How can you not be existential?

Why should you be depressed by existentialist thought?

Complete freedom, depressing? Maybe, for the Pinks and Drones, but not for the Real Bipeds.

 

cause i know why we exist

 

How can someone not exist?

 

I think its that people are afraid to think about life and all that, so they just go on thoughtless. I've asked several of my friends about things like their religious fews, and all I get is and I don't know. Not everyone thinks.

 

Many Persons Are So Busy And Ignore What They Are

 

My answer to this would be that the word 'existential' refers - for me - to a concern for what it is to be; a mode of being; a commitment to this kind of awareness. Many of us simply aren't concerned in such a way, and instead busy ourselves with distractions away from such a fundamental examination of lived experience and the uncertainties and anxieties attendant upon it. Personally, I wouldn't fault that - they seem happy enough...

 

my point is, i have spent a lot of time going up to people and asking them how they feel about the nature of reality and existence. and most people just do not want to think about it at all. it doesn't even cross their minds. they won't let it.

personally, i think every belief system can be connected and harmonized with every other one. but whatever, not many other people feel that way.



i agree 100%...

 

Thats so true, i tried explaining epistemology to my girlfriend and i think as soon as i said the words "knowledge" and "how do we know" she lost interest

 

I know! And it's not like it's hard or anything. Existentialists will say that the nature of reality and existence is that it is absurd and meaningless beyond the meaning we give it.

Everyone is existential. But we are not all existentialists. They are different things entirely.

 

what if fatalism and existentialism could exist simultaneously? that being said, with a complex enough god, an individual could have that free will junk, but it'd still be simple enough to be completely controlled in a sense that its inner workings denote what it will do. like if you were omniscient and omnipotent, you'd know the exact activity of every atom, of every electron, of every q-thingy, of every neuron and be able to predict by way of physics and biology every last thing that'll happen in the universe to the exact detail. and if you create this entire complex world down to the most minute detail, you can be in complete control of everything that will ever happen, while never having to move a finger after creation.

 

Existential Horrors
Dillon Walsh

What is existentialism? There is no clear answer. Many of the authors who wrote the works which are today considered the bases of existentialism would not have considered themselves to be existentialists, nor would they be likely to respond to such a title if it were given to them. Existentialism is not so different from traditional philosophy as most practitioners would have you believe. It’s just another conceptual groping for meaning in the void, with the somewhat depressing twist of not finding it there. If some god both exists and is alive, he isn’t speaking, and we’re left like the two mean in Waiting for Godot, never fulfilling our cause, never abandoning it for hope fulfillment will come later if we persist. Existentialists, rather than await meaning they deem unlikely to come, create it themselves, and thus we have the philosophy.
If there is no god, no standard moral compass, no pure ideology we should live be, then we are truly free. We are conscious, and we can do whatever we wish (hopefully without hurting others). Existentialists for the most part believe in a life policy of absolute freedom up until the point where your actions begin to affect others or inhibit their freedoms in some way. Existentialists are stereotypically apathetic but honest, an archetype probably stemming from the character of Mersault in Albert Camus’s vastly important novel The Stranger. The character, when asked by a girl he’s been sleeping with if he loves her responds “No, probably not.” However, he agrees disinterestedly to marry her. Only when faced with his death for nonchalantly murdering a man known only as “The Arab,” does he take any interest at all in his own life, and wishes only that those present at his execution would hate him, so that his presence on earth would matter at all. This is the underlying root of existentialism: What does it all matter?
Authenticity is a key point of existentialism. The model of Mersault does not care much for the world, but at least he’s honest about it. From Holden’s hatred for all the “Phony” people he sees around him in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, to the unreliable narrator in Fight Club labeling himself as a “Tourist” when he visits support meetings for ailments he doesn’t have, authenticity is important and non-authentic behavior, action and thought are referred to as “Bad faith.”
Existentialism isn’t really anything, other than a label attached to the scribbled thoughts of people trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. Most people don’t think about the nature of the universe. Those who do, we call existentialists. They bum everybody out except for other existentialists, and often times people don’t understand what they’re talking about. This makes the existentialists get more depressed and spend more time thinking about the nature of the universe. It is a cycle which will surely continue for countless generations. Until we all die.


^paper i wrote for a "literature of the existentialists" class