The Existentialist Thinker Type

What is an Existentialist?

Most frameworks tell you what is good and ask you to live up to it. Existentialism does something stranger and more unsettling. It tells you that the question of what is good is, in the end, yours to answer, and that you cannot honestly hand it to anyone else.

The Existentialist thinker type, one of the eighteen archetypes mapped by the Kwokka quiz, describes a mind that takes that responsibility personally. It is not a gloomy type, despite the reputation. It is a type that has decided the absence of a pre-written meaning is not a tragedy to mourn but a freedom to use, and that the only failure is to live as if the choice were not yours.

Existence Precedes Essence

The phrase that compresses the whole philosophy is Jean-Paul Sartre's: existence precedes essence. A paper knife, Sartre noted, has its essence before it exists. Someone designed it, decided what it was for, and only then was it made. Its purpose came first.

A human being, Sartre argued, is the one thing for which this is reversed. We exist first, thrown into the world without a designer's purpose, and only then, through our choices, do we make ourselves into something. There is no human nature waiting to be expressed, only a human situation waiting to be answered.

From this one move everything else in existentialism follows. If there is no pre-set essence, then you are, in Sartre's stark phrase, condemned to be free. You cannot point to your nature, your upbringing, or your circumstances and say they made the choice for you. You are choosing, always, and you are responsible for what you choose. The Existentialist thinker is simply someone who has stopped pretending otherwise.

The Philosophical Roots of Existentialism

Existentialism is less a single doctrine than a family of thinkers who circled the same problem from different directions.

Soren Kierkegaard, the religious source

The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher usually credited as the first existentialist. Kierkegaard wrote about anxiety, despair, and the leap of faith, the moment an individual commits to a way of life that reason alone cannot fully justify. For him the crisis of meaning was real, and the answer was a passionate, personal religious commitment.

Sartre and de Beauvoir, the atheist core

In mid-twentieth-century Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir built the most influential version. Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) gave the theory of radical freedom and bad faith. De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity worked out its morality, and her The Second Sex applied it, devastatingly, to the situation of women.

Camus and the absurd

Albert Camus rejected the existentialist label, but he belongs in the conversation. His idea of the absurd, the collision between our hunger for meaning and a universe that offers none, and his image of Sisyphus happy, gave the movement its most memorable picture of defiance.

Authenticity and Bad Faith

Existentialism's most useful working concept is bad faith, Sartre's term for the ways we lie to ourselves to escape the weight of our own freedom. Bad faith is the waiter who is so completely playing at being a waiter that he hides, even from himself, the fact that he chose to be there and could choose otherwise. It is anyone who says I had no choice when, strictly, they did.

The opposite of bad faith is authenticity, and it is important to be precise about what the Existentialist means by it. Authenticity is not doing whatever you feel like, and it is not finding your true self, since on this view there is no fixed true self to find. Authenticity is owning your choices as choices, living in full view of the fact that you, and not your role, your past, or your circumstances, are the author.

This is the demand that makes the Existentialist thinker type distinctive, and exhausting, and admirable. They will not let you, or themselves, off the hook with it was just how I was raised or I had no option. The Existentialist hears those as bad faith, and gently, or not so gently, hands the responsibility back.

How To Tell If You're an Existentialist

Read these sideways and notice which ones produce a jolt of recognition.

1. 01You feel a quiet contempt for the excuse it's just the way things are, and you notice when people use it to avoid a decision they are in fact making.
2. 02You have, at least once, been genuinely unsettled by the thought that you could have lived an entirely different life, and that nothing but your own choices stood in the way.
3. 03You distrust roles. The job title, the family position, the social script: you can wear them, but you are aware the whole time that they are costumes.
4. 04You would rather make a difficult, fully owned choice than drift comfortably into a life that someone else, or no one in particular, chose for you.
5. 05You find the question what is the meaning of life slightly misphrased. You suspect meaning is not found lying around but made, and the passive grammar bothers you.
6. 06Freedom, when you really feel it, comes with a flicker of dread as well as exhilaration. You recognise that mix.
7. 07You are suspicious of comfort that arrived without being chosen, and you would not trade an authentic hard life for a pleasant one you sleepwalked into.
8. 08You believe that who you are is still, to a real degree, unfinished, and that this is your responsibility rather than your problem.

If three or more of those landed, you carry a strong Existentialist component, whatever the full quiz returns.

The Strengths of the Existentialist Mind

The Existentialist's gifts all flow from one source: the refusal to outsource the authorship of their own life.

Radical ownership.

The Existentialist does not blame the script, because they do not believe there is one. This makes them unusually accountable, and unusually hard to make into a victim of their own circumstances.

Resistance to bad faith.

They can spot the moment a person, an institution, or a culture is pretending a choice was not a choice, and they will name it.

Courage in the face of uncertainty.

Because they expect no guarantees, the Existentialist can act decisively in conditions that paralyse people who are still waiting for permission or proof.

Depth.

The Existentialist takes the big questions personally rather than abstractly, which tends to produce a life that is examined, intentional, and genuinely their own.

Solidarity without illusion.

De Beauvoir's existentialism in particular grounds a real ethics: my freedom is bound up with yours, and an authentic life means willing the freedom of others, not just my own.

The Shadow Side: When Existentialism Goes Wrong

The Existentialist's shadow is the weight of the very freedom they prize.

Crushing self-responsibility.

If everything is your choice, everything is your fault. An Existentialist who forgets that circumstances are real, and sometimes overwhelming, can carry a burden of guilt that no human being should be asked to carry.

Mistaking instability for authenticity.

Because roles are costumes and the self is unfinished, an Existentialist can endlessly tear down and rebuild, never committing long enough for anything, a vocation, a relationship, a self, to actually grow.

Isolation.

Taken alone, the emphasis on individual choice can curdle into a lonely self-sufficiency, the Existentialist as a solitary author with no co-writers.

Anxiety without ground.

Existentialism names Angst honestly but does not always soothe it. A person can absorb the diagnosis, the dread of radical freedom, without ever reaching the part where freedom becomes exhilarating rather than only heavy.

Contempt for ordinary contentment.

The Existentialist can come to see comfortable, conventional happiness as a kind of failure, and miss that a freely chosen ordinary life is still freely chosen.

Famous Existentialists in History and Today

The type's range runs from the religious to the atheist, the despairing to the defiant.

Soren Kierkegaard

is the originating example. He spent his short life mapping anxiety and despair with extraordinary precision, and locating the answer in a passionate, personal commitment that no argument could compel.

Jean-Paul Sartre

is the systematic example. He gave existentialism its concepts, its slogans, and its public profile, and he lived a life of restless political engagement that tried, not always successfully, to follow its logic.

Simone de Beauvoir

is the example that turned the philosophy into an ethics and a politics. The Second Sex showed what existentialist freedom looks like when you take seriously that some people's freedom has been systematically denied.

Viktor Frankl

is the example forged in the worst possible conditions. A psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps, Frankl concluded in Man's Search for Meaning that the last human freedom, the choice of one's attitude, cannot be taken away, and built a whole therapy on it.

In fiction, the Existentialist register runs from Camus's Meursault in The Stranger, estranged and unsettling, to the trapped characters of Sartre's play No Exit, to almost any story whose hero must choose, without a guarantee, who they are going to become.

Existentialist Careers and Working Life

Existentialist instincts are at home wherever the work is the authorship of something: writing, philosophy, the arts, design, independent creative practice, and entrepreneurship of the genuine, build-it-from-nothing kind.

The type also has a natural and important place in the helping professions, particularly counselling and psychotherapy. There is an entire school of existential therapy, associated with figures such as Viktor Frankl and Irvin Yalom, built around the idea that many psychological struggles are, at root, struggles with freedom, meaning, isolation, and mortality.

Worst-fit work is the heavily scripted, deeply hierarchical, role-is-everything kind, where the job explicitly asks you to be the function and not the person. An Existentialist can survive there, but at the cost of a constant low hum of bad faith they will eventually find unbearable.

A note specific to the type: the Existentialist's working life goes best once they accept that committing fully to one chosen path is not a betrayal of their freedom but an expression of it. Endless openness is its own kind of cage.

Existentialist Relationships

The Existentialist brings rare honesty to a relationship. They are unwilling to coast, unwilling to let love become a mere habit or a role, and they will keep asking, sometimes uncomfortably, whether the relationship is still genuinely chosen rather than merely continued.

That same honesty is the friction point. A partner can experience the Existentialist's refusal to take anything for granted as a refusal to ever feel settled. The reassurance that ordinary couples draw from we just are a couple now is something the Existentialist is constitutionally reluctant to give, because to them it sounds like bad faith.

The resolution that thoughtful Existentialists reach is the one de Beauvoir lived toward: that commitment is most meaningful precisely because it is re-chosen, not because it is fixed. A bond that is freely renewed is stronger, not weaker, than one that is simply assumed.

The person who will love an Existentialist well is someone who is not frightened by being chosen rather than merely kept, and who can find, in that ongoing choice, a deeper security than the automatic kind.

Common Misconceptions About Existentialists

Existentialism is not the same as nihilism.

The Nihilist concludes that the absence of given meaning means there is no meaning. The Existentialist concludes the opposite, that meaning must therefore be created, and treats the creating as the central work of a life.

Existentialists are not necessarily gloomy.

The mood of mature existentialism is closer to defiant or exhilarated than depressed. Camus insisted we must imagine Sisyphus happy, and meant it.

Existentialism is not pure self-indulgence.

Authenticity is not doing whatever you feel like. It is owning your choices honestly, and in de Beauvoir's version it explicitly requires willing the freedom of others, not just your own.

Existentialism is not anti-religious by definition.

Its first great figure, Kierkegaard, was intensely religious, and there is a substantial tradition of Christian and Jewish existentialism alongside the famous atheist strand.

Existentialists are not against commitment.

The serious position is that a freely made, fully owned commitment is the highest expression of freedom, not a surrender of it.

Existentialist vs Other Thinker Types

The Existentialist is sharpened by contrast with the types that share its terrain.

Existentialist vs Nihilist.

The most important pairing. Both Nihilist and Existentialist stare at the same fact, that the universe hands us no meaning. The Nihilist takes this as the end of the matter. The Existentialist takes it as the beginning, and treats the construction of meaning as a duty rather than a delusion.

Existentialist vs Stoic.

Both prize inner freedom, but by opposite routes. The Stoic finds freedom by accepting what cannot be changed and detaching from it. The Existentialist finds it by insisting that far more is within the scope of choice than we like to admit, and by refusing the comfort of acceptance.

Existentialist vs Hedonist.

The Hedonist trusts the felt quality of experience as the measure of a life. The Existentialist trusts authenticity, and would choose a harder, fully chosen life over a more pleasant one that was simply drifted into.

Existentialist vs Determinist.

The cleanest opposition. The Determinist holds that your choices are the inevitable products of prior causes. The Existentialist's entire philosophy begins with the refusal to live as if that were the last word, whatever the metaphysics.