Existentialism is the act of gesturing. A gesture is a deliberate act which is undertaken for the power that comes from making a decision. It isn’t the content of the decision that is important so much as the act of being decisive. For instance, if a warrior found a snake that was numb and cold, he might struggle to invent a way to take the snake to a warm place without being bitten. The warrior would make the gesture just for the hell of it. But he would perform it perfectly.

It’s about the execution of ideas, feelings, thoughts.  Before getting any further, let me begin by telling you that Existentialists first always want to talk about death. Death makes people uncomfortable. Try and get over that. It’s a fact. It’s also the biggest turn off for people when they get into this stuff. Though accepting your mortality is important, I don’t feel death is truly the focus of the insights gained from existentialism.

Death is merely a primer…a backdrop to the attitude of existentialism. Death motivates you to treat your decisions wisely. And when I say decisions I don’t mean big decisions and I don’t mean small decisions. I mean all decisions–decisions you are making right now…to read this post. Decisions are a limited resource–limited to the span of time you are alive. So you must make them with conviction. You must live in terms of intensity and immediacy, and spontaneity. You don’t sacrifice the pleasures of today for something which may not happen tomorrow because you may not be here. And one day you will not be here. And once you are aware of that and your limits you don’t try to forget it.

Don’t take on a religion/philosophy/idealism or some other leap of faith to forget your mortality. Taking the leap is the easy way out because you are letting an idea make your decisions for you.   You are committing suicide mentally–cutting yourself off from having to think for yourself and make decisions.  And as we were discussing earlier, our decisions are valuable. So live lucidly and act based on what truths you find to be self-evident.

Existentialism has been described as an unphilosophy or an anti-philosophy.

It bucks the idea that you can create a knowable explanation for the world, that our rationality (our human mind altogether) is sharp enough to handle the complexity of this experience of being alive.  I tend to ask “Why?” a lot. And at this point in my life my opinion after 10-12 years reading  modern western philosophy (nothing crazy, maybe 30-some books over that decade) is that the rational mind is not equipped to understand “Why”. I’ve been trying to figure out “Why?” for 12 years–humanity has been trying for thousands. What I believe is that humans can’t answer big questions with Truth (Capital “T”), but only truths (little “t”) because we don’t really understand what the hell is going on. We can’t rationalize it and that is the issue… thinking logically is our best mental tool, but it’s not sufficient.

So stop asking why. There may be no knowable reason.

What is the meaning of all of life? No reason. We are just here.

Why can’t we see air? No reason.

Why did Castaneda’s warrior want to warm the snake? No reason (Capital “T”) other than that which the warrior ascribed to that gesture (little “t”).

The world just is. And it is indifferent and unpatterned and acts in an overall irrational/illogical manner. We can’t figure it out. We’ve been trying for a long time and it’s unlikely a human ever will understand it. So stop trying to be certain of the Truth. And instead worry about what you truly know to be truths.

Existentialism is an obsession with being genuine about what you feel and think…about defining your truths. You never want to express more than your true feelings (though I’d argue that it’s ok to express less than your true feelings). Do not try to escape thinking for yourself. There is no exit.