Surviving an Existential Crisis with Six Feet Under, Part 2: Identity

Watching it when it was new, I thought Six Feet Under was the best television ever made. And in some ways I still do, 20 years later. It wasn’t until I understood myself and my passions better that I realized much of what I love about this show is that everyone in the Fisher family is having an existential crisis for pretty much the whole show. 

These are characters contending with the biggest questions we have: Who am I? Why am I here? What’s the point of life? Of death? What happens after I die? Am I a good person? Am I loved? Do I know how to love?

Their internal and outward struggles ground the plot in existential matters of selfhood, intersubjectivity or connection, and meaning. So just for fun I’m breaking down, existential therapy wise, the main characters’ struggles. In the first article in this series, I talked about connection. Today I’m talking about Nate Fisher’s existential identity crisis. 

Nate’s existential identity crisis

Identity is what makes you you and not any other person: your experiences and memories, the interpersonal roles you take on, your social locations, your desires and interests, your choices and actions, your values. Identity is more than the sum of all these things, a sense of self that cannot be simply defined by any of its pieces. 

We ask ourselves about our identity all the time: 

What do I want?

Am I a good person? 

Why am I here?

Why do I suffer?

And of course, Who am I, really?

Nate, the eldest son of a funeral director, is in a constant identity crisis throughout Six Feet Under. He has drifted through life relying on his privilege, looks, and charm. In the opening episode, Nate sums up his life to date: 

“I live in a shitty apartment which was supposed to be temporary. I work at a job which was also supposed to be temporary, until I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life, which is apparently nothing. I have lots of sex but haven’t had a relationship last more than a couple of months. … I’m going to be one of those losers who ends up on his deathbed saying, where did my life go?” (season 1, episode 1)

Nate says this to his sister as they are both coping with the immediate aftermath of their father’s death in a car accident. After this first episode, Nate quickly finds himself both living back at home and deciding to be a funeral director after all, a role he has resisted his entire life, simply because his father left half the business to him in the will. 

This characterizes Nate’s existence: being thrown into situations and going with it because that’s the path of least resistance. He’s exerted very little active will in defining who he is. And that’s why he spends 4 seasons wrestling with identity. 

Existential therapy approaches these questions about identity through the idea of authenticity, an ongoing process of accepting the reality of your existence and taking responsibility for making something of it. This process helps you move through the world in a state that accurately reflects your values and choices, rather than merely acting out your conditioning or performative roles. Identity is something continually defined through authentic, consistent actions; it can remain constant, and it can change. 

Nate’s identity crisis seemingly starts to resolve when he chooses to take on the family business after his father’s death, but is this a resolution or a deferral? A few episodes later, he wonders if he made the choice for all the wrong reasons (to satisfy his mother, because his father ordained it). And he spends much of the rest of the show grappling with this choice and what it means for his identity.

Being thrown into unexpected situations is part of life. Existentialists often talk about this “thrownness,” which starts with our birth into family, community, culture, and sociopolitical conditions we did not choose. We can do what Nate does, which is look everywhere for guidance but within—handing our agency to others—or we can recognize our freedom to choose how to interact with the contexts we are thrown into. 

Deciding to be a funeral director helps Nate start to think that perhaps he is a good person, because he’s doing good work. Finding self-worth in the work we choose can move us closer to an authentic life, if that work takes on true meaning for us. But this budding comfort is thrown to the wind in season 2, when he finds out he’s accidentally gotten an old friend pregnant and can’t manage to tell the truth to his fiancée. That relationship implodes when he finally comes clean, unsurprisingly. Shortly after, Nate finds out he has to undergo brain surgery to treat an arteriovenous malformation. As you can imagine, facing death brings up these identity questions all over again (Who am I? What do I want? Am I a good person?)

Fast forward to the next season, and we find out Nate decided to marry Lisa, the friend, and be a father to their child. Nate again uses this opportunity to try to answer one of those questions: yes, I can be a good person by showing up for this child and her mother. His commitment to fatherhood is clear, as is his commitment to trying to be a good partner. It’s just as clear that he’s miserable in the relationship. He is working against his true desire to give Lisa what she wants and stabilize his identity as a good person. 

Nate’s way of contending with his identity is an example of what the existentialist philosopher Jean-Luc Sartre called bad faith, a form of self-deception by which we deny our inherent right to choose our actions and path. Nate becomes a funeral director because of his father’s expectation, a husband because of his friend’s expectation, a father because of his family’s and society’s expectations. He is living in three roles, none of which he’s chosen for himself but all of which he works to perform well. But a performance is not the same as an authentic movement to claim responsibility for his choices and what they reflect about who he is. 

And the consequence is severe. While catching up with his former fiancée over lunch, Nate explains: 

“You just have to work at it, every day. Can’t expect everything to be perfect all the time. And if there’s a moment when I feel like I’m in prison, I just have to think about all those moments when it feels safe. And remind myself that those moments outweigh the prison moments.” (season 3, episode 5)

Trading an occasional feeling of safety for “moments when I feel like I’m in prison?” No thank you.

Allen Wheelis talks about trading freedom for safety in How People Change. He speaks of freedom and necessity as opposing forces we use to make, and justify, our choices. Nate feels compelled by arbitrary necessity to function as a family man, but he was free to choose otherwise. He is aware he’s given up his freedom, but has done so to reduce internal conflict and tension. Conflict reduction is not necessarily a good thing, though. He’s traded his own agency and pursuit of joy to avoid the inherent anxiety of choosing his own life. Existentialism proposes that having freedom inevitably comes with anxiety. On the whole, that anxiety is actually a good thing for us. It drives us forward and motivates us to find the authentic path. 

At this point, Nate is on his way to becoming much like his father, because he postponed identity development. Nate rebelled as a teen and took off as soon as he could to avoid this very outcome. But rather than progressing beyond this defining against—which is still a defining by—he avoided cultivating himself, and so ends up exactly back where he started: in a prison of inauthenticity. 

Later on in season 3, Nate’s wife Lisa dies, freeing him from the marriage — but Nate never finds resolution around this crisis. He repeats the cycle with Brenda (his fiancée from season 1)—marriage, parenthood—and finds himself unhappy again. He decides to leave her for someone else just before he dies from a complication from his brain surgery at the end of season 4. The moment he realizes he can choose a different kind of relationship with a woman, which happens during his final hospital stay, may be the most authentic moment he has. 

One quirky feature of Six Feet Under, a show set in a funeral home, is that those who have died are still around for those who are living to talk to. At the end of season 5, Nate’s sister Claire is sitting in a park where he was buried, talking to him. She’s lamenting the state of her own aimless life (more on that in my next article). He says, “You want to know a secret? I spent my whole life being scared, scared of not being ready, of not being right, of not being who I should be. And where did it get me?” (emphasis mine; season 5, episode 12)

I can’t wrap the article up any better than that. 

Are you having an existential identity crisis?

Most people have some sort of existential identity crisis, often but not always in our teen years, when our brains have developed enough that we find ourselves thrown into a complex world full of risks and choices. It is during these years when we first explore our own agency (often demanding to be “treated like an adult”). And often we have more than one crisis, as our lives grow and change and get ever more complex. Do we need to always know exactly what we’re about and what our authentic path is? No. But living authentically will give you more meaning, more joy, more connection with the world, and more satisfaction. Ask me how I know. 

So here are some places to start when you want to move into your own authenticity. (I wish this word had a verb form, because it truly is an active, ongoing process. Authentifying? It’s not in Merriam Webster, but a quick internet search shows that it is considered a word by some.)

• Start with the roles that have been assigned to you so far in life. Child, sibling, student, friend are ones many of us have been given. How strongly do you identify yourself with these roles? How much of your time and energy do you use to fulfill the expectations of them? Certainly we can find aspects of authenticity in the roles we play, but most likely there are also ways in which you are performing these roles that don’t align with your preferences or visions for yourself.

  When you have a moment to pause and consider your day, ask yourself: What did I do today that felt draining or made me resentful? What did I do that filled my cup? Try to leave aside the typical stresses of work and daily obligations like feeding yourself here. Instead, think about the interactions you have with others and the activities you are able to choose for yourself (even if the choice was to commit to something for someone else). Do this for a week or two and start looking for patterns that will show you how you are performing and who you might want to become instead.

  Consider your cultural identities as well. All marginalized groups, in one way or another, have identities forced upon us by our Western society. This may come in the form of ableism, white supremacy, sexism, transphobia, or something else. Most of us end up internalizing some of those stigmas as a survival strategy. Cultural identity development involves challenging what we’ve been taught about ourselves, rejecting the harmful narratives, and developing positive narratives about who we are in resistance to the dominant paradigm.

• Explore your personality using a tool designed for reflection and increased awareness. The Enneagram, the Myers-Briggs, the Big Five, astrology—there are plenty of options to choose from. This process might reflect things you already understood, confirm things you suspected, and challenge you with things you are surprised to read but ring true. The point isn’t to take this information at face value (or buy into any one of these models), but to use it as a springboard to start making some choices about who you are becoming. Ask yourself:

  How do I want to embody these aspects of myself? What did I find is true but don’t like about myself, and how do I want to change that? Does this information align with, or challenge, the way I am currently living my life? This is where you can start to internally dig into performance vs. authenticity, the ongoing, active process of choosing who and how we are in each moment of our lives and, in recognizing our freedom to do so, taking responsibility for ourselves. 

• Find your values. You are already living according to some values, even if you don’t know what they are. The thing is, they might not be your own, but your parents’, friends’, teachers’, society’s. So start by looking at what you spend your time on and why. Did you prioritize having some down time this weekend or going to a friend’s party you RSVPed for, even though you were tired? Why? Did you pursue higher education, and if so, for what reason? Is there some activity you often want to do? Why? And what do you do instead? Make a project of observing yourself for a week or two. Write down what you learn about the choices you make. They try to identify a value in that choice (you might discover that some of those values are not ones you want to uphold). Don’t just use an abstract word—define the word. Freedom doesn't mean to me the same thing it means to you.

  Next comes learning to live by your values. I’m writing this like it’s easy, but I know it isn’t. Living our values often creates tension in our current relationships and requires taking a hard look at what we’re doing with our time. But change is inevitable, and claiming agency over how and when we change is part of choosing authenticity. Living a values-aligned life can mean making both small and big changes. So start with small ones. Did you find, for instance, that you went to that friend’s party out of social obligation that you were taught by your family, and in making that choice you sacrificed your own need for care? Are you filling your time with activities that your family approves of, rather than something that lights you up? Practicing on this scale will help you build the confidence to live your values on a larger scale.