Existential authenticity is the ongoing process of living in harmony with what we know to be most true about ourselves, our values, and our clear-eyed sense of reality. To do this, you’ll need to understand your beliefs, desires, needs, and personality traits. You can...
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...
