An existential crisis is a moment at which an individual questions the very foundations of their life: whether this life has any meaning, purpose, or value. It is commonly tied with depression and/or a feeling of a lack of purpose in life, e.g. "One day I will be forgotten... what is the point of all of my work." This issue of the meaning and purpose of existence is the topic of the philosophical school of existentialism.
Contents
Description
An existential crisis may result from, be misdiagnosed as, or be comorbid with:
An existential crisis is often provoked by a significant event in the person's life—psychological trauma, marriage, separation, major loss, the death of a loved one, a life-threatening experience, a new love partner, psychoactive drug use, adult children leaving home, reaching a personally significant age (turning 16, turning 40, etc.), etc. Usually, it provokes the sufferer's introspection about personal mortality, thus revealing the psychological repression of said awareness.
An existential crisis may resemble anomie (a personal condition resulting from a lack of norms) or a midlife crisis. An existential crisis may stem from one's new perception of life and existence. Analogously, existentialism posits that a person can and does define the meaning and purpose of his or her life, and therefore must choose to resolve the crisis of existence.
In existentialist philosophy, the term 'existential crisis' specifically relates to the crisis of the individual when they realize that they must always define their own lives through the choices they make. The existential crisis occurs when one recognizes that even the decision to either refrain from action or withhold assent to a particular choice is, in itself, a choice. In other words, humankind is "condemned" to freedom. It can also be noted that once one is out of an existential crisis, they are easily able to get into another, or aren't completely out of it.
Handling
Existential crisis is considered by many to be a direct consequence of depression.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, a Norwegian philosopher and adherent of nihilism and antinatalism, asserted in his book, The Last Messiah, four ways that he believed all self-conscious beings use in order to cope with their apprehension of indifference and absurdity in existence, comprising "anchoring", "isolation", "distraction", and "sublimation":
Intense vipassana meditation will usually bring about a set of experiences, referred to as the "dark night of the soul" by Western spiritual traditions, that resemble the typical symptoms of an existential crisis. During the "dark night", meditators become severely discouraged in regard to practice and life in general, although continuing meditation is said to be the way to overcome this difficult stage.
A short-term and non-clinical study found that a dose of acetaminophen can reduce some aspects of existential anxiety.
Cultural contexts
In the 19th century, Kierkegaard considered that angst and existential despair would appear when an inherited or borrowed world-view (often of a collective nature) proved unable to handle unexpected and extreme life-experiences. Nietzsche extended his views to suggest that the so-called Death of God—the loss of collective faith in religion and traditional morality—created a more widespread existential crisis for the philosophically aware.
Existential crisis has indeed been seen as the inevitable accompaniment of modernism (c.1890–1945). Whereas Durkheim saw individual crises as the byproduct of social pathology and a (partial) lack of collective norms, others have seen existentialism as arising more broadly from the modernist crisis of the loss of meaning throughout the modern world. Its twin answers were either a religion revivified by the experience of anomie (as with Martin Buber), or an individualistic existentialism based on facing directly the absurd contingency of human fate within a meaningless and alien universe, as with Sartre and Camus.
Fredric Jameson has suggested that postmodernism with its saturation of social space by a visual consumer culture has replaced the modernist angst of the traditional subject, and with it the existential crisis of old, by a new social pathology of flattened affect and a fragmented subject.