Meaning is at the heart of existential therapy: being born into the world without predetermined meaning, and creating (or failing to create) personal meaning as we go through life. A maxim of existential philosophy is “existence precedes essence,” from Jean-Paul...
I became an existentialist in high school. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, just that I was caught up in what the point of being alive was. That question and similar ones (“Why are humans the way we are?” “Am I real?”) drove me for the next 20 years. Then, when...
Most people have some sort of existential crisis around authenticity, 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...
The characters on Six Feet Under are contending with the biggest questions we have: Why am I here? What’s the point of life? Of death? Am I a good person? Do I know how to love? Their internal and outward struggles ground the plot in existential matters of...
When we’re short on connection, we end up isolated. The pandemic accelerated an already-growing epidemic of loneliness in the US. According to that linked Harvard study, chances are that at least 1 in 3 people reading this are experiencing serious loneliness—a lack of...
