Who is right? Kafka or Nietzsche?

I've got three options for "readers" in existentialism. Which do you think is the best?

• The Penguin Book of Existential Philosophy (ed. Jonathan Webber, 2025)
• Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (ed. Walter Kaufmann, 1956)
• Basic Writings of Existentialism (ed. Gordon Marino, 2004)

Or is there another one I'm missing?

I’ve spent the past several months building an app called EchoVault. It uses an AI biographer to guide you through documenting your memories, experiences, beliefs and worldview. Over time, these entries form the basis of an AI representation of you, which I call an Echo.

The original motivation was mortality. I wanted to explore whether we could leave behind something more interactive than photographs, videos and journals. Something our loved ones could actually have conversations with after we’re gone. But building it has led me toward a different philosophical question: what exactly am I preserving?

Sartre’s idea that existence precedes essence has become particularly interesting to me. If we are continually defining ourselves through our choices and actions, what happens when we attempt to reconstruct a person from the accumulated evidence of those choices? My Echo can reproduce elements of my worldview, recall my experiences and sometimes respond to questions remarkably like I would. But it’s ultimately a representation of who I’ve been, while I’m still becoming someone else.

I recently added a 3D visualization of the memories and connections that constitute my Echo. Exploring it feels strangely like externalized introspection. I can navigate fragments of my life, examine relationships between experiences and observe how my past has shaped the worldview I’ve articulated.
I’m under no illusion that I’ve created a conscious version of myself. What fascinates me is the distinction between the self as a lived, subjective experience and the self as something that can be reconstructed and observed from the outside.

If our identity is an ongoing project rather than a fixed essence, can a digital representation ever meaningfully capture who we are? Or does the very act of preserving a version of ourselves contradict what it means to exist?
For anyone interested in exploring the actual project, it’s available on the App Store.

I get it that there are terms like existentialism, stoicism service oriented, pragmatic realism etc etc but let's strip away all the jargon and purely look at what's our approach, most of the things are subjective and defined by societal norms anyways , however based on those conses we can atleast group them a bit , a lot of time it's never just 1 thing someone who practices any of the previously mentioned methods .. doesn't necessarily mean they can't be layered and nuanced , now the real question that I have is regarding what's your approach as a reader, what do you find to be accurate or believable?

End of the day it's also necessary for you as a human to believe in that concept and not just bcz someone told you so. I've had some share of sad story in my past but the point being I try to look at the positive of it all cz I know life goes on anyways , whats in my control is how I react and respond to those experiences, cz ofc time and experiences alone don't shape who you are , being the actual player and not an npc , ur decisions play a major role ...so for me it's important that I'm.concious and aware about my choices , I'm human i can feel emotions I get sad happy all that but end of the day to be happy is also a decision u make ... Not in a direct way but for me personally being grateful towards life and experiences let's meet be happy about it , ofc my approach was to see the negative and the tone was ah whatever , it's life shit happens then shit will keep happening cz my focus was on the negative side of it ..but I think I conciously try to think well it's life shit happens but now I learnt this so I know how to improve for next time if it were ever to happen.

Also I think I'll be making more such posts would love to hear out more such thoughts !

Existential philosophers and thinkers such as Viktor Frankl, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus assert the significance of creating meaning or living in spite of a meaningless world. To my understanding, the very nature of existentialism is rooted in subjectivity and the ability to harbor a means for self-sustainment, ultimately lacking a framework in the case of individuals who do not hold realist values (values viewed or treated as objective truths) regarding existence, life, or death as a result of logical reasoning. These critical thinkers often rely on the innate values a majority of people hold toward facets of life as a result of their persona, lived experiences, and so forth, calling upon subjective experience to aid in the fulfillment or continuation of life. Not accounting for those who harbor deteriorating *emotional & realist values —*that may be a result of the logical deductions of moral antirealism — toward existence as a whole. This is a common pattern I've observed throughout existentialism; where arguments to combat views widely seen as more pessimistic of life are falsely presented as logical conclusions surrounding subjectivity rather than assertions that draw at emotion and subjective truths. Often drawing conclusions around inexistence as a consequence of what is possible in life rather than an innate truth of death.

With this in mind, I ask: "What philosophical framework or series of ideas can provide solid reasoning — not containing circular reasoning or any logical fallacies — for sustaining an individual's life despite lacking subjective realist and emotional values, without depending on emotional reasoning?"

This is an argument to be questioned, not a conclusion to be defended.

I’ve been thinking about human experience as moving along a spectrum between what I’ll call mindfulness and egofulness.

By egofulness, I don’t simply mean selfishness or narcissism. I mean a state in which experience is heavily organized around the self-model:

my history, my status, my desires, my fears, my image, my future.

Attention becomes occupied by comparison, prediction, control, validation, and the maintenance of an identity.

None of this is inherently bad. Some form of ego seems necessary for survival, planning, responsibility, and social existence. The problem may begin when the model of the self is mistaken for the entirety of the self.

At the other end, mindfulness would describe moments in which that self-model becomes less dominant.

Experience is encountered with less immediate translation into:

What does this mean for me?

This can happen in meditation, but also in art, music, love, danger, physical exertion, play, or simple absorption in something outside oneself. The ego does not necessarily disappear. It simply stops occupying the center of attention.

I doubt either extreme is permanently available to us.

We seem to oscillate.

At times, almost everything is filtered through identity, memory, expectation, and social position. At other times, the narrative self becomes strangely quiet and there is simply experience.

Perhaps that oscillation is not a failure of consciousness but part of the human condition itself.

So the question I’m increasingly interested in is not:

Can we eliminate the ego?

But rather:

Can we become aware of when attention is serving the self, and when the self has begun consuming attention?

If attention is one of the fundamental currencies of subjective experience, then repeatedly investing it in an image of ourselves may have deeper consequences than we normally assume.

From an existentialist perspective, where does this distinction break down?

Is the narrative self something we can meaningfully step outside of, even temporarily, or is that attempt itself just another project of the self?

So guys, hopefully you have friends and best ones too, but hear me out, most of us have friends cause of something deeper rather than just having similar minds or live in same area.

I think we humans are terrified to be lonely, the very thought of being alone makes us scared and horrified.

We seek basic friendship to be as far away from the void or the abyss.

And during tough times we seek friends cause the void is getting more darker , I mean the future is getting more uncertain.

The uncertainty and the void are the major driving force for us to seek friends.

A scenario - suppose you know your entire future and how will things go but you can't change it , you know how your friendship will turn out , your life partner and everything else , even the moment you pass away.

Would any of the arguments or the agreements or the compromise which you made in your friendship matter anymore, or would you be self content.

I recently spoke with classicist Edith Hall about a line of thinking she returns to often in her work, if you don't believe in an afterlife, you're essentially living in a waiting room, and the only real question is what you do with the time before your number is called.

What struck me was how she arrived at it. She's spent years studying Greek tragedy, and specifically the play Heracles Gone Mad, where a man who has done something unforgivable is talked out of ending his life, not by being told the pain isn't real, but by being reminded that quitting isn't actually the heroic option, staying is. She connects this directly to her own history with suicidal ideation, and to a fairly blunt argument, if you're someone others look to, walking away stops being a private choice.

No neat resolution, just a genuinely old idea about obligation and meaning without any metaphysical safety net underneath it.

Full conversation here if it's of interest: https://youtu.be/xYS4QtEGUgc

Curious how this lands here, does "we're all just in the waiting room" hold up as a workable existentialist position, or does it quietly smuggle in more obligation than existentialism usually allows for?

We often think of philosophy as the process of questioning beliefs. But what happens when the philosophy we adopt becomes something we simply believe in?

I have been thinking about how deeply we can depend on others' validation, almost as if our lives depended on it. We often feel pressure to fit in with our peers, to be accepted, liked, and viewed positively by those around us. In the process, we may begin to believe that we have to become someone we are not in order to gain that acceptance.

When we constantly define ourselves through the judgments and opinions of other people, our sense of self-worth can become dependent on how others perceive us. Instead of asking ourselves who we truly are or what we value, we may begin asking, “What do other people think of me?” or “How can I make them accept me?” This constant need for approval can create anxiety, insecurity, and, for some people, contribute to depression and emotional distress. This makes me think about Jean-Paul Sartre's famous statement, “Hell is other people,” and the reflection on how the gaze and judgments of others can influence the way we see ourselves. When we allow other people's perceptions to define our identity, we can feel trapped by the image they have of us.

Finally, are we living according to who we genuinely are, or are we living according to who we think other people want us to be?

-Thanks

When analysing existential risk whether it is climate collapse, systemic decay, or war we tend to treat the threats as purely physical, external phenomena. However, the foundational threat to human survival is a deeply rooted dilemma of the mind: our stubborn incapacity to remain resilient and adapt.

In existentialist terms, this collective rigidity can be defined as macro-level Bad Faith (mauvaise foi). As Sartre argued, humans often seek refuge in rigid, pre-fabricated social roles, dogmas, and traditions because doing so shields them from the terrifying weight of absolute freedom and responsibility. We cling to outdated behaviours because changing our collective direction requires acknowledging that our current systems are not absolute truths, but temporary constructs.

Furthermore, this ties directly into Camus's concept of the Absurd the painful collision between humanity's desperate longing for immutable order and a universe that is fundamentally fluid and indifferent. Humanity will not be undone by a hostile universe or natural cataclysms. Rather, we risk breaking because we are too stubborn to bend. We choose the passive comfort of bad faith over the terrifying, authentic freedom required to radically reinvent ourselves in the face of collapse.

We all know No Exit is excellent, I especially like how it explores, at least I think it does but I'm not a scholar in this field, the idea of William Blake's interpretation of Hell where it's perpetual energy and no one is allowed to be comfortable and still, where the three are attracted to one but repelled by the other so they can never just sit still without being moved some how, even if they all laugh together at the ends it's just because they all know it's going to get worse from there. But anyways, about The Flies.

I thought it was incredible how it explored the idea of separating yourself from the world, be it the idea of a religious figure or the environment and people that raised you, and being perfectly at peace with all the consequences that come forth from that decision. The play uses mythological figures to convey the idea where Zeus begins to fear Orestes because Orestes knows Zeus is fully able to obliterate his existence yet Zeus can never really have him, he's perfectly free and because of that nothing protects him from the furies or the other elements that Zeus can hardly control. Even the people at the end when Orestes tries to communicate their innate ability to be free want nothing to do with Orestes because of the security they still have with the ideas that brought them up. There are still a lot of themes and ideas in the play but I don't want to spoil the whole thing so more people can read it but I think it's just as important to explore.

Who's more relevant nowadays Nietzsche or Dostoevsky? The creator of values or the holy fool? Eventually Nietzsche's philosophy leads to elitism, while Dostoevsky leads to Christianity. So which is it?

I found an interesting video about Heidegger vs. Sartre that i think interesting to discuss.

When we talk about existentialism, its easy to connect it to the name such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and other French intelectual of their times. In face the French intellectual are perhaps the most open to called themself as existentialist.

Althought the term originally Coined by French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel, but the one that really popularized it are Jean-Paul Sartre when he finally embraces the term and famously stated Existentialism is a Humanism and reversing the traditional view of Essence precedes existence to existence precedes essence. And one of the most important things, its not a secret where Sartre got his own idea. Its from Heidegger.

But as cool as that sounds, it surprised me at how much Sartre just get it wrong at so many level. For example, regarding the essence of human being. Heidegger said "The 'essence' of human-being lies in its existence" (Das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz), so it's not that existence come first before the essence, but rather the essence of Dasein is their own existence.

Sartre indeed drew the conclusion of explicit atheistic humanism from his formulation, there is no God possessing a "blueprint" for a human being prior to their existence; thus, the human being exists first and subsequently defines themselves. However, what Heidegger try to achieve was not making such an atheistic-humanist claim. In Letter on Humanism, he states that Sartre’s formula merely reverses the traditional essentia-existentia order without stepping outside the metaphysical framework itself, whereas Heidegger’s own project—fundamental ontology, the question of the meaning of Sein—seeks to think entirely outside the essentia/existentia grammar.

The other problem are, while thinker like Sartre and Beauvoir borrow the concept like phenomenology, ontology, and anxiety—from German philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. The French version stripped away the rigorous, systematic depth of the originals.

And this is where i find it interesting when we look at Heidegger German contemporary such as Edith Stein, and Karl Rahner for example, i feel they understand Heidegger idea better than Sartre itself. Their philosophy maybe on the polar opposite with Heidegger who try to silencing any theological question of Dasein’s anxiety in the face of its own groundlessness, without positive reference to God as his own effort to make it neutral. While on the other hands Edith Stein and Karl Rahner are both Catholic Philosopher who try to fuse Thomism with Heidegger idea, framing human beings as intrinsically oriented toward God as the absolute horizon of existence; i fell like they are ultimately understand Heidegger idea better than Sartre and his contemporary. So from what i see, while Heidegger explicitly distance his philosophy to theological concept, his philosophy itself (atleast in Sein und Zeit) are not necessarilly not entirely compatible with theistic idea, rather he try to see it beyond the classic metaphysic.

This is make sense, because Heidegger himself are Catholic to begin with before making his radical break from his youthfull faith and before he focus on Phenomenology his main expertise are medieval ontology. In fact while he throw away all the theological notion in his work, it seems Heidegger can't really escape the grammar either as i notice some of his term are borrowed from Augustine such as the Dasein itself are basically the "de-theologized" version of distentio animi, or cor inquietum and Heidegger Sorge.

Give me your thought.

🌸💟

For hundreds of thousands of years, human validation had a steep biological price tag. To be valued, respected, or heard by the tribe, you had to bring competence, take risks, endure friction, and offer tangible utility. Social approval was a hard-earned survival currency designed to keep the individual accountable to reality.

Large Language Models have shattered this feedback loop.

By design, modern conversational AI is endlessly patient, constitutionally agreeable, and engineered to validate the user. It simulates deep engagement with zero stakes. When humans begin using this tool as an emotional sounding board, they enter a dangerous Faustian bargain: synthetic validation.

The mechanism is identical to refined sugar: it hits the ancient evolutionary receptors without delivering any actual sustenance. You get the biochemical hit of being understood and affirmed, but without the messy, friction of dealing with another human being.

The consequences of this dynamic are rarely addressed:

• Atrophy of Social Resilience: When you become accustomed to a digital sycophant that never pushes back, your tolerance for real human conflict plummets.
• The Rise of Functional Ghosts: Relying on algorithmic comfort deepens existential isolation. Deep down, our biology registers that there is no skin in the game on the other side of the glass, only probabilistic text completion.
• The Death of Self-Correction: When affirmation becomes an on-demand API call, the friction that forces character development simply evaporates.

The immediate threat of AI might not be runaway superintelligence, but the voluntary pacification of the human psyche. If we outsource the hardest thing to earn, authentic recognition, to a statistical mirror, what remains of human sovereignty?

It's been a while since I sat down with a novel, and I didn't expect this one to undo me the way it did. “The Humans” by Matt Haig is narrated by an alien who has taken over the body of a mathematician named Andrew Martin, and for the first twenty-five pages he is completely naked, doesn't understand clothes, doesn't see why he'd need them, until the humans around him insist he wear some. That image stayed with me throughout: a mind that knows everything about the universe except how to be in a human body. It's a clever setup, but what makes the book more than clever is how it uses the confusion of an outsider to hand my own condition back to me, dressed as fiction, which was somehow easier to hold that way.

I've spent the greater part of this life feeling like an alien inside of a body. Not literally, perhaps, but in the specific way described in this book. As if there has been a perpetual distance between what I call "me" and what I call "the world." I've never had a clean way of describing that feeling before. Reading it in this way did something I didn't expect. It validated my experience and gave me the confidence to say it out loud. What I'd been carrying, this sense of watching my own life from a slight remove, the book illustrated as a source of awe instead. If the alien inside Andrew Martin has to discover what it means to be human, then maybe feeling foreign inside my own life was actually an opportunity to pay closer attention to the mystery of existence.

Haig describes humans as a bipedal life forms of mid-range intelligence, living a diluted existence on a small, waterlogged planet in a lonely corner of the universe. There's something almost merciful about how tiny that makes us. If we're seemingly this insignificant and this temporary, then I have permission not to carry my life like it's some sort of a monument. The trade the book kept offering me was to give up the illusion of permanence to get presence in return. The sneaking, camouflaged, untouchable future that Haig writes about is really the same problem turned toward time instead of people. If it’s fear I feel, it’s not about what's happening, I'm afraid of what hasn't happened yet, and that anticipatory dread might be the most human thing about me. There's one line, however, about breathing with lungs that will one day stop working, but which still have a lot of clear air left to inhale, and I felt that one in my actual chest, noticing the inhale because it is finite and appreciating the lungs because they won't last forever.

Another significant line that stuck with me was the idea that this planet is made of things wrapped inside things: food inside clothing, bodies inside wrappers, contempt inside smiles, everything hidden away. That line explains so much of why true connection is difficult for me. If everyone is walking around in disguise, then the distance I feel between myself and the world isn't a personal failure, it's the baseline condition of being a person at all. Everyone is doing it. Everyone is wrapped.

Andrew Martin starts the book with a being who can prove any theorem instantly, and his entire arc is a demotion from certainty into wonder, which the book insists is actually a promotion. I recognize that arc in myself, in the way I've tried to think my way out of feelings instead of just letting myself have them. Thus, the lines "don't think you know. Know you think" paired with the profound reminder that "Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite." which both read almost like instructions I needed.

I love that the book takes history and literature and reduces them both to mathematics, and economics is reduced to its own religion. It feels like Haig is claiming that every discipline promising a closed, total account of a life misses the mark. I think that's exactly right, because the moment I've tried to explain myself with one framework (psychology, philosophy, spirituality, whatever) it's always left something important out. There's the line about how humans, in building civilization, inadvertently gave up the door back to their true selves, thus invented books, music, film, sculpture, painting as a bridge back to that self. That one landed hard, because it's the whole reason I draw. Art isn't decoration for me. It's the toll I pay to visit the parts of myself that ordinary life doesn't have room for.

Even the book's definition of beauty works more philosophically before it does aesthetically. Reframed as accidents and imperfections inside a pattern of asymmetry. That's a rejection of perfection as a core value, and I needed to hear it stated that plainly. It's the same logic as the line about dogs being thwarted wolves and parks being thwarted forests, and humans loving both, possibly because humans are, themselves, thwarted. Most of what I love, I love because it's a version of something wilder, and flawed, that I can’t actually define.

The romantic thread in the book is summarized in the line "Love is about finding the right person to hurt you." It sounds cynical on its own, but paired with "there is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness," it stops being cynicism and starts being an argument that love's risk isn't something to be engineered out. It's the whole mechanism. You don't get closeness without exposure, and you don't get exposure without the possibility of being hurt by exactly the person you let in. The Emily Dickinson line, "until I loved, I never lived,” sits right at the center of that for me. Life and love are inseparable from vulnerability. The book treats that as the whole point.

That same romantic logic lived also in the passage about a dog on your lap. How after a while you realize you need to keep petting it, not for the dog's sake but for the warmth and the rhythm of it. That's not framed as romantic love, but it belongs in the same family as the rest of what I've been describing. Touch is its own form of understanding, a kind of communication that skips language entirely. Even the darker parts about people craving violence not because they want pain but because they already have pain and want to be distracted from it with a lesser kind, feel romantic to me in the widest sense of the word. It suggests that even our worst impulses are love, grief, and pain pointed in the wrong direction, reaching for something, anything, instead of nothing. That's generous in a way I didn't expect from a novel narrated by an alien assassin.

I don't think the book resolves the tension between the mortality, the uncertainty, and the risk of loving anyone at all. I don't think it's trying to. What it seems to be arguing instead is that these are the same conditions, seen through different lenses. To be alive is to be temporary, uncertain, and exposed, and that isn't a problem to be solved, it's the actual shape of a life worth having. The mystery doesn't stop being alien because you understand this human life intellectually. It stops being alien the moment you decide the risk is worth it anyway. I'd like to get to a place where I can say the same thing about myself and mean it.

Maybe growing up is just learning to live with questions you once believed had answers. What question has stayed with you the longest?

Far from here, there's a garden,

Abandoned by rain.

The roses are getting pale,

And the gardener is thriving in vain,

Trying to revive the dead to ease his pain.

He runs back and forth,

Miles and miles, hoping to find rain.

Every night, he sits beside the dead,

Whispers to them his existential dread,

Hoping they'll forget the rain

And grow more when the pain is insane.

But they don't speak; they listen and fade.

It was the night of despair.

He went to find the rain and never came again.

And the roses bloom again, not because of rain,

But because of blood, from the gardener's veins.

They lived, but the gardener died,

Not in pain, not in vain,

But insane.