can’t explain it.” Her words were strange, but they comforted me. Here, in a cardiac rehab clinic, I seemed to be surrounded by folks who already embodied a kind of existential wisdom. Whereas I was riddled with despair, they seemed clear-sighted about their condition, talked openly about their physical pain and losses, and appeared calmer and more sanguine in the face of mortality. Their weakened and frail bodies reminded me of death, but their attitudes seemed freer to me, more life-affirming. I began to think that maybe there was something about growing old that can make us more honest and accepting about who we are, something that can help us place our everyday worries in a proper perspective, and that maybe we become more like the existentialists as we get older.
As I began to do more research on the wisdom that comes with growing old, this suspicion grew stronger. A key moment occurred when I happened across a remarkable series of articles in the New York Times by journalist John Leland, who had spent a year closely documenting the lives of six ordinary New Yorkers from diverse backgrounds who were all members of the “oldest old,” that is, eighty-five years and up. Leland’s series was later published as a book, titled Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year among the Oldest Old, and in its pages the reader is introduced to elders who struggled with painful illnesses, loss, and bodily diminishment but who nonetheless lived with a marked sense of purpose and joy. Like Beverly, who consoled me at cardiac rehab, these elders weren’t dwelling on their losses or missed opportunities, nor were they overly anxious about the nearness of their own death. Indeed, they all seemed to shatter the ageist stereotypes I had grown accustomed to. Fred, for example, an eighty-seven-year-old African American and World War II veteran with debilitating heart disease whom Leland became especially fond of in the course of his research, accepted his bodily limitations and the proximity of death with a kind of ease and lightness. He embraced his age and savored each moment as it came with a clear knowledge that his time was short. Leland was struck by how Fred didn’t look backward with regret or forward with anticipation. He existed in the present. When he asked when the happiest period of his life was, Fred replied without hesitation, “Right now.”1 Fred was what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have called a “yes-sayer,” someone who embraces and affirms life as a whole, and all the gifts and losses and delights and pains that come with it. Fred wasn’t overly depressed and wallowing in the loss of his physical strength, his mental sharpness, or his friends and lovers. He embodied the Nietzschean principle of amor fati: he loved his fate and was overflowing with life right up until the end.2
To those already familiar with existentialism, it might seem odd to apply this particular brand of philosophy to the phenomenon of aging. We tend to associate “the existentialist” with the commitments of youth, of doing rather than being, of embracing freedom and rebellion against bourgeois conformism, moral absolutes, and metaphysical security. This figure is often viewed as the embodiment of vitality, courage, and agency, qualities that emerge in the heroic archetype of what the French existentialist Albert Camus branded “the rebel” (l’homme révolté). The rebel is the incarnation of “unbounded freedom,” someone who is “born of abundance and fullness of spirit” and actively embraces “all that is problematic and strange in our existence.”3 Wearing his signature black sweater and black pants and perhaps smoking a Gauloise cigarette in a Parisian café, he presents a dashing figure, passionate, creative, and wholly engaged in the world. It’s no surprise, then, that the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of old age are rarely discussed. Indeed, the only major figure who seriously explores the issue of aging is the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in her work The Coming of Age—a massive tome that paints an especially bleak picture of older persons as beings scorned by society, trapped in their bodies, and largely stripped of any kind of meaningful agency. But existentialism is not just a philosophy for the young and healthy. Indeed, the core aim of this short book is to show that existentialism is perhaps most applicable to our later years, as we struggle with illness, physical limitations, the stigmas of our ageist society, and the imminence of death. In fact the true rebel may well be the octogenarian in a wheelchair or a nursing home, not the twenty-year-old nihilist who is drawn to the radical ideas of existentialism but has not yet had to confront the painful realities of life. As the German language poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, the twenty-year-old may grasp the existential questions intellectually, but without the nearness of death and a deep reservoir of life experience to draw from, he or she has not yet learned how to “live the questions.”4
But what exactly are these questions? It is difficult to answer because the word “existentialism” does not refer to a unified movement or school of thought. There are philosophical and literary existentialists; there are existentialists who believe in God and others, like Nietzsche, who espouse the idea of God’s death; and there are some who believe in the existence of free will and others who think that this idea is a moral fiction. Indeed, the term wasn’t coined until 1943, long after the nineteenth-century Danish pioneer Søren Kierkegaard laid the conceptual groundwork for it. And of all the major twentieth-century players, only Beauvoir and her compatriot and partner Jean-Paul Sartre self-identified as existentialists. Other like-minded contemporaries disavowed the label for various reasons. Yet for all these disjointed views, there is nonetheless a common set of core principles that binds this diverse group of philosophers and writers together.
The first principle of existentialism is perhaps best captured by Sartre’s maxim that “existence precedes essence.” This pithy adage suggests that humans are distinct from other creatures in the sense that there is no fixed or pre-given “essence” that ultimately determines or makes us who we are. Humans are self-creating or self-making beings. Unlike my cat, I am not wholly determined by my instincts. I have the capacity to configure my existence through my own situated choices and actions. There is, for this reason, no definitive or complete account of who I am. No matter how old I am, I can always remake or reinterpret myself right up until the moment of death. Existence, then, is not a static thing; it is a dynamic process of becoming, of realizing who we are as we move through the stages of our lives. The existentialist, of course, isn’t denying that our inherited compulsions, our physical bodies, and our environmental circumstances limit and constrain us in certain ways. He or she is suggesting, rather, that we are not trapped or determined by these constraints and that what distinguishes us as self-conscious beings is our ability to care for, to reflect on, and to worry about our compulsions, our bodies, and our circumstances, to relate to them and give them meaning. This is why humans are, as Kierkegaard puts it, “a relation that relates to itself.”5 Our ability to relate to ourselves manifests itself in how we choose to interpret and make sense of the limitations and opportunities brought forth by the situation we’ve been thrown into. The fact that we are free to choose and create our existence in this way is what the existentialist means by “transcendence.”
But, insofar as I am self-conscious, I am also painfully aware that I did not choose to be born and that my being is always threatened by the possibility of non-being, by death. This leads to the second principle of existentialism, that the truth of our condition is revealed to us not by means of reason or philosophical reflection but by our emotions and our capacity to feel. When existentialists refer to feelings of “nausea,” “anxiety,” and “dread,” they are trying to capture the gnawing and inchoate sense we have that there is something wrong with us, that there is nothing that ultimately grounds or secures our lives, that there is no reason for us to be at all. Of course, the existentialist also understands that we spend much of our lives fleeing from this painful awareness. We cling to our comfortable routines and social roles; we distract ourselves with gossip and we numb ourselves with intoxicants, soft addictions, and fantasies of an afterlife, all in an effort to escape the feeling of our own groundlessness. But the existentialist makes it clear that the anguish we feel is not something we should recoil from, because it teaches us basic truths about who we are: it teaches us that we are temporal creatures, that our existence is in fact precarious, ambiguous, and uncertain. Understood this way, these unsettling feelings present opportunities for personal growth and transformation; they have the power to shake us out of self-deception and complacency, reminding us of what is truly at stake in our brief and precious lives.
And this leads to the third principle of existentialism,
