What is an existential crisis, or why not everyone likes a weekend

[Lord777]

An “existential crisis” is a typical first world problem: an intelligent being, freed from the need to constantly solve the most pressing issues of survival, has enough time to think about the meaning of his own life, and often come to disappointing conclusions. But before diagnosing an existential crisis in oneself, it is worth learning more about the philosophy of existentialism and the existential psychology that grew out of it.

Existentialism had a huge impact on the culture of the twentieth century, but, remarkably, it never existed in its pure form as a separate philosophical trend. Practically none of the philosophers, whom we now refer to as existentialists, did not designate their belonging to this trend - the only exception is the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, who unequivocally showed his position in the report "Existentialism is humanism. "And nevertheless, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Roland Barthes, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger are ranked among the existentialists. There was something in common in the intellectual quest of these thinkers - they all paid special attention to the uniqueness of human existence. The very name "existentialism" comes from the Latin word existentia - "existence.

This concept was first introduced by the forerunner of the existentialists, the 19th century Danish philosopher Seren Kierkegaard, who defined it as an awareness of the inner being of a person in the world. A person can acquire "existence" through a conscious choice, moving from "inauthentic", contemplative-sensual and external-world-oriented existence to comprehending himself and his own uniqueness.

But a person does not always succeed in realizing himself as "existence" - he is too distracted by everyday worries, momentary pleasures and other external factors. As one of the existentialists, Karl Jaspers, believed, this knowledge comes to him in a special, "borderline" situation - such as a threat to his life, suffering, struggle, helplessness in the face of chance, a deep sense of guilt. For example, Hamlet's existential quest - "to be or not to be?" - were provoked by the death of his father.

And if at such a critical moment a person begins to be tormented by questions about the meaning of his own existence, to which he cannot give a satisfactory answer, he has an existential crisis. A person wants to believe that his life has value, and at the same time, looking at his being as if from the outside, he suddenly realizes that human existence has neither a given purpose, nor an objective meaning. Such a discovery can cause deep depression or lead to radical changes in life.

How to approach the solution of this issue is a private matter for everyone. But, as in the case of cognitive dissonance, many people try to cope with an existential crisis in the simplest way - not through the search for their individual truth, but through the adoption of some ready-made concept, be it religion, tradition, or just a certain worldview system.

But since we call this crisis "existential", one of the possible solutions to the problem also lies in the field of existentialism. And this philosophy does not give ready-made answers, emphasizing that a person should first of all focus on himself and on his unique inner experience. In this regard, the famous phrase from "The Terminator" - "there is no destiny, except for the one that we create ourselves" is in some consonant with the concept of existentialism. And if to paraphrase a little - there is no point, except that we define ourselves. Thus, existentialism gives the life of each person to him in full possession, providing maximum freedom of action. But the flip side of this freedom is responsibility to oneself and the rest of the world. After all, if life has no “original” meaning, its value is manifested precisely in how a person realizes himself, in the choices and actions he has made. He himself must set himself individual tasks, relying largely on intuition and self-knowledge, and he himself will assess how well he managed to cope with them.

Seeking the truth in oneself, not relying on an external "coordinate system" and realizing the entire absurdity of being, is a serious challenge for which not everyone is ready, and that is why existentialism is often called the "philosophy of despair." Still, this approach allows in some way to look at life more creatively. This is helped by the existential direction in psychology, which helps a person to realize his life and take responsibility for it. The most interesting supporter of this trend is the Austrian psychotherapist, psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl, who for three years was a prisoner of a fascist concentration camp and still managed to overcome the torment of mental emptiness and hopeless existence. In his works, he talks about the "existential vacuum", a kind of disease of the 20th century, an era of change and destruction, when people felt disconnected from traditional values and losing support. Frankl founded a new method of psychotherapy - logotherapy, focused on helping a person find the meaning of life. The psychologist believed that the three main ways to this are creativity, the experience of life values and the conscious acceptance of a certain attitude towards circumstances that we cannot change.

Frankl also talks about a particular manifestation of the existential crisis - "Sunday neurosis". This is a depressed state and a feeling of emptiness that people often experience at the end of the working week - as soon as they stop preoccupying themselves with urgent matters, they begin to feel empty due to the lack of meaning in their lives. Perhaps it is this unfortunate phenomenon that is largely responsible for the Friday night bar earnings.

 

[Tomcat]

What does a crisis give a carder?​

A crisis gives a person the opportunity to really take a closer look at his internal clock, which is in a hurry, then lagging behind. And then the watch will show him what he wanted to achieve and what he actually achieved when he lived to be 20, 30 or 40 years old. It will become clear for what needs he forgot something, neglected something, abandoned something, lost something. In the course of overcoming the crisis, he will be able to adjust his watch. This, however, will require a difficult and honest investigation of the reasons for their own haste or delay.

But, as a rule, you don't want to reflect, looking at the dial, and there is no time. Life rushes forward, and everyday vanity successfully distracts from the realization of the finiteness of the unfolding path. We hide from the truth about ourselves, the truth about our environment, the truth about our own self-realization. We justify ourselves by employment, difficult life circumstances, the need to earn money, illness, obligations to our own parents and children.

At the beginning of life, when there is no such multitude of masks in our arsenal that an adult can change so cleverly, a small child bewitches with his spontaneity and authenticity. Later, unfortunately, for most of us, everything changes, and we lose the ability to remain ourselves. Only borderline, existential, crisis situations make it possible to think again about our own essence and why we came to this world.

It is good that an unconscious, dependent, almost automatic existence does not last long. The monotonous, monotonous movement along the path of life, overgrown with habits, duties and debts, is suddenly abruptly interrupted. It turns out that we urgently need to look for a new job, take on new responsibility, experience betrayal, loneliness, and disappointment. Sometimes a terrible grief, the loss of a loved one, or your own diagnosis, which sounds like a sentence, change everything around in the blink of an eye, highlighting false values and pseudo-desires.

In a crisis situation, a person constantly returns to resentment, betrayal, loss and “scrolls” it over and over hundreds of times. Time seems to stop, starts to mark time. It seems that there is no future, it is not visible, it is not perceived as something other than the painful present. Former prospects, clear goals, pleasant dreams are depreciating, fading. Behavior depends on random things: a phone call, a change in mood, a pain in the heart, a phrase said by a TV announcer.

When a crisis arises, the familiar life-world collapses rapidly. Finding himself among its debris, a person is forced to look for the causes of his life catastrophe, to comprehend his life. With such many days of deliberation, strange discoveries sometimes come. It turns out that something around which all activity has recently been concentrated is now perceived as unnecessary fuss, and that which seemed to have never been thought about before is gradually turning into a real meaning of existence.

It is precisely the crisis with all its morbidity that insistently demands from us a detailed, reasoned, balanced solution of the problem of meaning. The tasks are new and prohibitively difficult every time. The task, the solution of which alone can return us to the development highway or help open a new path. But such a successful outcome takes time, so the crisis never goes away quickly.

To get to the next straight, we need to find the strength in ourselves. Forces for the fullest possible awareness of all aspects of his recent life, exploration of the space and time of his life world.

It is crises that become beacons that do not allow one to get lost in the turmoil of life. Crises force us to reconstruct the dilapidated building of our own life world, to reconsider close relationships, abandoning those that have already exhausted themselves, pull us back, interfere. The correct, reliable operation of our internal clock, the adequacy of the relationship to the time of life depends on crises.

It is clear that not all people achieve personal maturity. One of the reasons for this is the non-constructive way out of crisis situations.

Why is this happening? Sometimes we do not dare to redo all the inner work that the crisis requires of us. We are not ready to take risks, we do not want to suffer, we are afraid of loneliness, we do not believe in our strength. It is easier for us to close our eyes tightly at everything that does not satisfy, to give up secret dreams, not taking a step towards a new life.

This is how boredom, depression, worthlessness and emptiness enter the scene. Instead of dynamics, stagnation lasts, instead of trust in the world, disappointment in it grows stronger.

A crisis is a kind of step forward or backward, up or down. Having decided to work, overcoming the crisis, a person tries to create a new life story with new horizons and perspectives. Having failed to cope with the crisis task, he returns to the old editions of his life story, refuses something forever and loses something irretrievably.

Let us consider what exactly is the impact of the crisis on each of us. Of course, if you are now experiencing a crisis, amidst the chaos of life, it is difficult for you to realize and isolate this influence. But if at the present time you are on a more or less prosperous, well-arranged section of your life's road, then you will have the strength to remember those crises that were successfully overcome in the past.

Then you can see that each crisis has helped you become a more independent person. Independent of external circumstances and internal obligations. You began to value your autonomy more, to better protect your boundaries, to keep your distance.

You freed yourself from the influence of assessments, requirements, expectations of your environment. You learned to take into account thoughts, advice, warnings or orders, but decisions still made their own, listening first of all to yourself. You respected your inner freedom more and more and found new ways to protect it from tactless and inappropriate interference.

The crises experienced in the past demanded from you a fresh look at everything that happened in your life, new insights, and this made it possible to creatively, innovatively, creatively solve the accumulated problems.

A new life story was created and played out regardless of whether you had an acting gift or the skill of a writer. The crisis stimulated the ability to create a new way of everyday life, without using ready-made recipes for raising a child, overcoming misunderstandings with relatives, planning a vacation or promotion. You learned to improvise, trust your intuition, connect imagination and fantasy.

And, finally, successfully passed crises have always led you to a greater acceptance of the reality of your life with all its possibilities and limitations. After experiencing and overcoming crisis experiences, you gave up illusions about yourself, your character, relationships. You took off your pink or black glasses to see everything as it is. You managed to accept your shortcomings, mistakes, miscalculations, without giving up love for yourself and faith in your own capabilities.

You have ceased so desperately to remake your loved ones, to educate and teach them. You had enough warmth, patience, wisdom and openness to see the surrounding reality as it is.

Our progress on the road of life never happens on schedule. This path looks smooth and straight only in very small areas. The road of life at different age stages either expands, then narrows, then begins to twist and circle. So we move forward, sometimes accelerating and sometimes almost stopping or turning back. And each crisis forces us to take a fresh look at the path we have traveled and outline the perspective of the movement.

During the crisis, we acutely feel that, despite the difficult circumstances in which we find ourselves, the steering wheel is still in our hands. There is no one besides us to steer out of today's impasse. Only we are the true authors of the most important work that we have been writing all our lives. Each crisis contributes to the emergence of new editions of our history about ourselves, our share, suffering and joys, defeats and victories. Such a story, depending on how we rewrite it, has a great impact on the future course of events.

But what if you imagine your life without any crises? Then from year to year we live, like in a fairy tale, peacefully and calmly, moving forward along the landmarks previously outlined by our parents. Happy fate has created such fantastic conditions for us, the guardian angel makes sure that nothing unexpected happens. Years go by, and we all walk and walk in one, obviously the right direction. No storms, misery, disappointment, betrayal or remorse. We are unfamiliar with outbursts of anger and waves of remorse; we do not have an oppressive feeling of hopelessness and emptiness. We never wake up with the feeling that life has no meaning, and everything we do is one big mistake.

By the way, for the purity of an imaginary experiment, it would be good to get rid of unexpected joys, from the experience of crazy love, a huge victory, from flashes of inspiration, insight, ecstasy. After all, an intense positive, which no one specifically planned, did not expect, also pulls out of the captivity of everyday life, expands horizons, makes it possible to see the life lived in a new way, to realize his own role in what happened, to write a new continuation of the life story.

So, in our imaginary world, everything is quiet and peaceful. No laughter, no tears. Boring and monotonous. No movement, not even a breath of breeze. This can only be a dream. Not only the personality, but also the organism does not develop so easily. It turns out that we need big shocks, which are crises, just in order to be personally healthy, for changes to take place, for development to take place.

But relatively stable, non-revolutionary periods of life are also necessary. Otherwise, we would have no time to assimilate, assimilate, and integrate the experience gained during the crisis.

E. Erickson believes that during a crisis we choose a favorable or unfavorable future path. Every personal quality that manifests itself as a result of crisis experiences is fundamentally bipolar, for example, trust or distrust in the world, autonomy or the experience of shame. Therefore, a new quality already at the time of its emergence becomes internally conflicting, thus stimulating movement forward.

Today the bipolar picture of the world already looks simplistic. As a rule, before us at every fork in life there is a whole fan of possibilities. We create many different stories about ourselves and our lives: first, when a crisis is approaching, sad, mournful, irritated, anxious.

In the very center of crisis experiences, our texts become doomed, full of unbearable suffering and pessimism. When we begin to cope with life situations, when we feel reserves of vitality, the stories are transformed into winning, overcoming, ever more daring, active and optimistic.

During a crisis, we seem to wake up from everyday hibernation and become especially attentive, sensitive to what is happening, sensitive to those around us, to their attempts to control, manipulate, push or support. Even a not very intense irritant such as a phone call, in which we are shocked by the intonation of the speaker, can now become truly significant and can cause a new understanding of relationships, their cardinal reassessment.

We can say that it is the crisis that awakens our writing talents and pushes us to create new stories about ourselves, our past, present and future. This does not mean that we all really rush to desks and computers. Oral stories arise within us, which quickly change, transform when we have attentive listeners.

We ask ourselves: “Why did it happen? What are the reasons? Is it my fault that I am so hurt and lonely today? "The one we trust also asks his questions and offers options for answers. Talking to someone about your experiences is very important. A frank conversation allows the one who talks about his problems to see them himself, as it were, from the outside, to hear his story, to be imbued with its plot. Depending on the relationship with the listener, on his role in the life of the narrator, the text about himself can be transformed in the most unexpected way.

Intense dialogue does not stop even when we are all alone. The phrase said by the hero of the film, the line read in the book, are sensitively perceived by us in the context of the crisis we are going through, sometimes helping a lot for new rethinking. During the incessant internal work, even an advertising slogan or a leaf of a tear-off calendar suddenly turns out to be carriers of important information. In this way, one can slowly see what is happening from a different angle, look at one's past with new eyes, which will make it possible to imagine the desired future in a completely different way.

The crisis gives the floor to being itself, as M. Heidegger would put it. It is a painful flash of reality, providing a new self-understanding, a new vision of oneself in an evolving life-world. This is a bright decoration for creating another version of life.