“Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

Dante, Inferno

We live in a world of choices. There are options for everything - food, entertainment, travel, and work. Your choices define your life. But what if you don’t know what you want? That is an existential crisis.

At a certain stage of life, everyone questions their purpose and life choices. What if I moved to another country? What if I was single? Did I want children? Am I happy at my job? Unanswered questions create anxiety.

The existential crisis is a theme running through European philosophy. It is associated with the ideas of five philosophers in particular.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger had a coherent view of existential crisis and its distinct features.

There are five distinctive features of an existential crisis:

1. Everything that made sense and was right before now is questionable. We realize we are free and can carve our paths, but where did that freedom lead us? Conscience makes us question our motives to the core.

2. This realization induces anxiety. Freedom doesn’t bring calm but robs us of it. We realize that no one cares as much as we thought they did about us, and we realize we wasted or abused our freedom.

3. We develop a heightened awareness of death.  We realize that we don’t have as much time as we thought. Time is flying, and with some urgency, we feel the need to re-examine our life to get back on track and have the life we want.

4. We have multiple choices but are not equipped with the wisdom to choose what is the best one. We never feel assured and have to choose blindly. Minus confidence, we make mistakes.

5. The existential philosophers don’t mean to depress you with this.