PracticallyPsychology

Most people think freedom means having options. A menu of choices. The ability to do what you want when you want. But existential freedom is something entirely different, and honestly, it’s terrifying. It’s the recognition that you are radically free whether you like it or not. There’s no script, no predetermined path, no cosmic instruction manual. You’re thrown into existence, and every moment demands that you create meaning from nothing. That’s not the kind of freedom people celebrate. It’s the kind that keeps you up at night.

The existentialists understood this. Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that we are “condemned to be free.” Condemned. Not blessed, not gifted, condemned. Because with absolute freedom comes absolute responsibility. You can’t blame your parents, your genes, your circumstances, or God for who you become. At the most fundamental level, you are the author of your life, and that authorship is inescapable. Even refusing to choose is a choice. Even denying your freedom is an act of freedom.

This is where existential anxiety comes from. It’s not the everyday worry about bills or deadlines. It’s deeper, more primal. It’s the dizziness you feel when you realize there’s no safety net, no guaranteed meaning, no external authority to tell you what matters. Søren Kierkegaard called it “the dizziness of freedom.” Stand at the edge of a cliff and you don’t just fear falling, you fear the freedom to jump. That vertigo isn’t about danger, it’s about possibility. It’s the awareness that in every moment, you could choose something radically different, and nothing stops you except you.

The existentialists identified what they called the existential givens, the unavoidable facts of human existence. There are four big ones: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. And here’s the kicker, you can’t escape any of them, but how you respond to them determines whether you live authentically or spend your life running.

Death is the most obvious. We all die. No exceptions. And unlike other animals, we know it’s coming. That knowledge colors everything. It can paralyze you with fear, or it can wake you up. Heidegger talked about “being-toward-death,” the idea that acknowledging your mortality isn’t morbid, it’s clarifying. When you truly grasp that your time is finite, trivial concerns fall away. You stop postponing what matters. You stop living as if you have forever. Death, paradoxically, gives life urgency and weight. It’s the deadline that forces you to decide what you actually care about.

Then there’s isolation. Not loneliness in the social sense, though that’s part of it. Existential isolation is the recognition that no matter how close you get to another person, there’s an unbridgeable gap. You can’t fully know what it’s like to be them, and they can’t fully know you. You were born alone, you’ll die alone, and in between, your subjective experience is yours and yours alone. That sounds bleak, but it’s also liberating. If you can’t escape into someone else’s existence, you’re forced to own yours. Relationships become more honest when you stop expecting them to complete you or rescue you from yourself.

Meaninglessness is the hardest one for most people. We’re meaning-making creatures. We crave purpose, narrative, significance. But the universe doesn’t provide it. There’s no inherent meaning baked into existence. The stars don’t care about you. History doesn’t care. Nature is indifferent. Camus captured this with his essay on Sisyphus, the Greek figure condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down. Absurd, pointless, exhausting. And yet Camus ends with a stunning line: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Why? Because Sisyphus owns his struggle. He doesn’t need the gods to validate his effort. He creates his own meaning by choosing to push the boulder. That defiance, that refusal to collapse into despair, that’s existential freedom.

And then there’s freedom itself, which is both the gift and the burden. You are free to choose, but that means you’re responsible for your choices. You can’t outsource that. Politicians, priests, parents, they can guide you, but they can’t choose for you. And when you try to escape that responsibility, when you live in what Sartre called “bad faith,” pretending you had no choice, you shrink your humanity. Bad faith looks like saying “I had to take this job” when you didn’t. “I had no choice but to stay in this relationship” when you did. “That’s just how I am” when you could be different. Bad faith is the refusal to admit you’re free, and it’s the most common form of self-betrayal.

Viktor Frankl lived this philosophy in the most extreme circumstances imaginable. A Jewish psychiatrist, he survived Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz, Dachau, places designed to strip people of their humanity. Everything was taken from him. His family, his possessions, his professional identity, even his name replaced by a number. And yet, Frankl discovered a kind of freedom that couldn’t be taken. He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

He watched men in the camps who, despite unimaginable suffering, maintained their dignity. They comforted others. They shared their last scrap of bread. They refused to let their captors define them. And he also watched men collapse into bitterness and brutality. Same conditions, different responses. The difference wasn’t external. It was internal. It was the choice to find meaning even in suffering, to see themselves as more than victims, to affirm their humanity when everything around them denied it.

Frankl described a space between stimulus and response. The Nazis controlled the stimulus, the camps, the cruelty, the deprivation. But they couldn’t control the response. In that space, Frankl said, lies our freedom. And in that freedom lies our growth and our liberation. This is the core insight of existential psychology: circumstances don’t determine you. Your relationship to those circumstances does.

After the war, Frankl developed logotherapy, therapy centered on meaning. He rejected Freud’s focus on the past and unconscious drives. For Frankl, what mattered wasn’t where you came from but where you’re going. What’s pulling you forward? What do you care about enough to suffer for? He believed neurosis often stems from existential vacuum, a lack of meaning. When people feel their lives don’t matter, they fill that void with distraction, addiction, materialism, anything to numb the ache. But the cure isn’t pleasure or comfort. It’s meaning. And meaning isn’t found, it’s created through commitment, through deciding what you stand for and acting accordingly.

Existential freedom isn’t about doing whatever you want without consequences. It’s about recognizing that even in the most constrained circumstances, you have agency over your inner life. You choose what you value. You choose what you focus on. You choose whether to live authentically or hide behind excuses.

But here’s where it gets tricky. That kind of freedom is uncomfortable. Most people don’t want it. It’s easier to believe you’re a product of your upbringing, your brain chemistry, your bad luck. It’s easier to blame and complain than to take ownership. This is why anxiety is epidemic right now. Between 2008 and 2018, anxiety surged for all American adults under fifty, with the steepest increases among young adults. By 2022, half of adults under thirty reported feeling anxious most or all of the time. That’s not just stress. It’s existential dread dressed up as worry.

Why now? Because we live in a culture that promises comfort, convenience, and control. We’re told that if we work hard enough, buy the right things, follow the right advice, life will be safe and predictable. But it’s a lie. Life is uncertain. Suffering is inevitable. Control is an illusion. And when that reality crashes through the fantasy, people panic. They’ve never learned to sit with uncertainty. They’ve never developed the psychological tools to create meaning in the face of chaos.

The antidote isn’t more distraction. It’s more awareness. This is where mindfulness enters the existential picture. Jon Kabat-Zinn brought Buddhist mindfulness into Western medicine and psychology, and its power lies in exactly what the existentialists described: presence. Mindfulness teaches you to observe your thoughts and feelings without being ruled by them. You notice the anxiety, the fear, the urge to run, and you don’t act on it automatically. You create that space between stimulus and response. You choose.

Without awareness, you’re on autopilot. Freud and Skinner might be right about you. You’re just reacting, driven by conditioning and unconscious patterns. But with awareness, you wake up. You see that thoughts are just thoughts, not truth. Emotions are just weather passing through, not permanent states. And in that seeing, you reclaim your freedom.

Existential freedom also has a relational dimension. This might sound paradoxical. How can you be radically free and also deeply connected? But the existentialists understood that authentic relationships require freedom. When you hide behind roles, when you perform who you think you should be, when you manipulate others to meet your needs, you’re not free and neither are they. Real intimacy happens when two people show up as themselves, flawed and finite, and choose each other anyway. That choice, renewed daily, is an act of existential freedom.

Martin Buber talked about I-Thou relationships versus I-It relationships. I-It treats the other person as an object, a means to an end. I-Thou encounters them as a whole being, unique and irreducible. I-Thou relationships are risky because they demand vulnerability. You can’t control the outcome. But they’re also where meaning lives. When you stop using people and start seeing them, when you stop hiding and start showing up, relationships become spaces of mutual freedom.

The existentialists also knew that freedom isn’t just individual. We’re thrown into a world with others, and our choices affect them. Sartre wrote that when you choose for yourself, you choose for all humanity. Not literally, but symbolically. Your actions create a model of what it means to be human. If you live with courage, honesty, and responsibility, you affirm those values for everyone. If you live in bad faith, you contribute to a culture of evasion. Freedom is personal, but it’s never private.

This is why meaning is so crucial. Viktor Frankl found that people who oriented their lives toward meaning, what philosophers call eudaimonic happiness, were more resilient, more satisfied, and more capable of enduring hardship than those chasing pleasure. Meaning isn’t a feeling. It’s a commitment. It’s deciding that something matters enough to organize your life around it, whether that’s family, creativity, justice, service, truth, or love. And once you commit, once you choose your meaning, the world changes. Obstacles become challenges instead of catastrophes. Suffering becomes bearable because it’s in service of something larger than comfort.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you are the meaning-maker. Not your parents, not your culture, not your circumstances. You. And that’s both the terror and the gift of existential freedom. You can’t blame anyone else for a meaningless life, but you also can’t credit anyone else for a meaningful one. It’s on you. Every single day, you’re writing the story of who you are. The question is whether you’re writing it consciously or sleepwalking through someone else’s script.

Existential freedom doesn’t promise happiness. It promises authenticity. It says you can live as yourself, fully awake to your mortality, your isolation, your responsibility, and your radical freedom, and in that wakefulness, find something worth living for. Not because the universe handed it to you, but because you created it.

And that’s where we’ll leave it. Thanks for sticking with me.