7 Ways to Win Against an Existential Crisis and Reclaim Meaning
By: Jamie Jackson
Tags: Life, Self, Existentialism, Philosophy, Faith

7 Ways to Win Against an Existential Crisis and Reclaim Meaning

What to do when the epiphanies don’t arrive

I used to judge religious people for their naivety, but really I was jealous of their certainty.

How dare they escape existential torment by simply believing a story! They should be down here in the dirt suffering with the rest of us.

Suffice to say, I’ve struggled with the concepts of meaning and existence from my earliest years.

When I was 5, I held a toy man in my hand and cried as it was “dead” and I knew one day I would die too.

I was holding the far-flung future in my palm and it freaked me out!

In my teens, these feelings continued, and I visited a priest to talk about life, though he didn’t help me, he had no answers, only empty rhetoric.

Surely the goal of life isn’t just to get through it?

When I talk to people about such concerns, it’s often as if I’m speaking in tongues, I’m met with confused looks and bafflement.

People either seem to believe in God and are happy about it or don’t believe in God and are happy about it.

Either way, they’re oddly at ease with living on a rock, flying through space, orbiting a giant fireball, and have no pressing questions on the matter.

So, feeling as if this existential and philosophical battle was mine to fight alone, I’ve learned some coping mechanisms over the years to deal with the unanswerable questions of life.

Here, I offer up remedies for those still waiting for an epiphany or awakening, because, in my experience, they don’t come unless you go after them with a club.

Here are seven tips on how to live in a world with no answers.

Let’s begin.

1) Defining an indifferent universe

Indifference is perhaps the worst emotion to be subjected to as it means we simply don’t matter.

No one wants to be a cosmic accident, like mould growing on a bathroom wall that appeared simply because conditions were right.

We don’t know what the universe thinks about humanity, or if it does at all, which is why we must decide ourselves.

Albert Einstein, a clever guy by all accounts, put it best when he said:

“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”

It’s “the most important decision” because all choices we make springboard off this foundational thought of reality.

If we believe the universe is friendly, we have hope and we act accordingly. If we believe it is indifferent or hostile, we act out of fear or get depressed.

It seems trite to claim the universe has an opinion at all, but we are dealing with deep existential questions with no answers, only soothing remedies. This is one of them.

Start from the view that if you exist and the universe exists along with you, perhaps that is enough to justify some hope you mean something.

2) Accept we’re not meant to know

In the ‘Divine Comedy’, poet Dante Alighieri writes about a man who, in the depths of despair, is granted passage through hell, purgatory and heaven to rediscover meaning and give his life context.

On his journey, he has questions about why people are in hell, why purgatory is so hard and why heaven itself is split into levels, each one further from God.

The response by both his guides is he is not meant to know. No one, including themselves, can fully understand the will of God.

This is Dante’s most profound suggestion in his epic poem.

The finite mind of a human cannot understand the infinite mind of God (or, to put it another way, the infinite universe). No one can begin to fathom its workings, it would be akin to an ant trying to comprehend an aeroplane.

Reconcile yourself with the fact some questions do not have satisfactory answers, so we should stop worrying about them.

This sounds like a cop-out, but don’t let the mystery tighten your stomach as if you were on a cliff edge, rather let it be a comfort.

Everyone is in the same boat, everyone has to surrender to their limits of understanding to be happy. You’re not giving up anything, you’re simply letting go so you can live.

Moreover, if it was all laid out and we knew everything, would life be as alluring? As Albert Camus wrote:

“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”

3) Creating meaning from uncertainty

On the topic of Albert Camus, he was one of the many people smarter than you or I who dedicated his life to pondering existence.

Camus was an “absurdist”, he believed nothing could answer the big questions in life, therefore looking for answers was, by definition, absurd.

He wrote:

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

Instead, he saw life in terms of 3 matter-of-fact choices: death, religion or revolt.

Death is when one kills themself in the face of absurdity; religion is “intellectual suicide” where one abdicates responsibility to think for themself in the face of absurdity, and; revolt is when one decides to give life personal meaning to the absurd.

In revolt, we reject absurdity and the context of meaninglessness and therefore we find meaning. Camus said revolt meant action, a call to stop thinking and to start living. It is the most rebellious of all acts.

As Carl Jung reiterated:

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.” — Carl Jung

4) This cartoon

This blew me away. I don’t know who did this, so I cannot credit them (edit: here’s the source) but Donald Duck is claiming life is meaningless, while Mickey is offering the rebuttal “All Knowledge is ultimately based on that which we cannot prove.”

We cannot prove there is meaning, but crucially, we cannot prove there isn’t meaning either.

Humans are negative creatives so we mostly view the unknown as bad or scary, but what if it was good?

To revisit Einstein’s invite to decide on the nature of the universe, we can expand on it to say as we don’t know, we may as well fight for meaning, we may as well say it’s a friendly universe, rather than accept indifference and “perish like a dog”.

The philosophy of this cartoon adds to Camus’ idea of revolt by suggesting living despite absurdity isn’t just a revolt, it is the noble, courageous and proper thing to do.

5) Stop worrying about why

Existential nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” More recently, motivational four-eyes Simon Sinek wrote a book called ‘Start with Why’ and seeking“why” has become de rigueur once more.

However, asking why is nonsense because as discussed, solid whys don’t exist. Life is a mystery, so any “why” is going to be superficial; it won’t stand up to scrutiny and will ultimately plunge you into further confusion.

“Why” seems the most important question, but as Dante suggested, we aren’t meant to know “why” so it is a distraction, a time-waster, the wrong question.

The right question is how am I going to live despite the lack of why.

Asking why steps in between you and your intuition.

Listen to intuition, it’s your guide. Acting from your intuition will reveal more answers about life than endlessly asking why ever will.

6) Build your own universe

I have two ex-girlfriends who are very important to me in terms of my life story. I hold their memory close, they helped define who I was and gave me my first experiences of love and desire.

Both of them dumped me and consequently, I’m sure they don’t hold the same view of me as I do of them.

Crucially, however, it doesn’t matter what they think.

It’s my life, my memories, my emotions. I choose what is meaningful to me. It’s none of their business how I process my experiences.

Your truth, reality and meaning belongs only to you. It doesn’t need to be justified by others, and it can’t be dismissed by them either.

You think, therefore you are. Even an indifferent universe cannot deny the reality of your thoughts and feelings.

You build your universe as you go; it’s valid, it has meaning, it matters to you, therefore it matters, period.

7) Who said an existential crisis was a bad thing?

Finally, this. We’ve discussed how to counter the uneasy feelings of meaninglessness, but it’s important to give yourself credit for such existential musings.

Those who are present and conscious in life feel the most anxiety because they see the bigger picture. Anyone can keep their head down and be the busy fool, it takes courage to examine oneself, one’s purpose, one’s place.

Indeed, existentialist Søren Kierkegaard believed escapism from our lives is our greatest source of unhappiness. He writes:

“The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself.”

We all have to confront our place in the universe sometime. Distraction and busyness will only work for so long. We cannot outrun ourselves.

An existential crisis might not be pleasant, but it illustrates you are doing the inner work required.

Confronting difficult truths of your own volition heads them off at the pass so you are not blindsided by them further down the road.

So embrace the existential crisis, embrace the giddy head and tightened stomach, for we all have to stand on the cliff edge sometime, it may as well be now.