Sartre is Smartre

Jean-Paul Sartre once said,

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

The dutiful existentialist in me takes issue with this; I would drop the last two words, and edit it thusly,

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything."

And it's true, isn't it? We talked about it in class: if we're just one anonymous, meaningless face in a collective of billions, a mere cog in a machine, a disposable node in a network, what significance do we have? What do our lives mean? What's the point?

Existentialism asks us to consider that life is without meaning: that we are cosmic accidents, thrown into existence by chance circumstance, mere biological curiosities without greater purpose or design. But in spite of this, we are here. And as uniquely sentient, conscious creatures, we have the power to create meaning for ourselves, pull some significance and purpose out of the nullity of existence. We each color our view of the world with our unique outlooks, feelings, values, and experiences, wielding the sword of subjective experience to carve out a version of reality that fits us. We have the ability to see that fundamentally, we're just a pile of flesh and bones, going through the motions of biological inevitability, and yet, we also have the power to transcend that knowledge and choose to inject our lives with meaning and purpose, to take the seemingly random, undecipherable confusion of our existences and make them something important.

We are responsible for shaping our own worlds, shaping our own realities, establishing our own Truths. As Sartre said, from the moments we are thrown from comfortable nonexistence into this crazy thing we call life, we truly are responsible for everything. Everything we do, at the very least, but also everything we feel, experience, believe, overcome, imagine, idealize, rationalize, question, hope for...everything.

There's the old adage, "with great power comes great responsibility," and I think this holds true regarding all of our existential freedom. Anything is possible and can be possible; it's up to you. This freedom gives us a tremendous amount of power, and in turn, the responsibility of being accountable for our own existence.

And to that freedom, we are condemned.

And that's what I'm thinking about today. I lead a small life, haha.