Sartre, The Real Existentialist, and The Personal Liberation Through Collaboration

I've been doing a lot of collaborating lately and it is amazing!

To those who feel like you're stuck, collaboration is the most powerful thing you can do for your personal and professional life. I'm sure a lot of people share my story in their own way and I wanted to write about it.

I wanted to call it existential. And then I remembered, the word has been highjacked by pundits and politicians. The usage of the word is completely misguided. I'll see if I can free the word a bit and somehow give you the real definition as I see it by the man who made it a household word decades ago.

Getting Deep. Philosophy Lesson One: Quit Using The E Word.

Every pseudo-intellectual knows that Nobel Laureate French Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was the father of modern Existentialism but few know the dude also loved to get high AF and was injected with mescaline by his old school friend, the psychiatrist Daniel Lagache, at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris.

There's a whole crazy party side to this guy and anyone who's ever read Nausea quickly realizes while he writes about his despair, he is also having the time of his life.

Since everyone uses that word "existential" without knowing what the word means, I'll try in my own way to explain it.

As a thought-experiment, I intentionally didn't look up the definition until after I wrote my own first...

My Definition of Existentialism

Life is basically meaningless unless you do something to build that meaning into your life. That effort is what Sartre called a pro-ject meaning literally to pro-ject kind of like you would a throwing knife. That is your life. That is your project.

The dictionary says, "a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will"

Hey that was pretty close!

The word applies to the positive and negative. Yes life can be meaningless and full of anxiety, nothingness and despair but there is also hope and possibility.

But since everyone is using Existential without the slightest idea of what they are talking about, it is meant to be Scary, Dangerous, Bad.

Which brings me back to collaboration. Where does the vision come from and why is working with others so empowering? Because you get outside of your sick lonely self. My man Jean Paul would never say it that way but that is one overly sunshiny way to look at it.

The next time you use the word Existential in the edified way outlined here you can help revive a concept that has to do with self-will.

So all newscasters stop saying it until you have read this piece. And I will never use the word again.

Jim Finlaw is the managing partner of Round Agencies, A Creative Collaborative. Find out more at www.roundagencies.com

#Collaboration #Teambuilding