Existentialism & the Absurd Part 10: Modern Applications

Career & Choice Paralysis

The 21-year-old graduate today faces a labor market with a thousand specializations, lateral options, gig possibilities, and remote-vs-onsite splits. The freedom is unprecedented — and unprecedented in its capacity to paralyze. Kierkegaard's "dizziness of freedom" describes this exactly: the more possibilities, the more vertigo, the more anxiety.

Optionality as a Trap

A modern executive coach will tell you to "keep your options open." Sartre would have laughed. To keep options open is to refuse to commit — and refusing to commit is itself a choice, and a particularly anxious one. The graduate who has been "exploring" for five years has not escaped choice; they have chosen exploration, and lived with its consequences (no expertise, no network depth, perpetual beginner status).

The Tyranny of "Should"

The Digital Self

If Sartre had lived to see Instagram, he would have written a second Being and Nothingness about it. Social media is a perpetual rehearsal of his concept of the Look (le regard) — the experience of being seen by another, of becoming an object in their consciousness, of trying to control the version of you that lives in their gaze.

Performative Identity

Erving Goffman, the sociologist, called everyday life a performance. Sartre had already gone further: the performance is not just what we do, it is the texture of consciousness itself in the presence of others. On a platform, this is industrialized. Every post is curated; every photo is selected from forty; every caption is workshopped. We are, increasingly, our own publicists.

Bad Faith at Scale

Sartre's waiter played at being a waiter — moving with exaggerated precision, "being" his role rather than freely choosing it. The modern equivalent is the influencer who plays at being authentic. The performed authenticity is itself a performance — bad faith squared. The follower-count ceases to measure connection and starts to measure how convincingly you have become an object for strangers.

The Quantified Self

Step counters, productivity dashboards, sleep scores. Heidegger called this falling into Das Man — "the They" — the diffused, anonymous public norm that tells you what is normal, healthy, productive. The metrics are not neutral; they encode a version of life and quietly substitute it for yours.

Climate Anxiety

Climate dread is, philosophically, a peculiar form of anxiety. It is not fear of a specific event (a hurricane next Tuesday) but a chronic awareness of structural unraveling. Kierkegaard's distinction between fear (object-directed) and anxiety (object-less) is exactly the distinction a climate psychologist needs.

Existential, Not Personal

The 25-year-old who wonders "should I have children?" in 2026 is asking, beneath the surface, a profoundly existential question — what kind of future am I willing to bring someone into, and what does my answer say about me? Camus would recognize the structure: the universe (or the climate system) does not care; the meaning must be created, in revolt against the indifference.

AI Existential Risk

The contemporary debate around superintelligent AI — Bostrom's Superintelligence (2014), Ord's The Precipice (2020), the rapid acceleration of frontier models — is, almost word-for-word, an existentialist conversation. The very phrase "existential risk" was lifted from existentialist vocabulary by analytic philosophers who often haven't read the source.

Heidegger Saw It Coming

In The Question Concerning Technology (1954), Heidegger argued that the deepest danger of technology is not specific accidents but a mode of revealing — a way the world starts showing up to us. Everything becomes "standing reserve" — material to be optimized, allocated, used. AI accelerates this by orders of magnitude. Soon, even our cognition becomes standing reserve: an input to algorithmic optimization rather than a free encounter with the world.

Two Existential Questions

• Will AI be conscious? If so, the moral circle expands dramatically — and the questions Sartre asked about bad faith, freedom, and the Look apply to entities we built.
• What does it mean to be human in a world where the cognitive labor that defined "rational animal" can be done better by silicon? The existentialists' answer would be: it shifts the locus of meaning from what we can do to how we live — to authenticity, commitment, love, finitude — none of which a model can outsource.

Burnout as Inauthenticity

Burnout is usually framed medically (chronic stress) or organizationally (poor management). The existentialist diagnosis cuts deeper: burnout is what happens when you spend years living a life that is not yours.

The Korean Philosopher's Diagnosis

Byung-Chul Han, in The Burnout Society (2010), updated Heidegger and Foucault: the modern subject is no longer a disciplined subject coerced from outside, but an achievement subject coercing themselves from within. We do not need a master; we have become our own. The "freedom" is total. The exhaustion, therefore, is total.

Frankl's Vacuum

Viktor Frankl, writing from a different tradition (logotherapy, Vienna), called this existential vacuum: the absence of meaning that leads to depression, addiction, and aggression. His prescription was not "self-care." It was self-transcendence — finding a project, a person, a cause that pulls you beyond yourself.

Authentic Leadership

Modern leadership literature (Sinek, Brené Brown, Bill George) has rediscovered "authenticity" as a buzzword. The existentialist tradition is the source they are unconsciously drawing on — though in a flattened form.

What Authenticity is NOT

• Not transparency. Sharing every emotion is not authenticity; it can be its own performance.
• Not "being yourself." The self is not a stable thing waiting to be expressed. Sartre is brutal on this: there is no fixed self, only choices.
• Not consistency. Authentic leaders can change their minds — a refusal to is a Heideggerian fall into rigidity.

What Authenticity IS

Authenticity, in the existential sense, is owning the freedom of one's choices. The authentic leader does not say "the market made me lay off your team." She says "I decided this; here is the reasoning; I will live with the consequences." The authentic leader does not hide behind process, role, or precedent. She uses them — and acknowledges the use.

The Engagement Question

Sartre, after the war, demanded engagement (engagement) — the commitment of one's freedom to causes that mattered. The modern equivalent: a leader, a citizen, a professional cannot retreat into pure technique. To work in finance, in AI, in pharma, in defense, is to be implicated. The existentialist refuses the alibi of "just doing my job."