Concept

Existential crisis

Overview

Existential crises are inner conflicts characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning and by confusion about one's personal identity. They 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. Their negative attitude towards meaning reflects characteristics of the philosophical movement of existentialism. The components of existential crises can be divided into emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. Emotional components refer to the feelings, 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 thinking about death. Behavioral components include addictions, and anti-social and compulsive behavior.

Existential crises may occur at different stages in life: the teenage crisis, the quarter-life crisis, the mid-life crisis, and the later-life crisis. Earlier crises tend to be forward-looking: the individual is anxious and confused about which path in life to follow regarding education, career, personal identity, and social relationships. Later crises tend to be backward-looking. Often triggered by the impression that one is past one's peak in life, they are usually characterized by guilt, regret, and a fear of death. If an earlier existential crisis was properly resolved, it is easier for the individual to resolve or avoid later crises. Not everyone experiences existential crises in their life.

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. Finding a source of meaning may resolve a crisis, like altruism, dedicating oneself to a religious or political cause, or finding a way to develop one's potential. Other approaches include adopting a new system of meaning, learning to accept meaninglessness, cognitive behavioral therapy, and the practice of social perspective-taking.

Negative consequences of existential crisis include anxiety and bad relationships on the personal level as well as a high divorce rate and decreased productivity on the social level. Some questionnaires, such as the Purpose in Life Test, measure whether someone is currently undergoing an existential crisis. Outside its main use in psychology and psychotherapy, the term "existential crisis" refers to a threat to the existence of something.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Christianity is called the religion of _pity._—Pity is opposed to the tonic passions which enhance the energy of the feeling of life: its action is depressing. A man loses power when he pities. By means of pity the drain on strength which suffering itself already introduces into the world is multiplied a thousandfold.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols
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The refusal to see that this reality is not so constituted as always to be stimulating beneficent instincts, and still less, so as to suffer at all moments the intrusion of ignorant and good-natured hands. To consider distress of all kinds as an objection, as something which must be done away with, is the greatest nonsense on earth; generally speaking, it is nonsense of the most disastrous sort, fatal in its…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen
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This abandonment of self‐responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies. Mind‐cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed.(173) Christians who have…
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
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Existential crisis

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