If you do, try to define it. Why are you here? What do you want to do? What are your desires powered by? Why are you so convinced there is an actual reason that you exist?
Human existence is not justified by anything other than itself. Most likely, you who find your presence in this world, are not able to attribute any necessity or reason to this fact. However, in the face of nothingness (that is, when you are faced with the lack of meaning in your life), you find that you are somehow "condemned" (responsible, let's say) to give meaning to your existence. (this is what Sartre said, please don't come for me). Anyway, all in all, to me, at least, it seems quite interesting and fascinating. After all, you have the opportunity to shape your own existence and essence. To better explain why I think it's pretty cool, I'll give you an example.
Let's compare ourselves to a glass. The difference between you and a glass is the difference between existence and essence. According to Jean Paul Sartre's theory (the guy that said you are basically a loser who is not capable of giving meaning to his own existence), in the case of the glass, the essence precedes the existence. Why? Well, the glass exists, right? But before it existed, it was thought, designed to contain liquids. So, before being an existence, the glass was a concept, an essence. On the other hand, in your case, existence precedes essence. You were first born, you began to exist, and then you began to define yourself. Man is absolutely responsible for the way he builds his personality: initially, we are nothing, but then we become something that we ourselves want to be. A win is a win.
As you may have figured, we are talking about Existentialism, a philosophical current that is the basis of ontology, an important part of philosophy as a science that has its object of analysis the existence itself, that is, the features and principles common to any existence. As an intellectual movement that exploded in the mid-twentieth-century France, existentialism is often viewed as a historical event that appeared in the context of the Second World War, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which created the circumstances for what has been called “the existentialist moment”, where an entire generation had to respond to the questions that I started this article with. In other words, human kind was forced to confront the human condition altered by an acute feeling of uncertainty that caused the loss of confidence regarding the ability of understanding and controlling reality.
Most popular voices of this movement were French, particularly Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, along with notable contributors like Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel and some others. However, the core concepts of existentialism were established earlier in the nineteenth century by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, among others. Key literary works have also shed light on its ideas. In addition to the plays, short stories, and novels by French authors, significant contributions came from Russian novelists like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Norwegian writers such as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun and German authors including Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Existentialism foregrounds the rediscovery of existence, understood as a human way of being typical and problematic . Albert Camus states in his work, "The Myth of Sisyphus": "there is only one really important philosophical problem: suicide. Deciding whether life is worth living or not means answering the fundamental problem of philosophy. So the problem that is being analyzed is no longer <<What is the meaning of life?>>, but <<Does life have any meaning?>>”. Anyway, this is another story that has to do with the sense of the absurd, a branch of existentialism, which I will not talk about now because I’ll get my brain fried.
To conclude this and to show you that understanding ourselves on a deeper level and finding meaning to our lives is beyond us, let's see how you do that to other people. Do you sometimes find yourself sitting on a bench in the park and observing the surroundings? Observing the people too? I bet you do that and I bet you often find it hard to comprehend that the person who's sitting next to you feeding the ducks has a life of their own and exists at the same time with you. This is sonder, a feeling (more or less) that expresses the realization that a random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. The explanation of why it’s a little difficult to understand that is because when we dissolve “I”, we also dissolve “other”, thus we see everyone as a different configuration of ourselves. But…what is myself ?
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