I picked up my first Camus book at a thrift store for like two dollars, and if I'm being honest, it was mostly because I thought carrying around a philosophy book would make me look interesting at coffee shops. Shallow reason, great outcome. About thirty pages into The Myth of Sisyphus I put it down and just stared at the wall for a while — not in a dramatic way, but in a "oh no, these questions are actually about me" way. Why was I doing things that didn't matter to me? Who'd decided this was the life I wanted? The existentialists had been poking at those exact same questions for over a century, and what they came back with was a lot more practical than the whole black-turtleneck-and-espresso stereotype would have you believe.
Look, the whole thing boils down to one pretty wild claim: existence precedes essence. You weren't born with a predetermined purpose. There's no cosmic blueprint telling you who you should be. You exist first, and then — through your choices, actions, and commitments — you define what you are. This is both terrifying and liberating, and understanding it changes everything.
Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, is often called the father of existentialism. Writing against the systematic philosophy of Hegel — who believed all of reality could be understood as a rational process — Kierkegaard insisted that the most important truths are subjective. What matters isn't abstract knowledge but how you personally relate to your own existence.
Kierkegaard was obsessed with what he called "the leap" — the moment when you must choose without certainty. Should you marry? Should you believe in God? Should you commit to a career? No amount of rational analysis can give you a definitive answer. At some point, you have to leap. And the anxiety you feel standing at that edge — what Kierkegaard called "the dizziness of freedom" — is not a weakness but a sign that you understand your situation honestly.
Then Sartre comes along and basically takes everything Kierkegaard was circling around and cranks it up to a level that's honestly kind of uncomfortable. For Sartre, human beings are "condemned to be free." There is no God, no human nature, no predetermined script. You are nothing but what you make of yourself through your choices.
This freedom comes with absolute responsibility, and Sartre observed that most people flee from it through what he called mauvaise foi — bad faith. Bad faith is the habit of lying to yourself about your freedom. "I have no choice," you say — but Sartre would reply that you always have a choice, even if every option is unpleasant. I'll be honest: the first time I read his example about the waiter, it stung. I'd spent years performing the role of "productive employee" with that same exaggerated precision, pretending I was just built that way rather than admitting I was choosing it every day. My coworker actually caught me doing it once — she said, "you talk about your job like it's a life sentence, but nobody locked the door." Oof. She wasn't wrong. The waiter who performs his role so perfectly is in bad faith because he's pretending to be a waiter the way a stone is a stone, rather than acknowledging that he's a free being who chooses to play the role of waiter each day.
Albert Camus, Sartre's contemporary and sometimes-friend, focused on what he called the absurd: the collision between our desperate need for meaning and the universe's stubborn silence. Life has no inherent meaning, Camus argued — but that doesn't lead to despair. It leads to revolt. I've always found Camus the most human of the three, honestly — chain-smoking outsider in Paris, never quite fitting in with the intellectual establishment. Sartre was building systems; Camus was just trying to figure out how to live.
In his most famous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus imagines the Greek hero condemned to eternally push a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down. Most people read this as a parable of futility. But Camus concludes: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." The act of pushing itself — the conscious engagement with life despite its absurdity — is enough. Meaning isn't something you find. It's something you create through the quality of your engagement with the world. That's actually a more demanding idea than any religion or ideology. There's no finish line, no cosmic reward, no "it'll all make sense in the end." Just you, fully present, deciding that the pushing matters because you say it does. That's either deeply inspiring or deeply exhausting, depending on the day.
Here's the thing most people get wrong about existentialism. They assume it's this nihilistic, hand-wringing philosophy and stop there. Strip away the gloomy reputation and you're left with something almost bracing: radical responsibility paired with creative freedom. It asks you to stop outsourcing your meaning to institutions, traditions, or other people's expectations and to take ownership of the fact that you are the author of your own life. We arguably need this more now than Sartre ever did — we're drowning in curated feeds and algorithm-approved life paths, and the idea that you might just stop and choose for yourself feels almost countercultural at this point. What really gets me, though, is watching people turn existentialism itself into an aesthetic — like, you can't just post a black-and-white Sartre quote on Instagram and call it a day. The whole philosophy demands you actually do something with the freedom it describes, not just vibe with it.
This is harder than it sounds. Existential anxiety — the unease that comes from recognizing your own freedom — is a universal human experience. And honestly? I think a lot of the self-help industry is built on selling people shortcuts around exactly this anxiety — five-step plans to "find your purpose" as if purpose were something hiding under a couch cushion. The existentialists would say: stop looking, start building. Confronting this anxiety honestly is the only path to an authentic life. The alternative is sleepwalking through an existence shaped by forces you never chose.
If existentialist ideas resonate with you, it may say something important about your personality. People drawn to existentialism tend to value autonomy, authenticity, and intellectual courage. Discovering which philosopher matches your personality can help clarify whether existentialism is truly your natural philosophical home or whether other traditions might speak to you just as powerfully.
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