How Existentialist Ideas Can Help People Deal With Contemporary Issues

We’re not exactly strangers to existentialism. Most of us here could probably recite Being and Nothingness or The Myth of Sisyphus in our sleep.

But lately, I’ve been wondering: are we really applying these ideas to the specific mess of modern life? Because the landscape’s changed—dramatically. We’re not just dealing with dread and mortality; we’re also swimming in notifications, economic uncertainty, AI-driven identity loops, and global crises that stack like dominoes.

What’s struck me is that existentialism might actually be more practically necessary now than ever.

Not just as a framework for big-picture thinking, but as a lived toolkit—something we can use to navigate the chaos, not just name it. And that’s what I want to dig into here: how we, as people who know this philosophy inside and out, can re-read and re-use it to respond to today’s most disorienting conditions in sharper, maybe even more human, ways.

Meaning in a World That Won’t Shut Up

Let’s start with what I think is one of the biggest existential shifts we’re experiencing right now: we’re not facing a void—we’re drowning in too much.

Back when Camus wrote about the absurd, the problem was silence. The world didn’t give us answers. Now, it won’t stop giving us content. Every moment of stillness is filled by something: an alert, a headline, an AI-generated recommendation. It’s a different kind of absurd—not the absence of meaning, but the hyper-saturation of it.

The Modern Problem – Noise, Not Nothingness

This isn’t just a poetic shift; it’s ontological. What does it mean to be, when your self is constantly pulled into fragmented digital realities? When your attention is being auctioned in real-time?

I think of this as a kind of “algorithmic despair”—and I borrow the phrase deliberately to echo Kierkegaard. But unlike his despair, which centers on the self’s refusal to become itself, this new despair is sneakier. It’s the self being subtly auto-constructed by external systems. You don’t refuse your authentic self. You just scroll past it.

Heidegger Would Probably Log Off

Heidegger warned us about this. His critique of “das Man” (the They) was a way of naming how easy it is to get swept up in socially normalized inauthenticity. And the They today? It’s not just social norms—it’s feeds, trends, metrics. The impersonal gaze of the algorithm replaces public opinion as the thing we live in reference to.

And unlike “das Man,” algorithms aren’t even human—they don’t care if we live authentically or not. They just want engagement. So we get trapped in a loop of reactive being, where our sense of identity is shaped not by free will, but by machine learning and market feedback.

Too Much Meaning Is Its Own Kind of Absurd

We’ve gone from asking, “Is there meaning?” to asking, “Which of these thousand meanings is real?” Or worse, “Am I allowed to stop and make meaning for myself when everything’s demanding my reaction?”

Byung-Chul Han’s work on the burnout society is useful here. He argues that we’re not dominated by external repression anymore but by internal pressure to perform, produce, and optimize. In a world like that, existential anxiety doesn’t look like a crisis of meaning—it looks like chronic fatigue, decision paralysis, a sense that you’re never quite “you.”

A Real-Life Example

Take the early months of the pandemic. Isolation pushed people inward, yes—but instead of silence, most of us were slammed with Zoom fatigue, endless news updates, and wellness influencers telling us to self-actualize through banana bread and breathwork. There was no space for a Camus-style confrontation with the absurd. The absurd was covered in filters and hashtags.

And yet, I saw glimmers of existential clarity in people who opted out. Those who refused to treat lockdown as a productivity bootcamp. Who let themselves feel grief, boredom, even despair—not as problems to solve, but as real conditions of being. That’s where existentialism shows up in practice: in the quiet decision to be present without optimizing it.

So What Do We Do With This?

Well, we could start by updating our existential vocabulary. Maybe absurdity today means too many signals, not too few. Maybe authenticity now involves resisting not just external judgment, but algorithmic shaping. And maybe freedom, if it’s going to mean anything, has to include the right to withdraw, to unplug, to resist the compulsive generation of content and response.

The big question I keep coming back to is: how do we create space for meaning when meaning is being mass-produced and pushed into us every second?

That’s where I think we need a more grounded, situated form of agency. And that’s what we’ll explore next.

What Freedom Means When You Don’t Feel Free

Let’s be honest: Sartre’s idea of radical freedom sounds great—until you’re facing a rent hike, layoffs, climate collapse, and a notification that your health insurance premiums just doubled. “You are free” starts to feel less like liberation and more like a cosmic joke.

But if we throw out the idea of freedom entirely, we lose what makes existentialism valuable in the first place. So how do we work with it now? How do we make freedom meaningful in a world that’s so structured, so surveilled, so stacked?

I think the key lies in reframing freedom as “situated”—not diluted, not denied, but grounded. And that changes everything.

Radical Freedom vs. Real-World Constraint

Sartre’s version of freedom—where we are “condemned to be free”—was written in a context where structural forces like capitalism, racism, and colonialism were either abstracted or sidelined. Sure, Sartre acknowledged situations, but there’s still this sense that the subject transcends them through pure will. That feels… insufficient today.

Modern existential thinkers (and let’s be real, a lot of them are women and non-Western voices who got less airtime historically) have pushed back on this. Think Simone de Beauvoir, who said freedom isn’t just about making choices, but also about recognizing the web of social, historical, and material limits that shape what we can choose.

And this is important: freedom doesn’t disappear in constraint—it gets sharper. It’s in those moments where you can’t change your job or your government or your body that existential choice gets real.

Example

Remember early 2020, when essential workers were being called “heroes” but weren’t being given hazard pay, proper protection, or even time off? That was the moment many of them made existential choices—not to quit (they couldn’t), but to reframe their actions as acts of care, resistance, or self-preservation.

A nurse told me she started writing letters to herself after each shift—tiny private narratives that helped her resist the crushing system. Another worker in a grocery store started organizing mutual aid runs on her day off, not because she had extra capacity, but because she wanted her exhaustion to mean something.

These weren’t dramatic Sartrean declarations of freedom. They were small, grounded refusals to become pure function.

Merleau-Ponty and the Body in Situation

Let’s bring in Merleau-Ponty here, because he gives us a version of agency that actually feels like real life. He said the body isn’t just a thing we inhabit—it’s the very condition of our being-in-the-world. And being a body means being in a world that resists you.

What I find helpful is that this shifts us away from freedom as abstract potential and toward freedom as lived negotiation. It’s not just “What can I do?” It’s “What am I doing right now, and how can I own that?”

So even when I feel stuck, even when I can’t change the whole system, I can still choose how I show up to it. Not in a bootstraps, grindset kind of way—but in an embodied, relational, and sometimes defiant way.

Authenticity Inside the Machine

Now, I’m not saying we can Instagram our way to authenticity (though people certainly try). But I am saying we need to revisit what authenticity means in a world where being real feels performative. Where even introspection gets gamified by wellness apps and quantified self trends.

To me, authenticity now means reclaiming intentionality. Not performing identity, but actually pausing to engage with it. Not optimizing life, but inhabiting it.

Freedom, then, isn’t about doing anything you want—it’s about saying: This is me, in this situation, and here’s what I’m going to do with that. That’s where the power is. Not in transcendence, but in rootedness.

5 Modern Problems, 5 Existential Moves

Let’s get specific. We’ve been deep in theory (which I love), but now I want to share five current, messy, real-life situations—and how existentialist ideas can be applied in fresh ways. Not as life hacks. But as serious, lived philosophies.

1. Information Overload → Heidegger’s “Releasement”

We’re conditioned to think that if we just read one more article or scroll a little further, we’ll get clarity. But often, more input means more fog.

Heidegger’s late work (particularly in Discourse on Thinking) offers this idea of “Gelassenheit”, or “releasement”—a kind of letting-be. It’s not passivity, but a radical stepping back from the will to control and consume. In practice, this might look like:

Taking “digital sabbath” not as productivity hacks, but as philosophical discipline.
Practicing being with information instead of trying to master it.

In short: create distance to regain presence.

2. Job Insecurity → Nietzsche’s Amor Fati

Instead of resenting uncertainty, Nietzsche challenges us to love our fate—to embrace every twist not just as necessary but as chosen.

In today’s gig economy, where work feels unstable and identity gets tied to productivity, Amor Fati becomes a kind of anti-perfectionism. It’s saying:

“This job isn’t me, but it’s shaping me—and I’ll make meaning out of it anyway.”
“The fact that this didn’t go as planned is part of the plan now.”

It’s gritty, not cute. But it’s freeing.

3. Pandemic Isolation → Kierkegaard’s “Single Individual”

When everything got shut down, a lot of people panicked about loneliness. But Kierkegaard saw solitude as a condition for authentic selfhood. In Fear and Trembling, he talks about the individual as someone who stands alone before the eternal—terrifying, yes, but necessary.

Isolation can either destroy you or deepen you. The existential move here is:

Stop asking “What am I missing?”
Start asking “What is being revealed to me now that everything else is quiet?”

Loneliness becomes a threshold, not a void.

4. AI-Generated Identity → Sartre’s Bad Faith Revisited

Bad faith used to mean lying to yourself. Now, it’s often letting an algorithm do the lying for you.

When Spotify tells me what I like, and Instagram tells me what I should want, it’s easy to outsource the work of identity. But Sartre reminds us: you’re always choosing—even when you pretend not to.

The existential move here is radical honesty:

Ask, “Am I acting, or am I being acted through?”
Refuse to let your preferences be harvested and sold as your personality.

5. Climate Paralysis → Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity

If you’re overwhelmed by the climate crisis, you’re not alone. But feeling helpless is different from being helpless.

Beauvoir offers us ambiguity as a moral ground—not something to resolve, but to inhabit. You can’t fix everything. But you can act meaningfully within contradiction.

Try:

Holding grief and action at the same time.
Letting fear coexist with commitment.

That’s not weakness. That’s clarity.

Final Thoughts

I’ll be real—I didn’t write this because I think existentialism is trendy or cool again. I wrote it because it has teeth, especially now. It still cuts through the noise and asks the most important question: What will you do with your freedom, here and now, knowing everything you know?

And even if the world feels chaotic, that question still matters. Maybe even more than it used to.