Closing Words

When I began this book, I wanted to share the ideas of a few remarkable thinkers who looked straight at the hardest questions of human life: freedom, choice, meaning, other people and death. I found, as I wrote, that their ideas kept leading me back to very ordinary places: a kitchen on a Sunday evening, a laundry basket, a café counter, a bus seat, a dark staircase during a storm, a half-finished crossword. That, I think, is where these ideas belong. They are not only for libraries. They are for the days we actually live.

None of the people in this book found a final answer to the question of what life is for. Neither did Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beauvoir or Camus, at least not in the sense of a single answer that could be handed to someone else. What they found, and what I hope you have found here, is a way of holding the question: with honesty, with courage, with care for others and with a certain stubborn love of life.

If you remember only one thing, let it be this. Nobody can tell you what your life means, and that is not a loss. It is an invitation. You are free, within your situation, to make your life meaningful through what you do: through your projects, your relationships, your honesty and your small acts on ordinary days. You are already doing it, every day, whether you notice or not.

Thank you for reading. I wish you courage for your choices, kindness in your relationships and many ordinary days that, looking back, you would gladly live again.

Key Terms in This Book

Existentialism: a family of philosophies about existence, freedom, choice and meaning, starting from the individual's lived experience. Existence comes before essence: Sartre's idea that human beings exist first and define themselves afterwards through what they do. Essence: what something is for, or what it is by nature. Facticity: the given facts of a person's situation, such as body, past, place, time and other people.

Freedom: the ability, and the necessity, to choose how to respond and what to make of oneself. Responsibility: owning one's choices and their effects. Anguish: the troubling feeling of being responsible for one's choices, in Sartre's sense. Anxiety, in the existential sense: the unsettled feeling in front of open possibilities, which Kierkegaard called the dizziness of freedom.

Bad faith: self-deception by which we hide our freedom from ourselves, pretending that our role, nature or circumstances leave us no choice, or by which we deny the facts of our situation. Authenticity: living honestly as a free being who chooses. The look: the experience of being seen and judged by another person, in Sartre's sense.

The absurd: in Camus's sense, the clash between the human longing for meaning and a world that gives no answer. Revolt: Camus's response to the absurd, living fully and with open eyes, without giving up and without false hope. Lucidity: seeing one's situation clearly, without illusions. Solidarity: standing together with others.

Ambiguity: in de Beauvoir's sense, the double condition of being free and limited, a subject and also an object, an individual and also bound to others. The serious person: someone who hides their freedom behind an outside value treated as absolute. Situation: the concrete circumstances within which freedom acts. Project: a chosen aim through which a person gives shape and meaning to life. The aesthetic life and the ethical life: Kierkegaard's names for a life of passing experiences and a life of commitment.

A Note on the Sources

The works discussed in this book are, grouped by author and in order of first publication: Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843, named in passing), Repetition (1843) and The Concept of Anxiety (1844), together with his journals; Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science (1882), section 341; Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943), the play No Exit (1944) and the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (given in 1945 and published in 1946); Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947) and The Rebel (1951); and Simone de Beauvoir's Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944), The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), The Second Sex (1949) and Old Age (1970). The story of Pyrrhus and Cineas comes from Plutarch's life of Pyrrhus, and the image of Sisyphus from Homer's Odyssey, Book 11.

Short passages from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plutarch and Homer are given in my own plain translation or paraphrase. The ideas of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus are described in my own words and not quoted; readers are warmly encouraged to read their works in full. These thinkers wrote long and complex books, and interpretations of them differ. Where I have given one reading, others are possible, and I have tried to say so where the difference matters.

Where I mention modern research, such as studies of personality change or of regret, I describe only general findings and avoid figures. The people in this book's examples are imagined, and any resemblance to real people is not intended.

A Note on Care

This book explores questions about meaning, freedom, absurdity and death. If questions about meaning are part of a time of deep sadness, hopelessness, grief or crisis, please talk with someone you trust and with a doctor or another qualified professional.

If you ever feel that life is not worth living, or if you have thoughts of ending your life, please do not wait. Reach out today to a crisis line or helpline, to a doctor or to someone you trust, and if you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency number. Many people who have felt this way have found, with support, that their feelings changed. Asking for help takes courage. It is a choice to stay, and a meaningful one.

About the Author

The author has been reading the existentialists for many years, first out of curiosity and later out of need, during the ordinary Sunday evenings when the big questions tend to arrive. The author is not a professor of philosophy, only a reader who has found in these books a kind of honest companionship, and who believes that philosophy belongs in kitchens, buses and offices as much as in lecture halls. When not writing, the author enjoys long walks, swimming in cold water and conversations that go on too late into the night.