Existential crisis and authentic self

An existential crisis is the result of allowing existential anxiety to build up to a point where it’s overwhelming. So, the root of an existential crisis is not attending to existential anxiety well, or well enough. In attending, we meet our authentic selves – which I come on to at the end of this short newsletter.

Many thoughts manifest and bother us with existential anxiety; left too long, it can become a crisis and is debilitating. Most people never attend to these feelings and thoughts and try to satisfy themselves with stereotypes. Many who try a DIY response end up with token efforts of ‘doing something different’ but return to their stereotype. Some make devastating changes and a few of these sometimes work out, but most don’t.

Existential anxiety is ‘normal’

Existential anxiety is always present in all of us, all the time, but we are not always aware of it. It might be a fleeting unsettled feeling felt on and off. It might be a thunderbolt of realization that brings you low (this is usually the point of crisis). Most try to bury, ignore, or compensate for their existential anxiety. It’s a natural reaction, but an unhelpful one. People try to push it away and console themselves with ‘a role’ which is societally approved of. A family role and/ or a job title for example.

The philosophical background

We must briefly cover the underlying philosophy here, otherwise, none of the explanations at the end can make any sense.

We’re in the region of existentialism. To get the name-dropping out of the way, it’s somewhere between the German philosopher and phenomenologist (the study of lived experience) Martin Heidegger, who didn’t want to be an existentialist (a bit like Madness not wanting to be a SKA band) and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who for many is existentialism.

Heidegger’s work is notoriously complicated. A vanishingly tiny number of people in psychology dare to go anywhere near it. It is my particular area of expertise.

This next bit is a bit odd sounding and complicated, but it’s really important.

For Heidegger, before we can answer any questions about humans, we must first understand who is asking the question. Not individually who, but what is the who, what is a human being. We take for granted that we know what being a human ‘is’. What Heidegger called Die Seinsfrage – the “being question” is the question of what it is to 'be' (a human). Heidegger does two deliberate things here, he calls humans Dasein – “Being-there” and he uses a capitalized Being when he’s talking about Dasein to distinguish the Being that humans have from all other kinds of being, but which can describe what humans 'are like'.

Dasein then denotes that a person is not a body, nor a body and soul, it is something that is happening. A person is Being. Here is the source of existential anxiety – this was not the case before birth and will cease to be the case upon death. Whatever we believe, and however sure we are about those beliefs, about a soul or spirit, or that we are merely biological events, we know that there will be an end to the Being of us in our human form. We will cease to ‘Be’.

Heidegger doesn’t give an analysis of what happens to Dasein in terms of a soul or spirit, but Sartre definitely does. For Sartre, there is utter nothingness. There is extinction. The word “existential” means that knowledge exists a-priori, which means that we are aware of some things without having been taught them or experienced them. We are already aware. We are aware as humans, as Dasein that we exist. We don’t know whether we are unique in this, but there has been a long-standing agreement that we are. Most modern philosophers think this is at odds with Descartes’ famous “?dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum?("I doubt, therefore I am — or what is the same — I think, therefore I am"), but I’m not so sure…

What does this mean for everyday life?

We fill our lives with the paths open to us according to the social norms we are born into and inhabit as adults. There is usually little shift too far from our own culture. This is what German philosopher Martin Heidegger calls being “fallen”, or "entangled". We fall into step with social norms (Das Man – the ‘They’). We do what ‘they say’, what ‘they’ find acceptable, and what ‘fits in’.

Our existential anxiety is the result of glimpsing our Being, getting a-priori flashes of the primordial knowledge of ourselves as a finite Being. An existential crisis is what’s experienced when we are significantly disturbed by confronting our existential Being, which is our authentic self. Our reaction is most often to assume that we have chosen the wrong social norm with which to fall into step. We try other stereotypes to see how they fit. There is a whole industry of life coaches and ‘experience’ givers that will gladly take lots of your money at this point and tell you that you’re doing the right thing.

You might be, but you probably won’t be.

The authentic self

A universally misunderstood concept. Our authentic self is not a version of a stereotype that we believe we are more, or most suited to. We are authentically ourselves all the time. We cannot be otherwise. Your authentic self is your existential Being. What you ARE. You are a Dasein. You are Being, and you are Being that is being, until you are not, and your Being is extinguished. THIS is your authentic self, and it can be terrifying. It’s the “why” of religions, and there is nothing wrong with this, but perhaps it should be seen in the context of a social norm, of Das man.

?Our Being is the only thing we can experience while we are being. The knowledge of our not being is something we “flee” or turn away from. We do this all the time; this is the source of existential anxiety. It is neither good nor bad, it just ‘is’.

It can be a very useful and therapeutic thing to gently lean into our authentic selves. Not in a way which is confronting or frightening, but one that helps us to make good choices. This is the basis of the existential work I do with people. It is all about being able to recognize where we are, what’s happening, who is doing what in our lives, and to us, and what we can do about it. Once we, once again, gently, understand what we’re nudging up against in experiencing our authentic self, then we deal with, and mitigate fears and maximize opportunities.

An existential crisis is what happens when we become overwhelmed by the confrontation with our authentic selves. We are disturbed emotionally, and psychologically, and this is where we see many of the dramatic attempts at trying to be what life coaches and pop psychologists call “authentic”. It’s an extremely vulnerable state to reach. It needs very careful handling.