is what happens when you suddenly notice that nothing forces your life to be the way it is, and existentialists think that moment is normal, not a malfunction.

Søren Kierkegaard described it a century before Sartre. In The Concept of Anxiety (1844) he compares anxiety to standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down. The drop scares you, but what really makes your head spin is that you could jump. Nothing stops you except you. His summary is one of the best lines in philosophy: “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” That is why existential dread rarely has a clear object. You are not afraid of a spider. You are uneasy about the size of your own options.

Kierkegaard also had the most relatable description of choice paralysis ever written. In Either/Or (1843) one of his characters says: marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, and you will also regret it. He goes on through hanging yourself and laughing at the world, and the regret is always the same. Anyone who has stared at a job offer, a lease or a dating app for too long knows the feeling.

Later existentialists kept the idea that anxiety is useful. It pulls you out of autopilot. For a moment you are not “an employee”, “a son” or “a customer”, just someone who has to decide what to do with a finite life. Heidegger built a whole philosophy around that finitude, which we unpack in our post on Heidegger’s being-towards-death. For Kierkegaard’s darker sequel, see Kierkegaard’s concept of despair, and for his take on the feeling of total boredom, Kierkegaard and ennui.

The practical takeaway is mild but useful: if you are lying awake wondering what any of this is for, you are not broken. You are doing the thing existentialism is about. (If the feeling sticks around and gets heavy, talking to someone is a better next step than reading more Kierkegaard. Our post on philosophy in psychotherapy shows how existential ideas ended up in therapy rooms.)

Nausea: Sartre’s Man Who Stared at a Tree Root

Existential dread has a physical side, and Sartre’s first novel, Nausea (1938), is basically a 200-page description of it.

The hero, Antoine Roquentin, is a historian living in a grey port town called Bouville. Slowly, everyday things start to feel wrong to him: a pebble on the beach, a beer glass, his own hand. The climax happens on a park bench. Roquentin looks at the root of a chestnut tree that sinks into the ground under his seat, and it stops being “a root”. The word falls off. What is left is a black, knotty lump of stuff that is just there, for no reason. In the same moment he realises that the tree, the park and he himself are all, in his word, “superfluous” (in French, de trop, literally “too much”). Nothing in existence has to be there. The essential point, he decides, is contingency. And that, he says, is what the nausea was.

It sounds like a bad trip, and it is a famous scene for good reason. Most people have had a mild version: you repeat a word until it sounds meaningless, or you look at your own face in the mirror for too long and it becomes a stranger’s. The labels that make the world feel tidy slip for a second, and you see that things just are, with no built-in reason. If that moment makes you dizzy, our post on the nothingness meme goes one step further and asks why there is anything at all.

Pop culture has its own Roquentin moments. In a 2014 episode of Rick and Morty (“Rixty Minutes”), Morty comforts his sister with the most existentialist pep talk on television: nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody is going to die. Then he invites her to come and watch TV. That last bit is not in Sartre, but he would have understood it.

Bad Faith: The Waiter Who Tries Too Hard

Bad faith is Sartre’s name for lying to yourself about your own freedom, usually by pretending you are a fixed thing with no choice.

His famous example is a café waiter in Being and Nothingness (1943). The waiter’s movements are “a little too precise, a little too rapid”, he leans towards the customers “a little too eagerly”. Sartre’s diagnosis: “he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” There is nothing wrong with being a waiter. The problem starts when you use a role to escape the fact that you are more than the role. “I had no choice, it’s my job” and “I’m just not a sporty person” are everyday versions of the same move.

Sartre has a second, more uncomfortable example. A woman is on a date with a man whose intentions are fairly obvious. He takes her hand. If she pulls it away, she ends the flirt; if she squeezes back, she commits to something. So she does neither. She leaves her hand in his, but acts as if it were not really hers, as if it were just an object lying there, while she keeps talking about lofty topics. She is free to decide and pretends she is not. Bad faith, in short, is not about lying to other people. It is about lying to yourself so that you do not have to decide.

Bad faith also works in the other direction. You can deny your facticity instead of your freedom: “I could totally run a marathon next month, I just don’t feel like it.” That is pretending to be pure possibility, with no body, no history and no limits. The opposite of bad faith is authenticity: owning your choices as yours, including the bad ones, and owning your limits too. We take the idea apart, dinosaur nuggets included, in Sartre and the true self.

The Look, the Keyhole and Why “Hell Is Other People”

Sartre’s most quoted line, “hell is other people”, makes sense only once you know his theory of the Look: the experience of suddenly being seen by someone else.

His example in Being and Nothingness is wonderfully grubby. A jealous man is peeping through a keyhole at a door. While he does it, he is completely absorbed in the scene; there is no “me” in his experience, just the room and what is happening in it. Then he hears footsteps in the corridor behind him. Suddenly he sees himself as the other person would see him: a man bent over a keyhole. That is shame, and it shows something important. Other people have the power to turn you into an object, a “peeping Tom”, a “type”, a thing with a label, and you can never fully control what they see.

That is the engine of Sartre’s play No Exit (1944). Three dead strangers, Garcin, Inez and Estelle, wait for their torturer in a hotel-like room in hell. Nobody comes. They slowly realise that they are each other’s punishment, because each one needs the others to see him or her in a flattering way, and none of them will. Garcin wants to be seen as brave, not as the coward he was. The others refuse. Forever.

Sartre later complained that people took the line to mean that relationships are always poisonous. In a spoken preface to a 1964 recording of the play he said he meant something narrower: “if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.” The hell is letting other people’s judgement define you. Today it has an obvious modern version: the like count. C.M. Black has a whole post on the play, Existentialism for the Edgelords, if you want to stay in that hotel room a little longer.

Heidegger and “the They”: Why You Enjoy What Everyone Enjoys

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) gave existentialism its most useful concept for everyday life: “the They” (in German, das Man), the anonymous crowd that quietly decides how “one” lives.

Think about how often you do something because that is what one does. One goes to university after school. One has a wedding with a DJ. One watches the series everyone is talking about and has an opinion about the finale. Heidegger’s description still reads like a comment on social media trends: we take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see and judge as they see and judge; we even find things shocking the way they find them shocking. And who is “they”? Nobody in particular. In his words, everyone is the other, and no one is himself.

Heidegger does not say the They is evil. You need shared habits to get through a day. The danger is that it is comfortable. It takes the weight of decision off your shoulders, and you can drift for years without noticing that you never actually chose your life. What pulls you out, for Heidegger, is anxiety and, above all, facing the fact that you will die. Nobody can die your death for you, so nobody can live your life for you either. That is where his idea of authenticity comes from: owning your life as yours, instead of living it on the They’s settings.

One honest footnote: Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 and never properly reckoned with it in public. Philosophers still argue how deeply that damages his work. Nobody argues that it was fine.

Simone de Beauvoir: Your Freedom Needs Other People’s Freedom

Simone de Beauvoir answered the biggest worry about existentialism, that it is just a fancy excuse for selfishness, and her answer is simple: you cannot want to be free without wanting others to be free too.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) she argues that the absence of a cosmic rulebook does not mean anything goes. Values do not fall from the sky; they arise between people. My freedom is empty if I live in a world where everyone else is treated as an object, because the projects I care about only mean something in a world shared with other free people. Her formula: “to will oneself free is also to will others free.” She also corrects Camus on a point of mood. Life, she says, is not absurd but ambiguous: its meaning is never fixed, which means it always has to be won.

Two years later she turned the same tools on the question of gender. The Second Sex (1949) contains the line usually translated as “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. It is “existence precedes essence” aimed at everything society tells women they naturally are: emotional, maternal, meant for the home. Beauvoir showed in hundreds of pages how those “natural” traits are produced by upbringing, law, money and expectations, and how women are pushed into the role of the Other, defined by men instead of defining themselves. The Catholic Church was not amused and put the book on its list of forbidden books in 1956. C.M. Black covers Beauvoir in Objectification: Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist idea.

The Forerunners: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche

Three 19th century writers did the groundwork for existentialism before the word existed: a Danish Christian, a Russian novelist and a German who announced the death of God.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813 to 1855) is usually called the father of existentialism, which would have annoyed him, because he hated systems. He wrote against Hegel, who explained world history as one grand logical development, and asked: fine, but what am I supposed to do with my life? For Kierkegaard, truth that matters is not something you can know from the outside, like a fact about the boiling point of water. It has to be lived, which is what he meant by “truth is subjectivity”. He also warned against hiding in groups, with the blunt line “the crowd is untruth”. He described three ways of living: the aesthetic (chasing pleasure and interesting experiences), the ethical (commitment, duty, marriage) and the religious, which requires a “leap” of faith that no argument can make for you. Our post on Kierkegaard on faith and truth explains the three stages and the leap.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote the first great existentialist anti-hero. The narrator of Notes from Underground (1864) is a bitter ex-official who refuses to be reasonable. If science ever proves that twice two makes four and all our choices can be calculated, he says, then humans will smash the calculation just to prove they are free. He even admits that twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming little thing too. It is petty, funny and very modern: the right to be irrational as the last proof that you are not a piano key.

Friedrich Nietzsche provided the cosmic setting. In The Gay Science (1882) a madman lights a lantern in the bright morning, runs into the marketplace and shouts that God is dead, “and we have killed him.” The people laugh at him. He decides he has come too early. Nietzsche was not celebrating. He was asking what happens to morality, meaning and purpose once the old foundation is gone, and his answer was that humans would have to create values themselves. That is the existentialist question in its purest form, and his Übermensch is his attempt at an answer.

Who Were the Existentialists? (And Who Refused the Label)

The existentialists were a loose group of mostly European thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries, and several of the famous ones did not want to be called existentialists at all.

Sartre himself sorted them into two camps in his 1945 lecture. On one side the Christian existentialists, among them the German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. On the other the atheists, in which he put Heidegger and himself. Beauvoir belongs with Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who wrote about the body and perception, is usually on the list as well. Later writers carried the ideas further: the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon used them to describe how colonialism damages the way people see themselves, and Sartre wrote the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). We have a post on Frantz Fanon too.

Then there are the refusers. Heidegger rejected the existentialist reading of his work in 1946, although Being and Time is one of the movement’s main sources. He thought Sartre had misread him and was still stuck in old questions about human subjects. Albert Camus was even blunter. In an interview with Les Nouvelles littéraires on 15 November 1945 he said: “No, I am not an existentialist,” and added that he and Sartre were always surprised to see their names linked. Camus had his own philosophy, the absurd, and the difference matters.

Camus, the Absurd and the Friendship That Broke

Albert Camus is the writer most people associate with existentialism, and the one who argued most with it.

Camus and Sartre met in 1943 at the premiere of Sartre’s play The Flies, and for a while they were the stars of Paris. Camus had just published two books that defined his thinking. The Stranger (1942) opens with one of the most famous first lines in literature, in which Meursault reports that his mother died today, or maybe yesterday, he is not sure. Meursault later shoots a man on a beach, and at his trial the prosecution spends a strange amount of time on the fact that he did not cry at his mother’s funeral. Camus summed up the novel years later in a preface: in our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death. Meursault is condemned less for the killing than for refusing to perform the feelings society expects.

The second book, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), gives the theory. The absurd is the clash between our demand for meaning and the silence of the universe. Camus thought the only honest response is to keep that clash in view: no leap into religion, no leap into a political utopia, and no giving up either. Sisyphus, rolling his rock up the mountain forever, becomes his hero, and the book ends with the line every philosophy meme page knows: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. We explain what he meant in One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy and in our guide What Is Absurdism?

The friendship ended in 1952. Camus had published The Rebel (1951), a book against revolutionary violence and the idea that history justifies anything. Sartre’s magazine Les Temps modernes ran a harsh review by Sartre’s protégé Francis Jeanson. Camus answered with an angry letter addressed not to “dear Sartre” but to “the editor”. Sartre replied with a long, brutal piece that ended the friendship for good. Underneath the insults was a real question that still splits people: is violence acceptable if it serves a better future? Sartre came to say yes, Camus said no. Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident in 1960, aged 46. (Our post on the Camus trolley problem meme has the details on that car.) Sartre was offered the same Nobel Prize in 1964 and turned it down, saying a writer should not allow himself to become an institution.

Existentialism vs Nihilism vs Absurdism

All three start from the same bad news, that the universe does not come with built-in meaning, and then go in different directions.

	Starting point	Response	One-line version
Nihilism	There are no objective values or meanings.	Often stops there, or treats the loss as a crisis to get through.	“Nothing matters.”
Existentialism	There is no meaning given in advance.	You create meaning and values through your choices, and you are responsible for them.	“Nothing is given, so you have to make it.”
Absurdism	We demand meaning and the universe stays silent. The clash is the absurd.	Camus: do not fake an answer, do not give up. Live with the clash and revolt against it.	“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Camus thought existentialists cheated a little, because they leap from the absurd to some new source of meaning (God for the religious ones, history or freedom for others). He called that kind of leap “philosophical suicide”. Existentialists could answer that Camus’s revolt is itself a choice that gives life meaning, so he is closer to them than he admits. If you want the full fight, we have three posts on it: Absurdism vs Existentialism, What Is Nihilism? and Are Absurdists Just Nihilists With Stockholm Syndrome?

Existentialism in Books, Films and TV

A lot of people meet existentialism in fiction before they meet it in philosophy, which is fitting, because the existentialists themselves wrote novels and plays.

• Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915). Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant insect, and his main worry is that he will be late for work. Kafka was not part of the movement, but the existentialists read him as one of their own: a man trapped in a role so tightly that even turning into a bug does not get him out of it.
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953). Two men wait by a tree for someone who never comes, and fill the time with chat, hats and half-hearted plans to hang themselves. Usually filed under “theatre of the absurd”, it is the closest thing to a stage version of Camus.
• Sartre, Nausea (1938), and Camus, The Stranger (1942). The two classic novels, both short.
• TV. Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman and The Good Place are often discussed in existentialist terms, and the last one even has a character who teaches moral philosophy. Whenever a show asks “what are we doing all this for?” and refuses an easy answer, the existentialists are in the writers’ room.

Our philosophy reading list for beginners has more starting points if you want to go beyond this topic.

The Case Against Existentialism

Existentialism had powerful enemies, and some of their objections are still good questions.

The Church. In 1948 the Vatican put all of Sartre’s works on the Index of Forbidden Books. For Catholic critics, a philosophy that starts from “God does not exist” and makes the individual the source of values was simply dangerous. Christian existentialists like Marcel had their own answer: freedom and anxiety are real, but they point towards faith rather than away from it.

The Marxists. Communist critics said existentialism was a philosophy for middle-class individuals who can afford to sit in cafés worrying about freedom. A worker on a 12-hour shift, they argued, is not “condemned to be free” in any meaningful sense. Sartre took the criticism seriously, moved towards Marxism and spent the 1950s trying to combine the two. His later idea of freedom “in a situation” is much more modest than the early slogans.

Sartre himself. He later distanced himself from the 1945 lecture, the very text that made existentialism famous. It remained a bestseller anyway and is still how most people meet the movement.

The structuralists. In the 1960s a new generation of French thinkers, starting with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who attacked Sartre in The Savage Mind (1962), argued that people are shaped far more by language, culture and social structures than existentialism admits. The free, choosing individual started to look like an illusion. Michel Foucault, who learned a lot from Heidegger, went on to write about how institutions produce the very selves that think they are free. Existentialism went out of fashion in universities, although it never went out of fashion with readers.

The fair summary is that existentialism probably overrates how free we are and underrates how much we are shaped by our surroundings. It is still hard to beat as a description of what it feels like, from the inside, to have to make a decision.

Three Things Existentialism Is Not

Existentialism has a gloomy reputation, mostly thanks to black polo necks and French cigarettes. Three common misunderstandings are worth clearing up.

It is not “nothing matters”. That is nihilism. Existentialism says the opposite: because nothing is decided in advance, your choices matter a great deal.

It is not “do whatever you want”. Sartre argued that when you choose for yourself, you are also sketching what you think a human being should be. His line was that we always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all. Beauvoir added that you cannot want your own freedom without wanting it for others. Freedom comes with the full weight of responsibility attached.

It is not only for depressed Parisians. Sartre called his lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” for a reason. He wanted to show that a philosophy of freedom puts people in charge of their own lives, which he saw as optimistic. Not everyone agreed, but the crowd that broke the chairs to hear it seems to have been curious, not despairing.

How to Use Existentialism in Everyday Life

You do not need to read 700 pages of Being and Nothingness to get something out of existentialism. Five small habits capture most of it.

1. Translate “I have to” into “I choose to”. “I have to go to this wedding” becomes “I choose to go, because I care more about my cousin than about my Saturday.” Sometimes the sentence still feels true. Sometimes you notice you do not actually choose it.
2. Check where your “one” comes from. When you catch yourself thinking “one should”, ask Heidegger’s question: says who? It may still be a good idea. But then it is your idea.
3. Use your anxiety as a signal. Kierkegaard’s dizziness often shows up exactly where a real decision is waiting. Instead of only trying to calm it, ask what choice it is pointing at.
4. Separate facts from verdicts. “I failed the exam” is facticity. “I am stupid” is a verdict you chose, and you can choose a different one.
5. Do not let the Look run your life. Other people will always see you in their own way. That is their business. The question is whether you can stand behind what you did if nobody liked it.

None of this is therapy, and it is not meant to be. It is a way of noticing where your freedom actually is, which is usually in smaller places than the big slogans suggest.

Is Existentialism Still Useful Today?

Yes, mostly because the questions it asks never went away: what to do with your life, who decides, and how to live with the fact that it ends.

The big existentialist ideas show up in places that never mention Sartre. “Be authentic” is everywhere in self-help, usually without the responsibility part. Existential therapy, developed by psychotherapists such as Rollo May and Irvin Yalom, works with what Yalom called the four “givens” of human life: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, built his own approach, logotherapy, around the search for meaning. His book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) contains a line any existentialist could have written: everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

And every meme about staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m. asking “what am I doing with my life” is, technically, existentialism with worse lighting. The most useful part is the reframing. An existential crisis says that the old answers you were handed have stopped working. Existentialism says: fine, that is your cue to choose new ones yourself, and to own them.

Where to Start Reading

Start short, then go big only if you get hooked.

• Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946). The famous lecture, about 50 pages. The paper knife, the student and “condemned to be free” are all in there.
• Camus, The Stranger (1942). A novel you can read in an afternoon, and the best way to feel the absurd before you think about it.
• Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café (2016). The whole movement told as a group biography, with the apricot cocktails, the fights and the love affairs. The most entertaining introduction there is.
• Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864). Short, angry and surprisingly funny.
• For the brave: Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, then Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety. Save Being and Nothingness and Being and Time for a long winter.

Still dizzy? Start with the clash that Camus thought existentialists dodged: Is absurdism just existentialism with good vibes?