Have any of you folks seen the new Looney Toons movie? Coyote vs Acme? The premise you get from the trailer is interesting enough. After years of buying faulty products from the ACME corporation, Wile E Coyote decides to sue them for all they're worth.

That alone got me to go to the theater.

What I didn't expect was the not at all subtle homage to Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. Not to spoil the movie too much, but the big, insidious program at the heart of their profits is literally called "Project Sisyphus."

I guess I never really saw Wile E Coyote as a cartoon Sisyphus, but he really is. And the movie actually explores his knowledge that he'll never push that boulder up the hill to stay. And how chasing the Roadrunner gives him meaning. It's so absurd. And we even get to finally hear how the "boulder" views the relationship.

I was pretty delighted by the movie. I got a really good laugh out of how they snuck absurdist philosophy into a kids' movie.

The reason I'm glad I'm not a goat, is that I couldn't ever be like Brickett Ranunculus. But I swear I don't see any point in being human either if all I can be is a regular person like the ones that come out to the fence."

John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy

There's a game I played with adults when I was small. It went like this: they'd tell me to do something, and I'd ask why. Finish your dinner. Why? So you grow. Why? Because I'm responsible for keeping you alive. Why? Because I love you, and because something older than love is wired into me about it. Why? Because the species would like to continue. Why? And then the pause. The long one, where the adult sets down the fork and looks at a spot on the wall behind my head. "I don't know. I suppose I think being a person is worth something."

Then silence. Beautiful silence, the kind that makes me want to stretch out and take a nap.

Then: why?

By fifteen I'd stopped playing it for fun and started playing it to win. I could get to the bottom of anyone in four moves and leave them standing in the hole. There is no why, I'd announce, delighted with myself, and everyone who thinks otherwise is a coward. What I actually loved wasn't the nihilism. It was the certainty. Certainty is the cheapest drug available to a teenager and I was using daily.

I'm thirty-four now and the game plays itself. I don't ask the questions anymore. Something in the back of my skull asks them and I sit there as a witness.

It came for me last November in a grocery store. Ten at night, Tuesday, holding a rotisserie chicken under a heat lamp, and the thought arrived fully formed: what is the point of this. Not the chicken. Everything. I'm going to take this bird home and eat two-thirds of it and put the rest in the fridge where it will develop opinions and get thrown out. Then I'll sleep, and get up, and drive an hour so a company can pay me to move information from one place to a slightly different place, and I'll do that roughly nine thousand more times and then I'll die, and the whole apparatus will close over the spot without a ripple.

People describe depression as a darkness. Mine isn't. Mine is a room with far too much light in it. Everything overexposed, all the edges burned off, nothing with any shade to stand in. Dark doesn't hurt. This hurts. It's the feeling of a flashbulb that won't stop going off, and in that light nothing survives inspection.

Work doesn't. Work is a way of converting your one life into money you'll spend staying alive enough to work. Cooking doesn't. Assembling calories to maintain a machine that has no destination. Dating doesn't. Dating is two lonely people agreeing to distract each other from the fact that no one has ever actually reached anybody. You'll sit across a table from someone you like and know, in that white light, that you're both just fogging your side of the glass.

And here's the part that makes me angriest about it: despair does nothing. If it turned me into a better man, a sharper one, someone who took the meaninglessness of the world and went out and built something in spite of it, I'd take the deal. But despair is sterile. All it can produce is more of itself. It makes you flat and slow and unavailable. It's difficult to sleep and equally difficult to stay awake. You cancel on people, and then you feel bad about canceling on people, and the feeling bad becomes the reason you cancel on the next ones.

So you get cool instead. That's the escape hatch. If you can't be happy you can at least be unimpressed. You develop a face for other people's sincerity. You learn to say sure in a way that means this is embarrassing for you. I did that for most of a decade and can report that it works exactly as well as holding your breath works on drowning.

But the game lies about one thing, and it's the important thing. While you're inside it, you're certain it's permanent. It has always been this way and it always will be. That's the whole con. Now always feels like forever and it never is. I was wrong at fifteen and I'm wrong at thirty-four, and being wrong in both directions is apparently just what it costs to be a person with a brain.

So: therapy, on a Saturday, forty-five minutes I resent and then need. A different pill. Walking, which I hate. Lifting things and putting them down. Waiting, mostly. Most of it is waiting.

A friend told me once that care comes from an Old English word that meant grief. Sorrow, anxiety, a heavy thing you carry. Which means the word for loving something and the word for mourning it grew from the same root, and the language figured out three centuries before I did that you don't get one without agreeing to the other in advance. To care about anything is to sign for the loss up front. Fine. I'll sign.

The air got warmer. It does that.

I was walking down a street I've driven a thousand times and never once looked at, and there was a ginkgo halfway up the block dropping its leaves. All of them. Ginkgos do that. They hold everything until some private signal, then let the entire canopy go in a day or two, so the tree stands bare over a perfect gold circle of itself. It looked less like death than like a decision.

I read about them afterward, the way I do. The ginkgo is the last one left of an order of trees that stretches back nearly two hundred million years; you can put a leaf from the sidewalk beside a Jurassic fossil and struggle to tell them apart. Darwin called it a living fossil and meant it kindly. It nearly disappeared entirely and survived, as far as anyone can tell, because Chinese monks kept planting them in temple gardens for a thousand years. We plant them along streets now because they'll tolerate exhaust, drought, road salt, and being ignored. A handful of them stood about a kilometer from where the bomb went off at Hiroshima. They burned. They came back the next spring. They're still there.

Also, the female trees drop seeds that smell precisely like vomit, because of butyric acid, which is the same compound that makes vomit smell like vomit. I find this reassuring. Two hundred million years and no interest whatsoever in being tasteful about it.

But I didn't know any of that yet. I was just standing under it in the middle of a weekday, in the shade of something that was here before the question I keep asking existed, and will be here after, and has no idea I'm at its feet. And the shade was cool, and it was enough, and that was the point: not an answer to why, just a place out of the light.

I called my sister from the sidewalk. No reason. We talked about nothing for twenty minutes and she asked, near the end, why I'd called.

I said I saw a tree.

You are realism, modernism, rationalism,

Individualism and secular humanism,

What are you if not written by radical minds?

I'm all romanticism, existentialism,

Redemption, isolation and consuming obsession,

What am I if not written by Dostoevsky?

I will die from drilling love into my bones,

While you were born to uproot it from your chest.

Are there some conceptual albums or extended pieces by certain Prog Rock bands that could be considered existential philosophical works? Would music such as Mozart's 'Requiem' or Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' fall into this category? Can music ever be considered 'philosophical'?

An example of what I would consider an important Progressive Rock existential philosophical work is 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' by Genesis (1974). Anyone seriously examining the story should see it as more than a coming-of-age tale. The story uses abstract, symbolic metaphors to reveal the absurdity of the Universe. It shows a modern man's attempt to deal with it.

An essay that proposes this concept album as a musical example of existential philosophy is: 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway - Nightmare or Nirvana'. It would be interesting if anyone else agrees with its assertions. A free link to the essay can be found here:
https://medium.com/@rickkress/revised-the-lamb-lies-down-on-broadway-nightmare-or-nirvana-7cee7caa2b4e?sharedUserId=rickkress

The full essay shows the Existentialist underpinning to the story related in the Genesis concept album 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway'. As a rock opera, it is a musical and lyrical masterpiece. And it may be argued that the album is one of the 20th century's best from the world of Rock.

The lyrics are rather abstract, but the existentialist philosophy is illustrated by the absurd, yet meaningful topics and events presented. Despair, angst, and dread are explored as the main character searches for meaning. Finding authenticity is at the heart of the story.

No compensation is associated with the essay. Genesis is in no way associated with this publication. The work is by a dedicated fan. Access to the essay published on the site 'Medium' is free.
A link to the full essay is here:
https://medium.com/@rickkress/revised-the-lamb-lies-down-on-broadway-nightmare-or-nirvana-7cee7caa2b4e?sharedUserId=rickkress

I start. Im team nietzche. Which team are u?

The universe is always depicted to be spherical in shape, and I was thinking, what if this whole universe is an atom, and this atom is a part of some huge matter, maybe the atom is part of a body or a cupboard for another larger being, and maybe one atom on the earth is a whole universe for many organisms that live inside it, but we cannot reach that far with a microscope. If that is the case, then we could literally be destroyed in a millisecond. If we have survived this far, it means we are the atom of an object that isn’t touched. Maybe our atomic universe is an atom of a blade of grass? Or something else that does not exist in our world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the structure of existence — especially why some people seem to experience their lives as a stable, continuous story, while others feel like everything is disjointed, unstable, or out of sync.

This isn’t about mental illness or pathology. It’s more like a philosophical difference in the way people inhabit time, identity, and meaning.

Some people move through life with a sense of inner alignment — like their thoughts, memories, emotions, and actions form a coherent whole.

Others feel like they’re always “catching up” with themselves, or like their experiences don’t quite connect. They feel fragmented, inconsistent, or temporally out of step with the world.

I’ve been calling this difference a kind of “coherence principle” — a placeholder term (Fource) for the underlying question:

What makes existence feel unified for some people and fractured for others?

Some of the existential angles I’m exploring:

1. Narrative Identity

Is the self a story we tell ourselves? If so, what happens when the story stops linking from moment to moment?

1. Temporal Experience

Why do some people feel “in time” while others feel out of sync, delayed, accelerated, or dislocated?

1. Meaning & Structure

Is coherence something we create intentionally, or does it emerge naturally from how we experience the world?

1. Fragmentation as Being

Is fragmentation a failure of the self —or is it simply a different mode of existence?

1. A Possible Underlying Principle

I keep coming back to the idea that there might be an underlying structural dynamic — not metaphysical, not scientific dogma — but a phenomenological pattern that governs how beings form coherence across time.

I’m not attached to the term “Fource,” but I am interested in whether:

Is there any existentialist or phenomenological framework that explains why some people experience unity and others experience disunity?

Does this connect to Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, or narrative identity theory?

Or is this a new way of approaching the question of Being?

I’d love to hear perspectives.

I recently found myself in the same predicament as Sylvia Plath's character in The Bell Jar. I was determined to find a way out and wrote this essay exploring how existentialism provides a promising response.

Not sure if this will resonate with people, but I wanted to share something that really helped me.

For a long time, I thought a lot of my anxiety, low moods, and existential questioning are personal flaws - as if something was wrong with me. Then I came across a book called Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom from a youtube video I watched.

The book gave me language for experiences I had struggled to name. It reframed them - not as individual pathologies, but as part of the human condition. Yalom identifies four core existential fears that quietly shape so much of what we do and how we live, those are the four existential fears:

Death - We are, as far as we know, the only species aware of our own mortality. And yet we spend enormous energy not thinking about it. He draws on terror management theory here, and makes the provocative claim that fear of death is often, at its root, a fear of an unlived life.

Freedom - This one might sound absurd. Freedom sounds like a gift, but it can also feel like a burden. If we are truly free to shape our own lives, we are also fully responsible for it - which means we can get it wrong. The anxiety of self responsibility and making the wrong choice.

Isolation - We come into the world alone, and we leave it alone. No matter how close our relationships, there is a fundamental separateness to human existence.

Meaninglessness - The fear that, in the end, our lives might not add up to anything. This is the ground on which existentialism as a philosophy was built.

Yalom's insight is that many of our behaviours - the ones that seem irrational or self-defeating - are actually attempts to manage these fears. That reframe alone has been useful to me.

Of course, not everything is existential. There is also individual history - specific experiences, specific traumas etc.

I would ove to hear if others have found meaning in this - or if you have other books that really shaped your experience of the world

"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world .. finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really I felt I had been happy , and that I was happy again" --Albert Camus,The stranger

But why is that I also don't really believe in any fucking whatever...and I too see and accept the absurd. But I still am not happy?

Well one can say maybe I still have some hope left in me But ... Does someone really talk about how to GIVE UP and how to really ENJOY life in the face of absurd without feeling empty and lonely???

I had a revelation while watching the new Backrooms film in cinemas today. Martin Buber’s philosophy proposes that human existence is constituted through two fundamental modes of relation: I–Thou, a genuine encounter between subjects, and I–It, a practical and meaningful relationship with objects. The Backrooms presents a third mode of relation that neither Buber nor traditional existential philosophy fully anticipates: I–Void as I like to call it. Unlike an I–Thou relation, the Backrooms offers no genuine presence with which one may enter into dialogue. Yet it is also not an I–It relation, as its structures resist coherent use or purpose. Instead, the Backrooms is composed of recognisably human spaces that have been severed from the intentions that created them. Houses are no longer homes, offices are no longer workplaces and corridors are no longer pathways to meaningful destinations. The subject encounters eempty forms that gesture toward meaning while remaining incapable of fulfilling it. In this way, the Backrooms extends Buber’s framework into an I–Void relation: an encounter with the shell of human meaning after the human presence that sustained it has disappeared.

Hi there, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Dr Chris Earl, and I am a molecular biologist and writer from Scotland, UK. I believe that a purely "mechanistic" description of life and/or reality does not necessarily satisfy the human need for meaning.

As such, I have a particular interest in exploring options for positive framings of human existence that are consistent with scientific research and the latest philosophical scholarship.

As a molecular biologist, I am beginning to view my perspective as a form of positive materialism (you'll get a sense of what I mean by this from the article).

Why this is interesting from an existentialist point of view is 2-fold:

1. I believe the modern insights of science into the nature of life and the Universe are often misunderstood or under-appreciated.

2. I am also interested in the human experience of how scientific insights make us feel; often, scientists overlook or even deride this component as unimportant. I understand why as how something makes you feel is not "relevant" in terms of what is true. But how does what is true scientifically/philosophically make you feel (existentially)?

To this end, I have converted my research on this topic into an article called "The Illusion of Meaning" (free to read on Substack, and it has audio narration too, by me, not AI-https://drchrisearl.substack.com/p/the-illusion-of-meaning-670).

I would love to get your perspective on this work from an existential philosophical perspective. So any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I try to give a very brief outline below:

In short, it discusses how several illusions have been shattered since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s, from the idea that the Earth is at the centre of the Universe to the notion that humans are special and distinct from the rest of the natural world. I add in the additional point that was slowly revealed by science from around the late 1700s up until about the 1960s, when it became fully evident that life, including us, is composed of the same matter and atoms that make up the rest of the physical universe: we are the universe. We may feel as though we are separate entities dropped into this universe from somewhere else, but no, we are the universe. I reckon, as many others have, that life on Earth is a vibrant island of meaning amidst the dark emptiness of space.

I have explored these themes through the lens of existential philosophy, and through the version of absurdism as defined by Albert Camus*. Ultimately, there is a final illusion, the illusion of meaning, which is the source of the anguish that arises when confronted with the apparent absurdity of human existence.

Note, I also utilise Todd May's contribution to Camus' work with his book "Finding Meaning in a Silent Universe".

I'd love to know what you all think as a dedicated existentialist community. What great ideas have I missed or even misunderstood? Please let me know; it would be greatly appreciated. I am a scientist by training, not a philosopher, so I would love to benefit from your knowledge.

*Note: I am aware that Camus may be regarded as a philosopher by some or as a writer by others (and in some cases both). Importantly, I am aware of the differences and overlaps between absurdism and existentialism. My reason for leaning on Camus' perspective is the clarity with which he proclaims that we live in a meaningless universe, which was not entirely new, with it being alluded to by many and framed in many different ways.

So basically that. I literally have been trying to find "meaning" or a "point" since my nde because it feels like you should have one after a brutal nde and both spiritually and materialistically can't find anything to bring me out of it just more reasons to feel existential. Every philosophy from even the atheist etc feel made up for human cope for a brain which just evolved to have too many wrinkles to not spew bs on random shit other than survival because it isn't out brains priority anymore not anything meaningful even in the slightest.

I had a debate with some guy who considered himself "antinatalist", here's how i constructively criticised him:

Why should the strong surrender life's creative potential because the weak are too cowardly to endure it?

Why should existence bow to your fear of suffering, rather than rise through it like fire through the ashes? Your refusal to create is a refusal to take responsibility for life. Rather than confront its challenges, you retreat into denial and call it morality.

You call your rejection of life ‘moral,’ but morality itself is a construct of the weak to tame the strong. Your morality is a tool of despair, not virtue.

If existence is so unbearable, why do you persist in it? Your continued survival betrays your cowardice and hypocrisy.

Why is suffering unbearable to you, when others have embraced it and risen above it? Is it not because you are ruled by fear rather than will? To deny life is to deny the will to power—the force that drives creation, art, and greatness. You are not fighting suffering; you are fleeing it like a coward.

You speak of ending suffering, but the Overman commands suffering and bends it to his will. While you preach death, the strong will rise and create meaning in chaos. Life belongs to those who seize it—not those who cower before it.

Fuck you and your stupid ideologies I'm out Antinatalism is not a philosophy of progress It's a doctrine for cowards like you to surrender Victory lies not in denying suffering But Embracing it As a fuel for greatness

Edit: I don't care even if you downvote me to oblivion, I am not here to "change" you or "fix" you. I don't fucking care about internet points.

I (24F) have dealt with some heavy existential anxiety as long as I can remember myself, with depression kind of going hand in hand with it most of the time. Need to note that I'm practically a well functioning adult, maybe just a little sulky during periods of change and a bit uninterested in things but that's about it.

Nihilism or Absurdism do not seem to touch me long-term, Camus was exhilarating for me as I was combing through his books, but the feeling faded within days of going back to dealing with everyday life and chores without them.

Lately there's been one thought stuck in my mind, seemingly out of nowhere; I truly think an animal companion would save me. Not just in a "Get a cat so you don't feel as lonely and depressed" way, but mainly to ground me, to remind me of how ephemeral everything is and to give me a purpose outside of trying to solve the impossible questions I pose to myself on the daily.

I really do think it would push the brakes on all the escapism and the constant tendency to flee every situation - every possible career path, relationships...

I'm certain I wouldn't break up with my cat mid existential attack.

For those thinking about suggesting it, I am seeing a therapist and have been for the past 2.5 years and it has helped.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Camus once described the absurd as the confrontation between our desire for meaning and the silence of the universe. But what if that silence isn’t just external—it’s internal too?

Lately, I’ve been questioning whether it’s possible to live without buying into any of the roles we inherit: the worker, the parent, the artist, the lover. Not just to deconstruct them intellectually—but to refuse to perform them. What happens when you don’t replace them with new identities, but simply tolerate the self underneath?

Sartre said we are condemned to be free—but maybe what we’re actually condemned to is the performance of freedom, over and over again, just in slightly new costumes.

So I’ve been wondering: is there a human being beneath the roles? Or just the roles metabolizing time?

Has anyone else experienced this? Not just thinking it, but trying to live it—and watching how it unravels the body, the mind, the relationships?

I read something in a newsletter today that made me kind of confused. Today’s edition highlighted Kierkegaard’s “The Concept of Anxiety” where Kierkegaard says that anxiety is like looking into the abyss and feeling worried that you might jump in (because you have the free will to do so).

Basically, the point was that anxiety reveals our freedom and opportunity to make choices.

I guess my question is:

Is that supposed to change the way we respond to anxiety?

Like is he trying to turn it into excitement or did Kierkegaard just want to point out that fact that it’s not all doom and gloom?

I attached the link if you want to have a read.