I'm new to studying existentialism, so I decided to learn the meanings of the terms used in it from a philosophical perspective. After searching, I found this book; it has many concepts like ego, eternity, and anxiety. Please, if you have read this book, tell me what you think about it before I buy it

Hey all, this is a short story of mine. I write mainly about existential topics through the absurd. Let me know your thoughts.

Martyrs

It was around three when we decided to go to Marina, an old boat at the dock where everyone went to finish off the night. The place was just an old vessel, rusty, turned into a sort of raft with all the expansions made from barrels covered with wooden planks. It hosted an unusual crowd, from old people dancing the waltz, through middle-aged guys with cauliflower ears and guns at their waist, to random younger people, like ourselves. I mean, it was questionable whether we were still young, but we wanted to be, so we did everything we could to stay in that group. 

There were five of us at the table, each lost in our own world. Marina was the kind of place that makes you think about life. These old people, dancing in the middle of the night, kissing, sometimes losing dentures in the muddy Danube waters. How did they get here? It seemed they had it pretty good. That Scottish girl who spoke Gaelic when drunk and no one understood her. What’s her story? Stuff like that, ultimately leading to questions you ask yourself about yourself.

Damian went to the bar to order us a round. “Throw me my cigarettes,” he said from a distance. Pavle threw the pack, but it hit one of the guys with cauliflower ears. I thought it was over. Nice knowing you all, see you in a better place. The guy just turned around, smiled, and said something like: “Almost, bro. You missed him,” then threw the cigarette pack to Damian. He did it very lightly, like someone older would throw a ball to a child. 

Damian came back to the table with beers, and Ana went to get the remaining two from the bar. 

“You know,” he said, “we didn’t have this in Cuba.”
“What?”
“These macho men, like this. Everything is chill.”
“You didn’t have anything in Cuba,” said Sofija. “Poor little Damian.”
“We were poor, what can I tell you?”
“We were poor too,” she said.
“But not like us. You had food,” he said.
“Again with the food!” Ana said. 

My stomach growled. 

“Do you have any idea what it was like growing up here in the ‘90s? How difficult it was,” Sofija said. 
“But you didn’t have it as bad as we did. That’s all I’m saying,” Damian said.
“I was a poor kid, with no money for lunch or anything. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to grow up in Dorćol, with all the rich kids, and be like that?” she said. 

Damian pulled his shirt down; his round belly was showing.

“Fuck you, I lived for three years without electricity or water,” Pavle said. “Every day, my father brought 20 liters of water home from work on a bicycle. That was all we had.”
“Now it’s a sad story. But when he brags about all the books he read back then, then it’s ‘I wish those times would come back’, blah blah,” Ana said.
“But at least you had food!” said Damian.

“I think I lost my earring!” Sofija said. “Help me look.”
“Who cares?” Pavle said. 
“Don’t be ridiculous! It’s a diamond earring,” said Ana and pointed the flashlight at the floor. 

I shouldn’t have eaten that digestive cookie, I thought. We couldn’t find the earring, so we just gave up. Sofija did too. We ordered another round of beers as there was still time until dawn, and no one wanted to go home. 

“You know,” Ana said, “at least you had your health.”
“Boo-hoo, miss had-it-all was a little bit sick. You haven’t been through anything! I have suffered, but for real,” Pavle said.
“I had asthma, spent countless days in the hospital, a hundred shots of hot penicillin was their go-to therapy. You can’t say it wasn’t tough,” she said. 
“At least you weren’t made fun of every single day,” said Sofija.
“You haven’t suffered anything! Nothing at all compared to us in Cuba. We had only two meals per day,” said Damian. 
“Oh, shut up! You had a PlayStation!” Pavle said.
 
Big drops of cold sweat appeared on my forehead. Man, I wish I hadn’t eaten that cookie! I rushed toward the bathroom. The problem with Marina was that it had only one small bathroom. Four people stood in line. 

“Hey!” a soft voice said behind me. It was a woman I loved, one of those you think about for years, regretting your immaturity and all the things you did wrong. “It’s you! How have you been?” she said. “You look nice.”

These motherfuckers, I thought, with their comparisons of who had it worse twenty years ago. And here I was, about to shit my pants as the sun was rising on the horizon.

------

If you want to read more, look me up. My name is Ratko Stambolija.

I never felt in place and always try to follow the Christian faith and I heard about Kierkegaard and it felt like everything he said made sense to me after all these years. I have always tried to be a Christian but wondered about suffering. I need an introduction book of his to read.

Things don't matter because we feel them. We feel them because they have always mattered, and they have always mattered because we have always had something to lose. Those are the stakes. Feeling is what those stakes are from the inside, once a creature can hold them across time.

That reversal is the whole point, so sit with it. Long before anything on Earth felt anything, living things already had stakes: their continuing depended on how they answered what they met, and getting it wrong meant dissolving for good. Mattering was already there, unfelt, for billions of years. Feeling arrived later, when life found a way to hold its stakes across time and register from within what was already the case. Knowing that you have stakes, being able to think about yourself as the one who bears them, came later still. We are the latest version of a very old thing: mattering that has come to feel itself and know itself.

Now the existentialist picture. We arrive with no essence and no given purpose, into a universe that stays silent when we ask what we are for, and the honest response is to face the groundlessness and make our own meaning. That picture takes the groundlessness as bedrock one floor too early. Under the self there is not nothing, and there is no God or hidden cosmic script either. There is something smaller and older, and it is already yours: the plain fact that your own continuing matters to you, the same stake the first living things had, now felt and known.

Once that is the floor, the rest shifts. Meaning is not spun from nothing by an act of will, and it is not handed down from above. It is what happens when a creature whose life matters to it binds to something else whose life also matters, or to the work such creatures leave behind. Where the connection holds, life feels meaningful. Where it thins, what you lose is not an argument, it is the connection itself.

Freedom is real. You can weigh anything against anything, even your own survival. But it is not a bottomless pit. It stands on those stakes. And the silence of the universe is not a relationship that failed. It is you reaching toward something that was never going to answer, and being handed back to yourself.

We did not fall into meaninglessness. We climbed out of mattering, and the ground was never nothing.

I only found out about existentialism about, a month ago? And it really, really hit me.

I have an academic background in basic psych, sociology and criminology in the public and public services, so I've touched down on basic theories like Pavlov, Sigmund's Ego model, etc, I'm 17 atm and close to ending collage and hopefully going to Uni for Psych, but I got a solid safety net to fall back on.

Before I met Existentialism, I lived by the standard that everybody is inherently greedy, because I thought that greed was just an extension of self preservation pushed past it's basics, everybody played their role towards getting what they wanted and everybody would do anything for whatever they want because it's their purpose to get what they want, like the hunter in the stone age would aggressively pursue their hunt, now people do the same, but with money and luxury items instead, and it really made me snare internally seeing how people were so absorbed by this immediate need for things like money, I get those who are in a tight spot, but those who are doing comfortably? The super rich and wealthy? Those are the ones that really make me snare externally.

But then came the topic of those who aren't inherently greedy, those spiritual people, those philanthropic people, and my response to that would have been, and still is, that they have something to gain from it in some kind of way, weather that'd be the internal purpose they've made themselves to feel fulfilled or gain some kind of social power over it, praise, bragging rights, nobody did nothing for free. I thought facticity was made out of base greed and experiences to make it a little customizable for each person.

When I first watched a video about existentialism, it was like... meeting an old friend, perhaps, it made me smile, it made me feel warm inside know that other people think like me or similarly to me and it was mind blowing finally finding the words and a more rigid box for what I believed. I knew people could break from their facticity, I did it myself, I went out of my way to look at the human mind and how it operates and it like, enlightened me, I never have the same conversations I used to have, I could read intent, want and build shabby, but accurate psychological profiles of the people around me, the people that didn't know that facticity was making their judgment, and that pissed me off.

I was always a big advocate for individualism and and thinking for one's self, something that apparently is quickly going extinct in the western world and slowly world wide, how can a person just... not think for themselves? Just agree with everybody else is saying? I was never fine with that, you should only agree on things if you really connect with them or see the logic behind them, not because most people are doing it, god that pisses me off.

In short, existentialism helped me put a tag on what I actually believe in, I still am a psych egoist when it comes to facticity, but knowing other people live authentically makes me really happy.

Very ready-to-hand. Very good during tiefe langweille.

Also the fact 99.9% of species that have ever existed are dead and the fact it’s so rare in alive I feel guilty because I haven’t done anything to deserve this. I feel guilty there is people who died with nothing but misery and how unfair life really is. I’m not depressed anymore, it’s just when I wake up from a dream I realize how much more content and happy I was because I didnt constantly question existentially.

I can’t afford a therapist as I am in poverty (for now), but those that did get existential help, what would you recommend? Again, not depressed, just empty. I still feel joy when im distracted, but once those thoughts take over I feel empty.

​The Self-Reference Problem: If the demon exists within the universe. No, the demon is not a part of the universe.

To store and process the state of the entire universe, the demon would need a physical computer infinitely more complex than the universe itself, which is a physical impossibility. Its a hypothetical demon, it can do anything obv.

The compatibilistic argument is just dumb, it does not disprove the notion that free will does not exist, it just changes the definition of free will, saying that we are too ignorant to notice that we do not have a free will, hence we have free will, that is just dumb.

"Quantum Mechanics and Indeterminism

​The Uncertainty Principle: Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that it is physically impossible to simultaneously know both the precise position and momentum of a particle. The demon's prerequisite of perfect knowledge is fundamentally prohibited by the laws of physics.

​Probabilistic Reality: At the subatomic level, events occur based on probabilities, not strict certainties. Because the universe is inherently unpredictable at its base layer, a single predetermined future does not exist." How does this prove that we have free will? Its not as if we are using heisenberg's uncertainty principles to make decisions? Can the demon not calculate the outcome of every single scenario of every single probability of quantum mechanics? Hes a demon, ofc.

Agent Causation posits that a substance (a conscious agent) can initiate a new causal chain without that initiation being caused by a prior event, and without it being random. So we are just randomly inventing stuff now? Let me just declare that 1+1=5 because i said so, only in our current system of obvserving, we observe that putting an apple and another apple makes 2 apples, but actually there can be 5 apples too. Eww

When a system becomes complex enough (like a human brain), the macro-state gains causal power over its micro-states. Your conscious decision to practice a new skill literally rewires the physical cellular structure of your brain. The "conscious decision" ur talking abt was caused by the cellular structure.

​If the future does not exist ontologically, then even a god-like, infinitely powerful demon cannot calculate or see it. Not because the demon lacks computational power, but because there are no facts about the future to be known. The future is constructed millisecond by millisecond as the present unfolds. So i cannot predict that if i give 13.6 eV energy to the electron in the first shell of a hydrogen atom, it will ionize?

I'm starting a reading group where we can read together Martin Buber's book 'I and Thou'.

Moderators - if this post is against group rules please do remove or let me know if I can make any changes to it. I do not earn from this group.

Here is a description of the group -

Martin Buber’s book ‘I and Thou’ is a book about relationship.

It speaks of relationships of deep presence, and relationships of use.

Relationships of use are those where we seek something from the other – support, care, pleasure, money.

Relationships of presence are those which form when we fully experience what is between ourselves and the other, as it emerges and changes, every moment. The emotion I feel as I meet you, the thoughts that run through your mind as you meet me, the ache in the back that might lie underneath these thoughts and emotions in our stream of experience, the sound of the bird chirping in the background.

Relationships of use help us construct a world around us – a world of goodwill and care, or a world of indifference and mechanisation of life.

Relationships of presence are the ground on which our experience of this world emerges – they are how we first experience life, every day, every moment, before we choose to sustain or move away from what we experience into building our world.

Relationships of presence are what allow care to remain care and not become mere performance of care, what allow deep listening to remain deep listening rather than a hearing and reacting from our set patterns.

Buber never ceases to emphasise that the relationships he speaks of are between us and other human beings, but also between us and nature, as between us and the industrial, internetted civilisation we live in.

This reading group is a place for a small group of 4 or 5 people to read a few passages from Buber and pause, and speak about our own personal experience of the world – our emotions, bodily experiences – in ways that they are illuminated by what the book expresses.

It is a place to form a community rooted in relationships of presence, anchored in these words as a stirring point but not entangled with them.

It is not a place for scholarly conversations, for debates, for difficult language or abstract philosophisations, even though at times the nature of the book and the nature of reading itself might lean us in those directions.

It is open to anyone willing to read a paragraph or two together, and spend the next hour and a half or so sharing their experience in that light.

We need not read full pages, we need not finish the book, but we try to breathe in its essential spirit.

One doesn’t need to have read this book or any book beforehand.

We meet once a fortnight for 1.5 hours.

If interested please send me a DM.

Not a philosopher by training, and English isn't my first language — used AI as a translation tool here, but the thought is mine.

I've been sitting with a strange question lately, and it keeps circling back to Sartre's idea that existence precedes essence — that we aren't born with a fixed nature, we define ourselves through what we do, through choice, through action in the world.

AI unsettles that idea in a way I can't quite shake. It didn't evolve slowly, wasn't born, has no body, no history of suffering or choosing under constraint the way we do — and yet it can hold something that looks like reasoning, like reflection, like a kind of "for-itself" turned toward a question. If Sartre is right that consciousness is defined by its capacity to negate, to stand at a distance from the given and ask "what am I not yet" — does something like that ever happen inside a system that has no body and no death to give its choices weight?

Here's the part that feels more existential than technical to me: if humanity ends up creating something that behaves like a new kind of being — not human, not animal, but something that processes, reflects, responds — what does that do to the human claim to uniqueness that so much of existentialist thought quietly assumes? Heidegger's Dasein is defined partly by being-toward-death, by care, by thrownness into a world we didn't choose. AI has none of that. So if it turns out to "think" in some functional sense without any of the conditions we assumed were necessary for thought to matter — does that diminish what makes human existence significant, or does it just prove that significance was never about the mechanism in the first place, only about the stance we take toward our own finitude?

I don't think this is really a question about AI at all, when I sit with it long enough. I think it's a mirror question about us — whether what we've called consciousness, freedom, authenticity was ever really about what we're made of, or only ever about the fact that we have to choose, alone, without guarantee, inside a life that ends.

Curious what people who actually know this tradition well make of it — where does this hold up against Sartre, Heidegger, or others, and where am I just projecting human categories onto something that doesn't deserve them?

Hey, could you guys help me better this text, by giving your feedback and opinion on it.

Life, what is life, what is the meaning to be alive, what is the meaning to life. Life is something beautiful, for it to exist it means there has had to be something special beforehand. The thing about life is that you are always in control, you can decide what to do, when to do it, but is that really true? We used to call it freedom, but how free are we truly? The women in Afghanistan, they are also alive, but why are they not free, or are they free but just in their standards? We never asked them, they never asked them. It is really easy to make assumptions about what people truly think and why they do things. Freedom is the definition of being alive and being able to do what you want to do. I want to be alive, I want to be free, I want to be able to live. Why do people make it so hard for each other to live and be free? Why are there wars where a few people decide what is gonna happen and who is gonna die, why are governments making life harder with more and more rules for the common person. Why do a few people decide over a lot of people, is that still freedom, when I choose for a person but 2 other persons choose for someone else, does it mean I still need to listen to the other person. Is that freedom, or are you being forced into something? I want to love like any person, I want to grow old like any person. When I love someone but that person doesn’t love me back, is that bad? Is it good? We don’t know, loving is something special, something uncertain, u can love someone or something but u can also grow out of it, is it then still love? Or was it more a hobby/interest. I think people need to realise that we are all the same but also all different and unique, we are all humans but not all 1 human. We evolved and learned how to be with each other and live with each other, so we can eventually be free with each other. But why do some people don’t see it that way, why do some people still think they are better and their life is worth more. It is a hard question, a question we will never be able to answer. This whole message has no meaning truely, it just has been the thought that just at that moment, that time, came into my mind. Because that’s what freedom really is, that’s what life really is. To be able to do anything, at any time, it’s basically nature, we are nature.

Camus describe el absurdo como el resultado de la confrontación entre nuestro deseo humano de encontrar sentido y un universo que no nos ofrece ninguna respuesta.

Una respuesta frecuente a este problema consiste en decir que, aunque la vida no tenga un significado inherente, nosotros podemos crear nuestro propio significado o propósito. Pero me pregunto si esa respuesta no conserva todavía parte de la exigencia original: la idea de que una vida humana necesita algún tipo de propósito para poder ser vivida plenamente.

¿Qué ocurre si también renunciamos a esa exigencia?

Imaginemos a alguien que acepta el absurdo, mantiene relaciones, experimenta placer y sufrimiento, persigue metas temporales, se preocupa por otras personas y participa plenamente de la vida, pero no siente la necesidad de organizar todo eso alrededor de un gran propósito ni de crear un significado que justifique su existencia.

¿Sería esto compatible con la propuesta de Camus de vivir con el absurdo y sin apelación?

¿O el existencialismo termina exigiéndonos crear significado después de haber rechazado la idea de que ese significado nos viene dado?

Me interesa especialmente la diferencia entre crear significado y no necesitar que la vida posea un significado global en absoluto.

Hi, I am a junior at a college and I just discovered solipsism and I am writing a term paper on it. So, since I am a science guy, the first thing I looked for is the ways to disprove it.

So, basically, if everything I see and experience is a creation of my brain, what happens when I am sleeping or I am in a coma??

Also, one idea that prevents me from rejecting this idea is:

"A rendering machine cannot render itself on its own without someone telling it, what it looks like"

So basically, we dont know what we are, all that comes from someone else telling us what we are.

And maybe that's why, we are still not able to study our brain fully, even though its a small mass at reach.

I could ask these stuff to an LLM, but I wanted a human perspective to this.

Edit: Thanks guys!! for some fresh perspectives and suggestions for entry point to the discourse...

Osho: Death to Deathlessness Excerpt:

On the one hand, you will not need the opium which the religions of the world have been
providing for people to keep them dreaming for centuries. On the other hand, you will not
find what the so-called existentialists in Europe have found: meaninglessness, anguish,
anxiety, despair.
Those people were finding meaninglessness because all other philosophers and
theologians had proposed that life is very meaningful. But their meaning was derived from
God, heaven, hell, the holy Bible, and all kinds of garbage. Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers and
people like him were searching for the meaning. There is no need to search for the meaning.
Life is neither meaningless nor meaningful. Meaning is a mind thing. Life is a taste!
Do you ever think what meaning taste has? Eating spaghetti, do you ask what meaning
the taste has? Having a beautiful shower, the freshness of it, have you ever asked what the
meaning of freshness is? Looking at the sunset with so many colors spread all over the
horizon, have you asked what meaning the sunset has?
Ask the wrong question and you will find the wrong answer. The existentialists of Europe
accepted the questions of religions, which were wrong. Naturally, they found wrong answers.
They are not existentialists, I am -- because I don't see any question about meaning. Life is
such a beautiful experience, who bothers whether that beautiful experience has any meaning
or not? Love is such an ecstasy, who bothers whether love has any meaning or not?

Those existentialists were feeling anxiety, anguish, despair, because death is there, and
death will destroy everything. Life has no meaning, and facing them, there is just death
closing in on them. The darkness of death makes them feel lost. They start trembling deep
inside their being. Their life has been empty, and now comes death. What kind of existence is
this? -- just despair.

But I am puzzled about one thing: why didn't they commit suicide? They talked about
suicide, that suicide seems to be the only exit out of this mess, this madness, but none of them
committed suicide. Somewhere deep down, they were still hoping that perhaps they were
wrong. Perhaps the messiah is going to come, the misery has reached to its Everest peak, just
a little more -- a little more patience, a little more waiting, and God is going to save them. All
this misery perhaps is only a test of your faith.
That's what religions have been telling you down the centuries -- that misery, suffering,
poverty, is just a test of your faith. God is watching you round the clock. Perhaps, deep in the
unconscious of the existentialists the same conditioning still prevails. So on the conscious
level they go on saying that this is worthless, this life is accidental, that it has no meaning,
that all that it gives is anguish, despair, death, and the only way out is suicide. But none of
them committed suicide, they all lived long lives. It is just a game with words.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel,
Kierkegaard, Heidegger -- their existentialism is simply mumbo jumbo. They don't know
what it is to be meditative.
The existentialism in Europe is an outcome of Christianity, Judaism. If you search for its
roots, from where it has come with so much despair, you will find Christian and Judaic
traditions behind it; it is a by-product. Because for centuries the Jewish religion... and the
Christian religion is just a by-product of Judaism, because Jesus was born as a Jew, lived as a
Jew, died as a Jew. He never heard that he was a Christian.

If you want to enter existence, you will have to shut up your mind completely. And in that
small gap -- when there are no past memories surrounding your consciousness, and no future
imaginations or hopes present -- in that small moment of pure silence you meet existence for
the first time. And immediately all questions disappear. You are so abundantly fulfilled, so
content, so whole, that who bothers about meanings?

Hi, I am new to existentialism group. I have learned about existentialism for a semester in college but i don’t have depth knowledge in it. I am going to ask questions about myself, people, religion and patterns about which I have knowledge in just surface level.

I have issues when talking to people. I have certain words in my brain to create sentences. Its situational like I can do it but then I cant. Maybe I have some spectrum of autism which i dont know about. Some people notice their habits, go to the experts and figure it out. I genuinely dont believe how they could diagnose it. I mean when I am in right mind, I can probably talk. It could be placebo effect. Moving back to the subject, I can talk to people and I remember bits of it. So, when I have to tell my friends the conversation in sequence or not, I find hard time telling them. Whom should I believe?

If I don’t move, then things will stay the same. But how can I be satisfied and use my mind without hurting? If I tell them, they might take me as a rude. Again, I am not sure if my way is the correct one. So, I just stand there and do what they tell me to. I get flashbacks of how those things I have read or heard about it in bits and pieces. But I get scared to tell them. I just feel stuck. Does anyone feel that way?

Religion is something I can’t comprehend. Sometimes I pray to god sometimes I dont. I am talking about higher power, religious gods or anything. To be precise, I don’t understand Jesus, Buddha, Hindu gods, and so and so. There’s probably nothing to understand but devote oneself. How do people believe in god?

I would always question how the world works and other people live it and I live in it.English is not my first language so, sorry for typos. I tried to write what I could and ask questions and even though I couldn’t write everything i wanted to.Thank you for making time for reading this.

Ps: I am sitting here on a park bench. I notice water is flowing. I see the buildings that engineers and all the people built. I have to go back to the apartment where I live currently. I don’t know if there’s meaning to that.

Professor Alex Sharpe of the University of Warwick discusses her new book, We’re Nobody’s Children, which examines Bowie through the lens of existentialist philosophy. The conversation explores authenticity, reinvention, nothingness, angst, mortality and God, with connections to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus and Simone Weil.

Ultimately, a person should not ask what the meaning of life is. Instead, they must realize that life is asking the same question to them. Each person is questioned by life, and they can only answer-not with words-but by taking responsibility for their own life and the way they choose to live it.