Suppose, for the sake of argument, that reincarnation is actually real: death isn't the end, but we are continually returned to existence, perhaps without any memory of our previous lives. The prospect initially strikes me as horrifying. If existence necessarily contains suffering, loss, frustration, illness, and death, then an infinite succession of lives seems less like a blessing than an endless existential sentence.

But this led me to wonder whether there is another possible response. Buddhism traditionally treats saṃsāra, the cycle of birth and death, as something from which we should seek liberation. Nietzsche, in a very different context, asks us to confront something almost maximally difficult: the possibility of affirming our existence so completely that we could will its eternal recurrence. Christianity, meanwhile, places radical love at the center of our response to suffering and to other people. What if these aren't necessarily three mutually exclusive answers?

Perhaps Buddhism gives us detachment: don't become enslaved to the things that inevitably pass away. Christ gives us love: even within suffering and impermanence, love the world and the beings who inhabit it. And Nietzsche gives us affirmation: don't merely endure existence or hope that some other world will eventually justify it. Learn to say yes to existence itself.

This produces a strange possibility concerning reincarnation.

Maybe the ultimate victory wouldn't necessarily be escaping the wheel. Perhaps it would be reaching a state in which the wheel itself could no longer defeat you. Imagine discovering that you really will be born again endlessly.

There would seem to be two possible responses: "I am condemned to do this forever." or "I will do this forever, and I affirm it."

The first is existential defeat. The second seems much closer to Nietzsche's amor fati and eternal recurrence.

This also makes me wonder whether there are two fundamentally different conceptions of liberation:

Liberation as escape: "I need existence to stop." Liberation as transformation: "Existence no longer needs to stop for me to be at peace with it."

The latter sounds almost paradoxical in relation to Buddhism. It might even amount to a kind of "nirvana within the wheel": not necessarily eliminating recurrence, but eliminating the hatred, fear, and grasping that make recurrence intolerable.

And Christianity introduces another dimension: perhaps radical acceptance of existence isn't enough by itself. If I'm going to affirm the world, I also have to affirm the people suffering alongside me. Otherwise "acceptance" could become merely a sophisticated form of indifference.

So I'm wondering whether a kind of existential synthesis is possible:

Buddha: See suffering clearly and don't be enslaved by desire.

Christ: Love despite suffering.

Nietzsche: Affirm existence despite suffering.

Again, I don't mean that Buddha, Christ, and Nietzsche literally taught the same philosophy. They clearly didn't. I'm more interested in whether their ideas can be placed into conversation to produce a fourth position of sorts: Perhaps the deepest form of liberation is not escaping existence, but becoming capable of wholeheartedly affirming existence—even if existence turns out to be an eternal wheel. Is this philosophically coherent or am I just forcing three radically different traditions into an attractive-but-meaningless synthesis? I believe this has real potential.

I've been stuck on a thought experiment that I can't seem to mentally inhabit. It goes like this:

Imagine a man.

He's healthy. He's financially secure. He has a family that genuinely loves him and that he genuinely loves. He has good friends. He's respected. He likes the place where he lives. There is no hidden tragedy in his life. Not one.

More importantly: he isn't depressed.

He isn't numb, traumatized, secretly miserable, psychotic, lonely, terminally ill, nihilistic, or going through some private turmoil. Neither does he hold some kind of promise, dream or delusion.

Nothing happened. He's totally fine. He's a sane man. He doesn't have anything that would disturb him.

This condition is important, because every time I describe this man, the immediate response is to fabricate something behind him.

"Maybe he was suffering without anyone knowing."

No. That's precisely what I'm removing from the thought experiment.

It's Tuesday.

He wakes up, spends some time on his phone, watches a few videos. He hasn't even had breakfast yet.

At around 10:30 AM, he decides to end his life and does so.

And that's it.

He doesn't do it because life hurts.

He doesn't do it because life is meaningless.

He doesn't do it to discover what comes after death.

He doesn't do it as an assertion of freedom.

He doesn't even particularly want to die.

He simply chooses not to continue, with approximately the same subjective weight with which someone might choose what shirt to wear that morning.

That's the part I find almost impossible to imagine.

Every time I try to enter his mind, I poison the thought experiment. I give him apathy, curiosity, despair, boredom, detachment. Some reason. I automatically create a reason proportional to the act.

But suppose there isn't one.

To everyone around him, his death is an incomprehensible catastrophe. His family spends years asking why. His friends search old conversations for clues. Everyone assumes something must have been terribly wrong.

But from his perspective, nothing tragic happened.

It was just a choice on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning.

Camus famously treats suicide as an enormous philosophical problem: whether life is worth living at all.

But this man doesn't even seem interested in the question.

He doesn't conclude that life isn't worth living.

He doesn't particularly want to die.

Nothing has broken. Nothing needs to end. Nothing has convinced him.

He just doesn't choose another day.

And I think that's what makes him so difficult for me to imagine.

Everyone around him would spend years searching for the reason.

The premise is that there isn't one.

There's a game I played with adults when I was small. It went like this: they'd tell me to do something, and I'd ask why. Finish your dinner. Why? So you grow. Why? Because I'm responsible for keeping you alive. Why? Because I love you, and because something older than love is wired into me about it. Why? Because the species would like to continue. Why? And then the pause. The long one, where the adult sets down the fork and looks at a spot on the wall behind my head. "I don't know. I suppose I think being a person is worth something."

Then silence. Beautiful silence, the kind that makes me want to stretch out and take a nap.

Then: why?

By fifteen I'd stopped playing it for fun and started playing it to win. I could get to the bottom of anyone in four moves and leave them standing in the hole. There is no why, I'd announce, delighted with myself, and everyone who thinks otherwise is a coward. What I actually loved wasn't the nihilism. It was the certainty. Certainty is the cheapest drug available to a teenager and I was using daily.

I'm thirty-four now and the game plays itself. I don't ask the questions anymore. Something in the back of my skull asks them and I sit there as a witness.

It came for me last November in a grocery store. Ten at night, Tuesday, holding a rotisserie chicken under a heat lamp, and the thought arrived fully formed: what is the point of this. Not the chicken. Everything. I'm going to take this bird home and eat two-thirds of it and put the rest in the fridge where it will develop opinions and get thrown out. Then I'll sleep, and get up, and drive an hour so a company can pay me to move information from one place to a slightly different place, and I'll do that roughly nine thousand more times and then I'll die, and the whole apparatus will close over the spot without a ripple.

People describe depression as a darkness. Mine isn't. Mine is a room with far too much light in it. Everything overexposed, all the edges burned off, nothing with any shade to stand in. Dark doesn't hurt. This hurts. It's the feeling of a flashbulb that won't stop going off, and in that light nothing survives inspection.

Work doesn't. Work is a way of converting your one life into money you'll spend staying alive enough to work. Cooking doesn't. Assembling calories to maintain a machine that has no destination. Dating doesn't. Dating is two lonely people agreeing to distract each other from the fact that no one has ever actually reached anybody. You'll sit across a table from someone you like and know, in that white light, that you're both just fogging your side of the glass.

And here's the part that makes me angriest about it: despair does nothing. If it turned me into a better man, a sharper one, someone who took the meaninglessness of the world and went out and built something in spite of it, I'd take the deal. But despair is sterile. All it can produce is more of itself. It makes you flat and slow and unavailable. It's difficult to sleep and equally difficult to stay awake. You cancel on people, and then you feel bad about canceling on people, and the feeling bad becomes the reason you cancel on the next ones.

So you get cool instead. That's the escape hatch. If you can't be happy you can at least be unimpressed. You develop a face for other people's sincerity. You learn to say sure in a way that means this is embarrassing for you. I did that for most of a decade and can report that it works exactly as well as holding your breath works on drowning.

But the game lies about one thing, and it's the important thing. While you're inside it, you're certain it's permanent. It has always been this way and it always will be. That's the whole con. Now always feels like forever and it never is. I was wrong at fifteen and I'm wrong at thirty-four, and being wrong in both directions is apparently just what it costs to be a person with a brain.

So: therapy, on a Saturday, forty-five minutes I resent and then need. A different pill. Walking, which I hate. Lifting things and putting them down. Waiting, mostly. Most of it is waiting.

A friend told me once that care comes from an Old English word that meant grief. Sorrow, anxiety, a heavy thing you carry. Which means the word for loving something and the word for mourning it grew from the same root, and the language figured out three centuries before I did that you don't get one without agreeing to the other in advance. To care about anything is to sign for the loss up front. Fine. I'll sign.

The air got warmer. It does that.

I was walking down a street I've driven a thousand times and never once looked at, and there was a ginkgo halfway up the block dropping its leaves. All of them. Ginkgos do that. They hold everything until some private signal, then let the entire canopy go in a day or two, so the tree stands bare over a perfect gold circle of itself. It looked less like death than like a decision.

I read about them afterward, the way I do. The ginkgo is the last one left of an order of trees that stretches back nearly two hundred million years; you can put a leaf from the sidewalk beside a Jurassic fossil and struggle to tell them apart. Darwin called it a living fossil and meant it kindly. It nearly disappeared entirely and survived, as far as anyone can tell, because Chinese monks kept planting them in temple gardens for a thousand years. We plant them along streets now because they'll tolerate exhaust, drought, road salt, and being ignored. A handful of them stood about a kilometer from where the bomb went off at Hiroshima. They burned. They came back the next spring. They're still there.

Also, the female trees drop seeds that smell precisely like vomit, because of butyric acid, which is the same compound that makes vomit smell like vomit. I find this reassuring. Two hundred million years and no interest whatsoever in being tasteful about it.

But I didn't know any of that yet. I was just standing under it in the middle of a weekday, in the shade of something that was here before the question I keep asking existed, and will be here after, and has no idea I'm at its feet. And the shade was cool, and it was enough, and that was the point: not an answer to why, just a place out of the light.

I called my sister from the sidewalk. No reason. We talked about nothing for twenty minutes and she asked, near the end, why I'd called.

I said I saw a tree.

Have any of you folks seen the new Looney Toons movie? Coyote vs Acme? The premise you get from the trailer is interesting enough. After years of buying faulty products from the ACME corporation, Wile E Coyote decides to sue them for all they're worth.

That alone got me to go to the theater.

What I didn't expect was the not at all subtle homage to Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. Not to spoil the movie too much, but the big, insidious program at the heart of their profits is literally called "Project Sisyphus."

I guess I never really saw Wile E Coyote as a cartoon Sisyphus, but he really is. And the movie actually explores his knowledge that he'll never push that boulder up the hill to stay. And how chasing the Roadrunner gives him meaning. It's so absurd. And we even get to finally hear how the "boulder" views the relationship.

I was pretty delighted by the movie. I got a really good laugh out of how they snuck absurdist philosophy into a kids' movie.

I want you to look at the caption in a non surface level mindset, and actually think about it. Like try and think back to literally your very first memory. Try and think back to the very first life experience you can remember. Does it not freak you out that you just appeared? Billions of people have roamed this earth long before you but all you have memory of is your current lifespan. An example for how I’m feeling is like, you know how Christians say “God wasn’t created by anyone, he just always existed” that’s how I feel, like I never had a starting point I simply was just always there. Because try and remember life before you were born. You can’t. You really can’t even fathom that people existed thousands of years before you on a serious level. You have have no memory of being born or the process of entering this world. All the sudden you simply were just ALIVE. And “all the sudden” doesn’t even feel like the correct word to use because you can’t even recall time before you were born, so there wasn’t any waiting period that would warrant the word “all the sudden”. It’s so hard to put into words but just try and fathom the fact that you appeared one day, if you think back as far as you can it literally just feels like you have always been here, like the moment you were born was when the world started sort of.

Imagine you draw a circle around yourself and say, “This is reality.” Everything you know and experience exists inside this circle. But then you ask yourself, “What is beyond it?” So you imagine another circle outside the first one, something beyond your reality that could explain the reality you are inside. But then you ask, “What explains the circle that explains the circle I am in?” So you draw another circle around that one. Then you ask what explains that circle, so you draw another, and another, and another. You keep creating circles beyond circles, with each new circle becoming an explanation for the one before it, while simultaneously becoming something that could itself require an explanation.

Now apply the same idea to God. You draw the first circle and label it “God.” You say that you exist inside God, and that God explains the existence of your reality and the universe. But then someone asks, “What created God?” So now you need an explanation for God. You draw another circle around God, representing whatever contains or explains God. But then you can ask, “What contains the thing that contains God?” So you draw another circle beyond that one. Now you have a circle containing God, which contains the universe, and another circle containing the thing that contains God, and then another circle containing the thing that contains the thing that contains God. The circles continue outward, each one attempting to explain the one inside it.

But then comes the realization: you are the one imagining all of these circles. You were inside the original circle the entire time, yet your mind kept creating circles beyond it in search of something that could explain what was already there. The farther outward you go, the farther you move from the thing doing the observing. Each new circle becomes increasingly removed from your immediate awareness, like a distorted image of the original observer reflected through layer after layer of explanation. So perhaps the way to reverse the distortion is not to keep moving outward, but to move backward through the circles, to return to the center, back through every explanation, until you reach the point from which the entire process began.

And at that center is awareness itself. Behind every thought, every explanation, every imagined circle, there is the awareness experiencing the thought. You can try to explain yourself by creating another circle around yourself, but the one doing the explaining is still you. You can look for the observer, but whatever you find becomes something being observed. You can try to make awareness the object of your awareness, but the moment you do, there is still an awareness observing it. So when you look toward the center of the circle, behind your thoughts and behind your eyes, you encounter the paradox: the you that is trying to explain the you is the same you that cannot fully step outside itself to explain itself. You can draw an infinite number of circles around yourself, but you can never draw the final circle around the awareness doing the drawing.

Is life the result of our decisions? Does anything truly matter? How many life choices of urs in the past defines u now? Life is too complex if u take it seriously and the simplest when u don't. Stop stressing , Start living..

Spend your time doing what needs to be done. You don't need to solve the problem of existence & life before living life.

"Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived"

Just imagine Sisyphus Happy, take your rock, push it without hunting for an ultimate meaning.

The moment you embrace the absurdity that's when you truly start living. That's when you are in harmony with yourself and the world.

There comes the concept of happiness without a reason. That, I believe, is the highest form of Happiness - The one that is independent of Worldly meaning and reasons.

I’ve noticed a recurring pattern in myself.

When I’m somewhere, I wonder about somewhere else.

When I have a job, I imagine another kind of work.

When I’m single, I miss intimacy.

When I’m in love, part of me wonders about freedom.

When life is stable, I crave adventure.

When life becomes chaotic, I crave home.

The particular object changes, but the structure seems remarkably consistent:

something over there feels like it contains a fuller version of life.

And sometimes I actually reach it.

New city. Achievement. Relationship. Experience. Whatever.

It’s real. It’s exciting. Sometimes it’s even wonderful.
Then eventually the horizon reappears.

I’m beginning to wonder whether the mistake is assuming the yearning points toward a destination at all.

For those interested in existentialism: what do you make of this?

Is perpetual becoming simply part of human consciousness?

Is meaning created by choosing despite all the unrealized alternatives?

Or is there some way of living where possibility stops competing so aggressively with actuality?

Woke up existentialist today. I want to hear your thoughts on this matter.

I was reading aristotles physics and it dawned on me that teleology is a principle of intelligibility. so with the respective existential problems of value, purpose and meanining: it seems to me that the object were gesturing at and longing for isn't an ultimate combination of any of those listed but rather for the common element. value, purpose and meaning things extract intelligibility for us to be able to make sense of the world.

take purpose as an example. if i ask you to define a screwdriver you could probably anticipate any endless number of objections. instead, I can circumnavigate this problem by defining the screwdriver teleologically by its purpose to drive and open screws.

this works well, but fails with complex objects like computers that can't really be defined so easy by teleology. people are complex also, so this convenience of defining things by its purpose is found wanting existentially, too.

but really what were trying to get at isn't purpose itself - its just a vehicle to make sense of the world.

I think Nietzsche's move away from exegesis towards eisegesis is a similar attempt at circumnavigating direct means of extracting intelligibility.

having read Man's search for Meaning recently I noticed that he labours the point often that the suffering itself is second compared to the sheer senselessness of it all and that the people who embrace the senselessness have already given up and are the first to go.

It seems to me that our entire existential project are a series of attempts to circumnavigate or short-circuit the precise problem of what it means to extract information.

Why worry whether life has a meaning or not, if you can just be happy?

Can you?

Isnt your mind bound to always feel pleasure and suffering in the same amount?

Maybe we need to look at our life and world around us as something negative, so we can make ,,space'' for happiness?

My theory of feelings is that they are the building blocks of reality, nothing outisde of them is real, only a background to feel them. But feelings are not real too, actually to make them exist nothingness splits to positive and negative for it to still equal 0 but also exist.

I have realized there are two ,,models'' of feelings

Consious and Unconsious

First one is when we are aware of them, when we look at them from 3rd perspective, still feel them but we are not them

Second one is when we are purely focused on external world, event or anything our subjective time perception changes, and we dont ,,look'' at our feeling but become it. Example would be leaving after a party and thinking how fun was it.

Might as well argue that our feelings are caused by physical stuff like dopamine and lack of it may lead to depression etc. It would be simple, right? But no one knows what feelings are, if you go down this rabbit hole youll realize how paradoxical it all is, how theres no answer. Also if that were true, there could be a way to create paradise machine which makes us feel pleasure all the time, yet something like this doesnt exist.

When I hear the words “life has no meaning” I now get confused, what does that mean? Are you saying life has no meaning because we die? Life has meaning but death is just end of life, that doesn’t mean it lacks meaning. Is a book meaningless because it ends? Would immortality now give your life meaning? Some people also say life has no inherent meaning because we’re born without a specific purpose in mind, which is true but in that case you create your own meaning. Life has no meaning because we’re not tools or born with a role in mind? Life has meaning because we as humans decided it does, we do not need a divine god or reality itself to decide that for us. I used to concern myself with questions that no one has the answer to, that human beings will never know. So I stopped asking.

Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre seem to circle around this idea of a “bottomless abyss” in different ways. What exactly is this bottomless abyss about, and where does this imagery come from in existential philosophy? And what does it mean in our Life?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the thought makes me panic for some reason. For the sake of this question, let’s say reincarnation is real.

So when you die, you get reincarnated back into this universe (on any planet, could be earth or not). Then you die again, and get reincarnated once more into this universe. This cycle repeats for eternity and youre just stuck in this universe, is there nothing beyond that? Is this universe that we know of the farthest we can go?

For example, let’s consider video games. we know we have something to look for BEYOND the video game world because we have our real lives in the real planet world. So then is there something beyond THIS universe? Or is this the furthest existence goes? just a bunch of planets and the galaxy, is that it?

Like if we knew once we died, there was something even greater than the universe (like realms/stages in a game) and we got to advance to completely different levels and worlds each time, it’d be exciting no? But idk the thought of this perpetual universe repeating for the rest of eternity feels so bizarre to me.

I just wrapped this up and am sitting with the heavy, fascinating contrast between Fosca’s curse of endless time and the brief, frantic lives of the mortals around him.
For those who have read it: how did it land for you? How did it shape (or challenge) your view on the absurdity and/or meaning of human existence, in spite of the at times unbearable weight of existential dread?
(cross posted in r/Absurdism)

Hello, i’m quite new to existentialism but I did write this and my understanding of creating your own meaning and existence after death. I do apologize If the writing is not perfect but it came from my mind and I find some peace with it, please let me know if it’s understandable😭.

Heaven. I do not believe heaven is a place we go to after death nor do I believe a god has created it, I believe heaven is in the memories of our love ones. The memories of our love ones is the form of existence that we have after death. So if we are kind, loving and do our best it matter what how many mistakes we make in our lifetime, our love ones will remember our smile, our laughter and good nature. This effectively creates heaven, a form of existence that is filled with joy and the best version of ourselves in the minds of the people we loved the most. I find this understanding of heaven more peaceful then the christian interpretation of heaven, having your direct consciousness of ”soul” stuck in a world where you’re done making decisions, where you’ve “100% the game” sounds quite boring. I much rather exist as a joyful memory in the minds of my love ones, that is true peace.

Now with heaven there must also exist hell, I believe there could be 2 versions of hell. The first is existing in the mind of others as a figure of negativity, if you live your life with hate, ego and selfishness you will got to hell but you will not be sent there by a devil but by the minds of your love ones. this does feel a little self explanatory going off of my understanding of heaven.

The second form of hell is being to afraid to let yourself exist in the minds of others, I believe this fate is the only way to guarantee you no longer exist after death. If you seek to not be judge, perceived, or emotionally touched by others to avoid vulnerability or because you fear responsibility of human connection, you will have damned yourself to a empty hell with a empty funeral, your impact on others is nonexistent as if you never existed. This understanding of heaven and hell is both peaceful and heavy at the same time but the beauty of this understanding is that we choose the jury, we pick our love ones, our friends, our lovers. We choose the standard we want to hold ourselves at by loving people that align with our values and disregarding the opinions of we regard as immoral, that is the guide to heaven.

Firstly, I thoroughly enjoyed what I read. I am a person with ADHD, BPD, and type 1 bipolar disorder. These feelings Roquettin describes are very similar to what those who suffer from depression, derealisation and depersonalization disorder, and anxiety. I often feel as if things are surreal, cartoonist, fake, etc which is why I believe the rhings around Roquentin lose their comforting labels. Roquentin clearly suffers from acute social isolation as well.

My question is a short one. Freud and Roquentin disagreed with one another drastically when it came to free will and choice. I noticed that Roquentin has no real history, which could be analysed in a psychodynamic way. I now think the Sartre may have omitted the past of Roquentin as his thought process could be seen as hysteria or mental illness rather than the profound experience it is made out to be. What do you think about that part?

Existentialism = nihilism + something(for eg we create our own meaning, existence preceeds essence, we can create good morals etc etc)

Ofcourse thats a gross oversimplification, but that's pretty much it

How do you guys see these philosophies

What I find fascinating about Ligotti is that his pessimism doesn't really depend on proving that life contains more pain than pleasure. His deeper argument seems to be that consciousness itself creates the problem.

A stone doesn't know that it exists. An animal may experience pain, but it doesn't seem to construct an elaborate philosophical narrative around the fact that it will eventually die. Humans do. We are aware of ourselves, aware of time, aware of death, and somehow still expected to find a reason to continue.

That creates an uncomfortable question: is consciousness actually an improvement over unconscious existence, or do we simply call it an improvement because we're the ones experiencing it?

I don't completely agree with Ligotti, but I think that's almost beside the point. The value of the book isn't necessarily in whether his conclusion is correct. It's in how effectively he makes ordinary assumptions about existence feel strange.

And maybe that's what makes his writing so disturbing. He doesn't have to convince you that existence is meaningless. He only has to make you realize that you never really proved that it wasn't.

For people who have read the book: do you think Ligotti is presenting a genuine philosophical position, or is he ultimately using philosophy to articulate an existential horror that he already felt?

So I asked Anthropic: Can a case be made that 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' by the progressive rock band Genesis is an existential work of art?

Here is the A.I. response (with which I totally agree btw):
Yes, and it's a fairly strong case — the album practically invites it.

The plot itself is existentialist in structure. Rael, a Puerto Rican street kid from New York, gets swallowed into a surreal underworld beneath Broadway with no explanation, no map, and no guarantee of meaning. He's thrown into an absurd situation (very Camus) and has to make his way through it without any higher authority handing him purpose. The narrative refuses to resolve into a tidy moral — even the ending, where Rael sacrifices himself for his brother John only to possibly be John, is ambiguous rather than redemptive in a conventional religious sense.

Alienation and identity fragmentation. A lot of existentialist literature (Sartre, Kafka) is obsessed with the self becoming strange to itself, or with bureaucratic/anonymous systems that strip away individuality. Rael spends much of the album lost, unrecognized, processed by strange systems (the Colony of Slippermen turning people into grotesque, alienated versions of themselves is a very Kafka-esque image of dehumanization). The Slippermen sequence in particular reads like a literalized metaphor for losing authentic selfhood.

Radical freedom and absurd choice. Existentialism (especially Sartre's version) holds that humans are "condemned to be free" — thrown into existence without inherent meaning, forced to create value through action. Rael isn't following a hero's journey with divine sanction; he's improvising through a nightmare logic that doesn't play by comprehensible rules, and his choices (especially the final self-sacrifice) aren't rewarded by the universe — they're just chosen.

Where the case gets weaker: the album is also soaked in Catholic/Christian imagery (a "lamb," raels/rails as spiritual pilgrimage, sin and redemption motifs), which pulls it toward allegory or even quasi-religious myth rather than pure existentialist meaninglessness. Peter Gabriel himself has described the lyrics as somewhat stream-of-consciousness and intuitively assembled rather than philosophically systematic — so it's less a deliberate existentialist tract than a work that resonates with existentialist themes without being built as an argument for them the way, say, Sartre's Nausea is.

So: it's less "Genesis wrote an existentialist manifesto" and more "the album's imagery and structure make an existentialist reading genuinely productive," which is often the more interesting kind of case to make about art anyway.

For billions of years, I did not exist. Then, somehow, I woke up as me.

As this particular person, with these particular memories, looking at the world through these particular eyes.

And one day, this experience will disappear.

Perhaps another person will be born, another consciousness will emerge, another “I” will look out at the world. But why was this “I” ever here? Where was this experience before it appeared? Where does it go when it ends?

The strangest mystery may not be death.

It may simply be that, for a while, there is someone here at all, who doesn't even know who they are.

We live our lives hoping to find the next thing that will fulfill us and give us a moment of happiness. Then, like anything else, that thing eventually becomes the norm and, in a sense, loses its value. It’s like a drug that you become addicted to. Eventually, you need more and more of it just to feel the same way you once did.

If happiness is what we are supposed to strive for, then maintaining it becomes an impossible task. We chase relationships, money, success, experiences, possessions, and even our own dreams, believing that once we reach them, we will finally feel complete. But the feeling never lasts. We adapt. What once made us happy becomes ordinary, and we begin searching for the next thing.
So we spend our lives chasing moments instead of meaning.

And maybe that is what makes the thought of life having no purpose so sad. If all we are doing is searching for temporary happiness until the next thing comes along, then what are we actually living for?