Existentialism Without the Absurdity

Existentialism has become, in popular culture, a synonym for gloom. The existentialist is imagined as a chain-smoking Frenchman in a raincoat, muttering about the absurdity of it all. But this caricature misses the rigor and, paradoxically, the hope that characterizes much existentialist thought.

Jean-Paul Sartre declared that "existence precedes essence," by which he meant that human beings are not born with a predetermined purpose or nature. We are radically free, and that freedom is both our burden and our dignity. For Sartre, this was not a cause for despair but a call to authenticity: we must choose our values and take responsibility for those choices, rather than hiding behind determinism, social convention, or religious doctrine.

Simone de Beauvoir extended existentialism into ethics and politics. In *The Ethics of Ambiguity*, she argued that freedom is not an individual escape from the world but a social project. To be free, others must be free too. Oppression is not merely a political problem but an existential one: it denies both the oppressor and the oppressed the full exercise of their freedom.

Albert Camus, often misread as a nihilist, was in fact a thinker of limits. The question he posed in *The Myth of Sisyphus* was not "why should we live?" but "how should we live, given that the universe offers no guarantees?" His answer was not suicide, as is sometimes claimed, but revolt: a lucid, unwavering commitment to life in the face of uncertainty.

What Existentialism Offers the Skeptic

For those drawn to antinatalism or pessimism, existentialism provides something these positions sometimes lack: an affirmative framework. If existence has no predetermined meaning, then meaning is not discovered but created. The void is not a verdict; it is a space.

This is not optimism. It does not deny suffering or death. But it refuses to treat these as decisive arguments against engagement. The existentialist does not ask "why bother?" and expect an answer from the universe. The question is itself the beginning of the answer.

A Living Tradition

Existentialism is not a historical curiosity. Its concerns—authenticity, bad faith, freedom, responsibility—are alive in contemporary debates about identity, work, technology, and mental health. The pressure to optimize one's life, to treat oneself as a project to be managed, is a form of bad faith: it pretends that value can be outsourced to metrics, algorithms, or social approval.

The existentialist alternative is not easier. It demands that we face our choices without alibis. But it also insists that we are never merely victims of circumstance. Even in confinement, Sartre wrote, we remain free in how we relate to that confinement.