https://open.spotify.com/episode/1RazyAG9ruCZYGXoKgd88r?si=WG0Xn11ASne33APmsywn7A

If you’re trying to understand what someone believes should you observe how they act or what they say?

Existentialism focuses on action. It posits that people should align their actions with their beliefs.

Existentialists believe that psychopathology is built into the human experience. It is endemic to existence. Basically everyone has a psychologically valid reason to be depressed or anxious.

They take misery as a given. They then ask how we should act.

“When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?”

Throwness: there is no answer to the question of: why were we born at this time with these traits in this circumstance. We just have to deal with it. Existentialism attempts to address how to deal with it.

Dose for dose negative emotion is more potent than positive emotion. You can be completely and utterly dead but you can only be so much happier. It is more evolutionary favorable to be anxious than dead.

Humans have a complication relationship to the unknown. It represents danger but also potential.

Religion historically shielded us from existential dread by giving us belief systems.

What you want most is found where you least want to look. Existentialism encourages exposure to things you are scared of.

In the depths of your existential terror the wisdom to cope with it will be found

There is more in you than you know and the way you discover it is by challenging as many parts of yourself as you can manage.

Once burned forever shy. If you lose faith in one belief system you have the capacity to lose faith in all of them. That’s nihilism.

Nihilists are predisposed to totalitarianism because totalitarian order is often preferred to nihilistic chaos.

What makes people think that getting everything they think they want will make them eternally fulfilled