Existentialism

You’re free.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Freedom. Choice. The ability to steer your own ship. But here’s what nobody tells you about freedom: it comes with a price tag, and that price is responsibility.

I speak to people every day who’ve forgotten they have choices. They sit in my consulting room and tell me they’re unhappy. Desperately unhappy. Some of them have convinced themselves they’re trapped. They’ve built such a solid cage of “can’t” and “shouldn’t” and “what will people think” that they genuinely believe there’s no way out. They conform. They make do. They put up with the crap, day after day, year after year. They do what they’re told, live the life everyone else expects, and somehow they’ve ended up existing without purpose.

That’s not living. That’s surviving with excellent punctuality.

The Message You Need to Hear

Let me introduce you to a few dead philosophers who understood freedom better than most living people do. They’re existentialists, and before you roll your eyes and think this is going to be some dusty academic lecture, stay with me. These men figured out something crucial about human existence, and it might just be the key that unlocks the door you’ve been staring at for years.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher born in Paris in 1905. He’s the father of existentialism, and the underlying message from his work is dead simple, and it’s often summarised as: we are our choices.

Not our intentions. Not our wishes. Not our dreams or our plans or our “somedays.”

Our choices.

That message sounds empowering, doesn’t it? But here’s where it gets uncomfortable. With freedom comes responsibility. Sartre put it this way, in Existentialism Is a Humanism: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

Condemned. Not “blessed with” or “gifted with.” Condemned.

Because once you accept you’re free, you also have to accept that your life, exactly as it is right now, is the result of the choices you’ve made. Every single one of them. That job you hate? Your choice. That relationship that’s slowly crushing your soul? Your choice. That weight you’ve been carrying for ten years? Also your choice.

I know. It’s brutal. But it’s also the most liberating thing you’ll ever hear.

The Trap of Poor Decisions

I see people trapped in lives built from poor decisions every day. The smoker who knows they need to quit but hasn’t. The drinker who’s watching their liver pack its bags but keeps pouring. The person who’s waited three years for someone else to fix their problem instead of taking responsibility and fixing it themselves.

They’re all exercising their freedom. Making choices. But they’re not taking responsibility for those choices, and that’s where the trap snaps shut.

You’ve got this backwards idea that you need to feel ready before you act, that you need to wait for the perfect moment, that circumstances need to align just right. But here’s what Sartre understood and you need to accept: responsibility comes first. You take responsibility, and then you make the decision. Not the other way around.

Claire (not her real name) came to see me last year. Forty-two years old, stuck in a job that was slowly eating her alive. Marketing manager at a company that treated her like furniture. She told me she couldn’t leave. I asked why. She gave me a list: the mortgage, the kids’ school fees, her age, the job market. All excellent reasons. All completely beside the point.

What she meant was: “I’m scared, and I’d rather stay miserable than take responsibility for changing.”

Six months later, she’s running her own consultancy. It took a genuine leap, and a lot of unglamorous groundwork most people don’t see, but she’s earning more, working less, and sleeping better. What changed? Not the mortgage. Not the job market. Not her age.

She took responsibility.

The Power of Purpose

Let’s shift from a French philosopher to a moustachioed German. Friedrich Nietzsche gave us one of the greatest quotes on purpose ever written: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

Read that again. Let it sink in.

You can endure almost anything if you’ve got a reason to endure it. The suffering becomes bearable. The obstacles become challenges instead of walls. The daily grind becomes a path instead of a prison.

Most of you have relatively good health. You’re not fighting just to stay alive. You’ve got the luxury of worrying about meaning instead of survival. But somehow you’ve taken that luxury and turned it into a life of nihilistic drifting. You get up, go through the motions, come home, repeat. Every day slightly worse than the last because there’s no why powering any of it.

Dostoevsky, the well-bearded Russian, nailed it: “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”

You’re alive. Congratulations. Now what?

I know someone who spent fifteen years working in a terrible job, hated every minute of it. Good money, terrible life. His why was “because I need to pay the bills.” That’s not a why. That’s a because, and a weak one at that. When I asked him what he actually wanted to do with his life, he looked at me like I’d asked him to solve quantum physics while juggling chainsaws.

He didn’t know.

At forty-one years old, he’d never asked himself the question.

The Conformity Trap

Here’s another problem: you’re surrounded by people who’ve given up. They’ve accepted average. They’ve made their peace with mediocrity. And you’re matching your thinking to theirs because that’s what humans do. We conform.

Søren Kierkegaard, the great bouffant-haired Danish philosopher and the first existentialist before anyone even used the term, proposed something radical: each individual, not society or religion, is solely responsible for giving meaning to life.

Not your parents. Not your boss. Not your social media feed or your friends or the government or God.

You.

But if you’re surrounded by non-achievers, you’ll get dragged down to their level. That becomes your norm. I see this every day in my practice: people who’ve quietly accepted apathy as the family default because everyone around them has done the same, generation after generation, until nobody in the room can quite remember what ambition was supposed to feel like.

JFK said it perfectly: “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.”

When you conform to what’s around you, when you match your life to the expectations of others, you’re not living your life. You’re performing someone else’s idea of what your life should be. And that performance will never feel authentic because it’s not yours.

The First Step is Accepting Reality

Let me bring this together for you. From Kierkegaard, Sartre, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, we get these essential messages:

You’re free. You’re responsible. Your life is the result of your choices.

Having a purpose gives you strength and direction. Going without one for too long leaves you drifting, and drifting is a miserable way to spend a life.

Conforming to the norm, to what those around you expect, is what’s stopping you from growing, from being authentically you, from getting the life you actually want.

This isn’t motivational fluff. This is the foundation of change. You can’t build anything real without accepting these truths first.

The smoker who takes responsibility and quits will live longer. The person stuck in the wrong career who stops blaming others and makes a change will find purpose. The conformist who breaks free and builds their own path will finally feel alive.

You are your life. Nothing else. Not your circumstances. Not your history. Not what happened to you.

What you do next.

That’s what matters.

So what’s your first step? Because here’s what I know after twenty years of doing this: you don’t need to have it all figured out. You don’t need a perfect plan or the ideal moment or complete certainty.

You need to accept that you’re free, take responsibility, and make one choice that moves you forward.

Just one. Not ten. Not a complete life overhaul. One choice that’s different from what you’ve been choosing.

Because your life multiplied by doing nothing equals nothing. That’s not philosophy. That’s mathematics. And the only way to change the equation is to decide to change what you’re doing.

Start there.

This isn’t therapy. If you’re dealing with clinical depression, severe anxiety, or trauma, please see a professional. I say this as a doctor, not as a disclaimer.

Further reading

• Sartre, J-P. (1946). Existentialism Is a Humanism. Éditions Nagel.
• Kierkegaard, S. (1843). Either/Or. C.A. Reitzel.
• Nietzsche, F. (1889). Twilight of the Idols. C.G. Naumann.
• Dostoevsky, F. (1880). The Brothers Karamazov. The Russian Messenger.
• Frankl, V. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
• Yalom, I. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books.
• Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus. Gallimard.
• May, R. (1950). The Meaning of Anxiety. Ronald Press.
• Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time. Max Niemeyer Verlag.
• Solomon, R. C. (2005). Existentialism. Oxford University Press.