why you are having an existential crisis

Source: why you are having an existential crisis, Sisyphus 55, 8:46, uploaded 2025-09-25, Watch Later position 343.

For whatever reason, you have ended up in this body with this name and these attributes. The arrangement can feel arbitrary. Sisyphus 55 begins by asking whether arbitrariness is the right word, since it usually suggests limitless freedom. You can make coffee, dance in the street, or marry one person rather than another. Those choices may carry little weight on a cosmic scale, yet they remain choices.

The harder question concerns everything that happened before a choice became possible. Your parents, country, period, body, and inherited traits arrived before you could select them. The video separates this condition from arbitrariness. Arbitrariness points towards apparently limitless options. Contingency names the limits that arrive with a life.

Arbitrariness and contingency

The video gives a small example. You plan to go to the cinema, then start coughing and stay home. That lets you call your mother, who tells you about a good chicken pot pie recipe. You spend the rest of the day cooking. You still make choices, although the shape of the day comes from events outside your control. A chance illness leads to a phone call, and the phone call leads to a different use of the afternoon.

The same pattern extends across a life. A person may think they chose to move for university or change careers through calm reasoning, then notice that a chance meeting or an accidental moment set the decision in motion. Being born to different parents, in a different country, or at a different time would have changed the range of likely paths before any deliberate choice appeared.

Martin Heidegger gives this condition a name: thrownness. A person enters the world without consent and inherits an arrangement of traits that shapes identity and direction. Someone born into a wealthy family in 1950s California is thrown towards fame and fortune in a way that differs from someone with the same wealth during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The video uses this contrast to show how much a life depends on its setting. It also lists the basic categories through which people are thrown into a world: man or woman, black or white, blind or paraplegic.

Thrownness gives existence contingent foundations. The claim does not amount to determinism. Wealth can raise some odds and lower others without fixing a person’s future. Existentialists still insist on the use of freedom, even when the past has shaped the present. The video’s example is ordinary and recognisable: many people decide that they are simply bad at mathematics, then avoid the class that might have interested them. They accept the story attached to their past and stop examining how it governs the next decision.

Heidegger’s account becomes difficult at the point where the person who projects a life is also thrown into that project. The video presents this freedom as a fact without an external cause or ground, even though it makes causation and grounding possible. Jean-Paul Sartre offers a simpler version: freedom is what you do with what has been done to you.

The freedom that remains inside a given life

The contingencies of existence are solid once they have happened. Your family name, country, political context, and historical period cannot be exchanged for another set. The video asks the viewer to add the present conditions of war, environmental collapse, and growing inequality to that inherited context. Awareness changes the next question. Once you accept what has happened to you, what can you do with it?

Viktor Frankl supplies the video’s main example of this remaining freedom. As a psychotherapist who endured the inhumane conditions of Nazi camps, Frankl saw that a person could lose basic dignity while retaining some control over their response to the present. The video paraphrases his claim that the last human freedom is choosing one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances. The point concerns the space between a condition and a response. That space may be narrow, yet the video treats it as real.

This view also explains why examining thrownness can break a cycle of resignation. A person who says “it is what it is” has turned an inherited circumstance into a settled identity. Examining the circumstance does not erase it. It makes the next act visible. The video connects this approach to acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, which uses mindfulness and related interventions to help patients accept difficult events and feelings so that they can commit to what needs doing in the present.

The claim about ACT is presented without a study or named clinical source. The video calls it a highly efficacious treatment for anxiety and depression, so that description belongs to the speaker rather than to an independently checked evidence base here.

The second crisis: choosing a direction

Accepting the conditions of a life still leaves a more difficult problem. What should a person commit to? Every choice, from clothing to marriage, closes some other possibility and carries the risk of having judged badly. The criteria can change without warning. Someone raised within a religious tradition may experience a crisis of faith and have to reconsider what matters. A life organised around avoiding sin depends on a definition of sin that can vary across traditions and situations.

With no stable direction, the question of how to live can feel arbitrary on the same cosmic scale as the question of how one came to exist. An existential crisis therefore has two connected tasks in the video’s account. A person first has to face the contingent facts of the life already given to them. They then have to establish a direction from which future choices can be made. The second task depends on the first, since a person cannot decide who to become without looking at the material they have inherited.

Identity as a set of tools

The psychologist Alfred Adler’s idea of the “psychology of use” gives the video a way to describe that material. People are not defined only by their traits and features. Their lives also depend on how they use those qualities. Responsibility starts with noticing what the tools are.

The video compares becoming who you are to beginning a project. Before using a tool, you need to know its shape, limits, and condition. The seemingly stable parts of identity are tools of this kind. They come through contingency, yet they become available for a person’s own work. The question “how do I figure this out?” remains open because the video is an excerpt from a longer book rather than a complete account of the life it recommends.

Limits and references

The video is a short philosophical treatment of identity, freedom, desire, and a life worth living under uncertainty. Its examples carry the argument, although it gives no full citation for Heidegger’s terminology, Sartre’s phrase, Frankl’s wording, Adler’s psychology of use, or the historical claims about California and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It also names ACT without giving clinical studies. I have normalised caption errors such as “Haidiger,” “throness,” and “Frankle” to Heidegger, thrownness, and Frankl.

The description presents the video as an excerpt from Sisyphus 55’s book So You’re Having an Existential Crisis. It also credits the editing and animation to Izaak Thomas. The book links are the video’s only substantive reference material:

Further reading / references

• Sisyphus 55, So You’re Having an Existential Crisis, book link from the video’s description.
• Sisyphus 55, So You’re Having an Existential Crisis, e-book link from the video’s description.