Existential crisis
In psychology and psychotherapy, existential crises are inner conflicts characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning or by confusion about one's personal identity. Existential crises are accompanied by anxiety and stress, often to such a degree that they disturb one's normal functioning in everyday life and lead to depression. This negative attitude towards life and meaning reflects various positions characteristic of the philosophical movement known as existentialism. Synonyms and closely related terms include existential dread, existential vacuum, existential neurosis, and alienation. The various aspects associated with existential crises are sometimes divided into emotional, cognitive, and behavioral components. Emotional components refer to the feelings they provoke, such as emotional pain, despair, helplessness, guilt, anxiety, or loneliness. Cognitive components encompass the problem of meaninglessness, the loss of personal values or spiritual faith, and reflections about one's own mortality. Outwardly, existential crises often express themselves in addictions, anti-social and compulsive behavior.
For threats to the existence of humanity, see Global catastrophic risk.
The specific symptoms vary from case to case. Theorists try to address this by distinguishing between different types of existential crises. Categorizations are usually based on the idea that the issues at the core of existential crises differ with the individual's stage in life and personal development. Types commonly found in the academic literature include the teenage crisis, the quarter-life crisis, the mid-life crisis, and the later-life crisis. They all have in common a conflict about the meaning and purpose of one's life. The earlier crises tend to be more forward-looking: the individual is anxious and confused about which path in life to follow, especially concerning education and career as well as one's identity and independence in social relationships. Crises later in life are more backward-looking. They are often triggered by the impression that one is past one's peak in life, and are often characterized by guilt, regrets, and a fear of death. The individual's age does generally correspond to the type of crisis they experience, but not always since there is a lot of variation on the level of personal development. Some people may only experience some of these types or none at all. If an earlier existential crisis was properly resolved, it makes it usually easier for the individual to resolve or avoid later crises.
The problem of meaninglessness plays a central role in all of these types. It can arise in the form of cosmic meaning, which is concerned with the meaning of life at large or why we are here. Another form concerns personal secular meaning, in which the individual tries to discover purpose and value mainly for their own life. The issue of meaninglessness becomes a problem because of the discrepancy between the desire of humans to live a meaningful life and the apparent meaninglessness and indifference of the world, sometimes termed the absurd. Various sources of meaning have been suggested through which the individual may find meaning. They include altruism, or trying to benefit others; dedicating oneself to a cause, such as a religious or political movement; creativity, for example by creating art; hedonism, or the pursuit of pleasure; self-actualization, which refers to the development of one's inborn potentials; and finding the right attitude towards one's hardships.
Existential crises have various negative consequences, both on the personal level, such as anxiety and the formation of bad relationships, and the social level, such as a high divorce rate and decreased productivity. They may also have positive effects by pushing the affected to address the underlying issue and thereby develop as a person. Some questionnaires, such as the Purpose in Life Test, can be used to measure whether someone is currently undergoing an existential crisis. Because of the primarily negative consequences, it is important that existential crises are resolved. The most common approach is to help the affected find meaning in their life. This can happen through a leap of faith, in which the individual places their trust into a new system of meaning, or through a reasoned approach focusing on a careful and evidence-based evaluation of the sources of meaning. Some theorists believe in a nihilistic approach, in which the individual accepts that life is meaningless and tries to find the best way to cope with this belief. Other approaches include cognitive behavior therapy and the practice of social perspective-taking.
Outside psychology and psychotherapy, the term "existential crisis" is sometimes used to indicate that the existence of something is threatened.
Definition[edit]
In psychology and psychotherapy, the term "existential crisis" refers to a form of inner conflict. It is characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning and is accompanied by various negative experiences, such as stress, anxiety, despair, and depression.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] This often happens to such a degree that it disturbs one's normal functioning in everyday life.[5] The inner nature of this conflict sets existential crises apart from other types of crises that are mainly due to outward circumstances, like social or financial crises. Outward circumstances may still play a role in triggering or exacerbating an existential crisis, but the core conflict happens on an inner level.[3] The most common approach to resolving an existential crisis consists in addressing this inner conflict and finding new sources of meaning in life.[4][5][8]
The core issue responsible for the inner conflict is the impression that the individual's desire to lead a meaningful life is thwarted by an apparent lack of meaning. In this sense, existential crises are crises of meaning. This is often understood through the lens of the philosophical movement known as existentialism.[3] One important aspect of many forms of existentialism is that the individual seeks to live in a meaningful way but finds themselves in a meaningless and indifferent world.[9][10][11][3] The exact term "existential crisis" is not commonly found in the traditional existentialist literature in philosophy. But various closely related technical terms are discussed, such as existential dread, existential vacuum, existential despair, existential neurosis, existential sickness, anxiety, and alienation.[9][10][11][3][4][12][13][14]
Different authors focus in their definitions of existential crisis on different aspects. Some argue that existential crises are at their core crises of identity. On this view, they arise from a confusion about the question "Who am I?" and their goal is to achieve some form of clarity about oneself and one's position in the world.[2][3][5] As identity crises, they involve intensive self-analysis, often in the form of exploring different ways of looking at oneself.[2][3][5] They constitute a personal confrontation with certain key aspects of the human condition, like existence, death, freedom, and responsibility. In this sense, the person questions the very foundations of their life.[3][5] Others emphasize the confrontation with human limitations, such as death and lack of control.[4][5] Some stress the spiritual nature of existential crises by pointing out how outwardly successful people may still be severely affected by them if they lack the corresponding spiritual development.[4]
The term "existential crisis" is most commonly used in the context of psychology and psychotherapy.[3][1][5] But it can also be employed in a more literal sense as a crisis of existence to express that the existence of something is threatened. In this sense, a country, a company, or a social institution faces an existential crisis if political tensions, high debt, or social changes may have as a result that the corresponding entity ceases to exist.[15][16][17]
Cultural context[edit]
In the 19th century, Thomas Carlyle wrote of how the loss of faith in God results in an existential crisis which he called the "Centre of Indifference", wherein the world appears cold and unfeeling and the individual considers himself to be without worth. Søren Kierkegaard considered that angst and existential despair would appear when an inherited or borrowed world-view (often of a collective nature) proved unable to handle unexpected and extreme life-experiences.[88] Friedrich Nietzsche extended his views to suggest that the death of God—the loss of collective faith in religion and traditional morality—created a more widespread existential crisis for the philosophically aware.[89]
Existential crisis has indeed been seen as the inevitable accompaniment of modernism (c.1890–1945).[90] Whereas Émile Durkheim saw individual crises as the by-product of social pathology and a (partial) lack of collective norms,[91] others have seen existentialism as arising more broadly from the modernist crisis of the loss of meaning throughout the modern world.[92] Its twin answers were either a religion revivified by the experience of anomie (as with Martin Buber), or an individualistic existentialism based on facing directly the absurd contingency of human fate within a meaningless and alien universe, as with Sartre and Camus.[93]
Irvin Yalom, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, has made fundamental contributions to the field of existential psychotherapy. Rollo May is another of the founders of this approach.[94]
Fredric Jameson has suggested that postmodernism, with its saturation of social space by a visual consumer culture, has replaced the modernist angst of the traditional subject, and with it the existential crisis of old, by a new social pathology of flattened affect and a fragmented subject.[95]
Historical context[edit]
Existential crises are often seen as a phenomenon associated specifically with modern society. One important factor in this context is that various sources of meaning, such as religion or being grounded in one's local culture and immediate social environment, are less important in the contemporary context.[4][5]
Another factor in modern society is that individuals are faced with a daunting number of decisions to make and alternatives to choose from, often without any clear guidelines on how to make these choices.[2][4] The high difficulty for finding the best alternative and the importance of doing so are often the cause of anxiety and may lead to an existential crisis.[2] For example, it was very common for a long time in history for a son to simply follow his father's profession. In contrast to this, the modern schooling system presents students with different areas of study and interest, thereby opening a wide range of career opportunities to them. The problem brought about by this increased freedom is sometimes referred to as the agony of choice.[96] The increased difficulty is described in Barry Schwartz's law, which links the costs, time, and energy needed to make a well-informed choice to the number of alternatives available.[97]