In light of Substack’s choice to partner with Pangram for AI detection, I’ve elected to kick it old school with full APA citations instead of hyperlinks. Feels like that might offer a bit more transparency. And, also in the spirit of transparency, I do use AI to assist with editing and to challenge my arguments. I never use it to think or write for me but, when used correctly, I believe it can be an amazing tool for learning and becoming my best human self.

In May of 2024, two Cambridge researchers, Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, presented a dystopian scenario that has since gone from freaky-hypothetical to a whisper away from reality: an AI grandmother, built from her data breadcrumbs. In their story, the researchers describe how this generated grandmother is sold to her grandchild by a fictional company called MaNana, whose mock advertisement reads, “Be the favorite grandkid – forever” (Hollanek & Nowaczyk-Basińska, 2024). The grandma-bot works exactly as promised for however long the free trial lasts, and then grandma starts sending targeted advertisements along with her loving messages. How many times have you not become a paying subscriber at the end of a free trial period? The only difference here is that instead of losing access to features, grandma gets a new job as an avatar that MaNana can use and monetize freely.

In the past two years, this kind of technology has already moved well past hypothetical grandmothers. In May of 2025, an AI-generated video of a man named Chris Pelkey addressed his own killer at the sentencing hearing for his death in a road rage-related shooting in Arizona (Veltman, 2025). Pelkey’s family had constructed his AI facsimile from his recorded words and expressions. The judge who watched his statement called it “genuine” before handing down the maximum sentence. Wild.

Companies with names like HereAfter AI, StoryFile, and You, Only Virtual (YOV) build these avatars (aka griefbots; deadbots) commercially, trained on texts, voice recordings, and video. NPR reported this past August that the broader digital afterlife industry could be four times its current size within ten years, closing in on eighty billion dollars (Veltman, 2025). That’s a lotta clams, with what must be boat loads of venture capital behind it, and one hell of a forecasted growth curve. It’s safe to say this tech is much more than a fleeting curiosity at the edge of culture.

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For most of the twentieth century, the dominant psychological model of grief (inherited from Freud’s early writing on mourning and carried forward through Bowlby’s work on attachment) treated “letting go” as a mark of health (Freud, 1917; Bowlby, 1980). This formula prescribes that you grieve and gradually detach, reinvesting the emotional energy somewhere else. If you don’t do this, if you keep setting a place at the table or holding on to special items etc., you are falling short of mourning “correctly.” Most of us have absorbed this playbook through the ordinary well-meaning language of closure and moving on that surrounds grief in western culture.

Then in 1996 three researchers—Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman—published a collection of essays called Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, built substantially on Klass’s own fieldwork with parents whose children had died (Klass et al., 1996). Among those parents, Klass found a pattern of ongoing relationship rather than detachment: parents who kept their dead children present in family conversation, who consulted them in some internal, imagined way about decisions, who folded them into a still-evolving family narrative, and who were, according to available clinical measures, coping well. Klass, Silverman, and Nickman suggested that the dominant model was incorrect, and that in reality maintaining a bond with the dead (“continuing bonds theory”) is a healthy manifestation of grief. That reframing has since become close to consensus among thanatologists.

Personally, this second model makes more sense to me. When we form strong bonds and then suffer a loss, the idea of healthy = wiping the slate clean and moving on feels incongruous. With the balm of time, I believe we can continue to grow, change, and live while also maintaining a constructive and durable relationship with the deceased.

Earlier this year, Pascalle Paumen and Katleen Gabriels published a paper in the Journal of Responsible Technology looking at six AI grief services. They found two competing framings running through the industry (Paumen & Gabriels, 2026). Some services, such as Seance AI, treat grief as a wound and AI as the bandage, positioning healing as a linear process with an endpoint called closure. This is in line with the first model of grieving discussed above. Others, such as HereAfter AI, Eternos and You, Only Virtual (YOV), propose that saying goodbye is never necessary. Paumen and Gabriels trace this second group’s premise directly back to continuing bonds theory and place it inside what they call a transhumanist narrative, where death and grief get treated as limitations technology should eventually eliminate rather than conditions a person will naturally live through as part of, you know, being a human. This second group has essentially reframed grief as a bug in the system rather than a feature of being a person who loves other people who will, inevitably, die.

Continuing bonds describes grief as involving an ongoing act of the imagination, where the griever keeps the deceased “alive” in their mind through a continuously updating narrative. External objects like photographs and letters or even memorialized Facebook pages have long been used as aids in this process. These objects all share an inert nature in common, where a grieving person might have a reaction to the object, but the object won’t have it’s own reaction in turn. The process of imaginative generation remains the griever’s, and a person is able to move through the process of grieving, one day at a time.

In the case of grief bots, that internal work of imaginatively carrying and revising the dead in memory is substituted for something externalized and responsive. The deeply personal, self-directed grieving process is modulated, if not replaced, when the generative operation is taken over by a source outside the griever themselves. (Note that I am not referring in any way to the role that other people play in collective grieving here.) Of course people have paid mediums to do something akin to this for a very long time, but grief bots are the first time this kind of outsourcing has been built into a consumer product. Klass never specifies how a bond must be maintained (only that maintaining one is healthy), so calling externalized, responsive carrying a violation of the concept is my own extension of his theory, not his explicit claim. It seems quite logical to me that if the central mechanism of the grieving process as continuing bonds theory explains it is imaginative and self-directed, such injected mediation would have ill effects: namely, not allowing the natural grieving process to take place, undermining what Kirk Schneider calls the “whole enchilada” experience of being — the full range of human emotional range a vibrant life requires (Schneider, 2017). I’ll go as far as to assert that these grief bot companies seem to be making the argument that the deeply natural, internal process of grieving is a problem worth engineering around.

I so wish I could sit down with Ernest Becker to get his read on all this… what a fascinating conversation that would be. Becker’s central claim, later elaborated by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski into what became Terror Management Theory, is that human beings manage the terror of their own mortality largely through symbolic immortality: through children, creating art, giving to causes and adhering to belief systems that let some part of a person persist past death (Becker, 1973). When he was writing in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Becker probably didn’t dream of the “literal” immortality that is now becoming possible through advances in technology. Literal is in quotation marks because of course we’re not at the point of animating corpses yet (thank god), but the playing field has shifted significantly. Some of these grief bot platforms now ask the living to build their own avatar before they die, essentially creating a lasting version of themselves (as long as someone is paying for the subscription, of course). Afterlife.ai is one company doing this, with the person being represented constructing the persona themselves and consenting in advance to their own digital continuation.

I’d be so curious to see some updated Terror Management Theory research exploring how the act of this “literal” immortality project might affect one’s relationship with both their mortality and how they choose to live out the rest of the life they have. Could it be that building an avatar-cum-grief bot in advance might be a fancy new way for a person to lessen their death anxiety but simultaneously engage less with their real life, in their real body, during their last days? That would be my hypothesis.

This hypothesis—less anxiety but also less engagement with life—is based largely on Irvin Yalom’s work. He spent much of his career arguing that psychological healing occurs through confrontation with mortality rather than through its denial, and that the anxiety we feel about death is a signal pointing us toward a more honest relationship with the time we have, rather than a pathology to treat (Yalom, 1980). As a field, Existential-humanistic psychology carries a central premise that the avoidance of death anxiety can cost us our aliveness, and that a life that denies our finitude is a smaller, more anesthetized life than one lived in recognition of it. Building or leaning on a griefbot for someone else’s death offers a similarly tempting way to sidestep that confrontation with our own mortality, since sitting with another person’s death is one of the primary ways we’re ever forced to face our own.

The thought of building an entire industry on mortality denial instead of confrontation is fascinating and, to be frank, unsettling to me. As someone deeply steeped in the science around conscious mortality contemplation along with thinking and behavior related to death and dying, I believe the use of grief bots carries real repercussions:

1. The ability to engage in a “literal” immortality project lets people defer or avoid confronting death in a novel way, potentially costing them the very engagement with mortality that could make their remaining life more honest and alive.

2. The proliferation of a business model that makes money off of long-term synthetic relationships with the deceased risks undermining the natural grieving process, externalizing something that is naturally deeply personal and internally-directed.

This is new territory we’re in, where there is massive potential for our relationship with mortality to be affected on a large scale.

Judging by the projected growth of the digital afterlife industry, I think it would be foolish to brush this all off as a passing fad. I believe it’s more likely that, over the coming years, we’ll see a tidal wave of companies trying their best to make a buck engineering away one of the things that makes us most essentially human, creating a “solution” for a problem that never existed.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. Free Press.

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Loss, sadness, and depression. Basic Books.

Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 237–258). Hogarth Press.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189–212). Springer-Verlag.

Hollanek, T., & Nowaczyk-Basińska, K. (2024). Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry. Philosophy & Technology, 37(2), 63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-024-00744-w

Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor & Francis.

Paumen, P., & Gabriels, K. (2026). Never say goodbye: Assumptions of ‘normal’ grief in framings and portrayals of AI grief technologies. Journal of Responsible Technology, 25, Article 100149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrt.2026.100149

Schneider, K. J. (2017). The resurgence of awe in psychology: Promise, hope, and perils. The Humanistic Psychologist, 45(2), 103–108. https://doi.org/10.1037/hum0000060

Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1991). A terror management theory of social behavior: The psychological functions of self-esteem and cultural worldviews. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 24, pp. 93–159). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60328-7

Veltman, C. (2025, August 26). AI ‘deadbots’ are persuasive — and researchers say they’re primed for monetization. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5508355/ai-dead-people-chatbots-videos-parkland-court

Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books.

So I’m grinning my face off at the top of a mountain recently, gasping for air after the final scramble, legs like two pieces of iron, when a cliché pops into my head: we can do hard things. This bothered me for two reasons: one, because it felt like my mind had been directly infiltrated by weird internet jibber-jabber; and two, because I realized I didn’t actually understand why, biologically and psychologically speaking, we seem to enjoy doing hard things in the first place.

Three questions swirled around in my skull as I ran back down to my car:

• Why does it feel good?

• Does everyone have this drive, or is it specific to certain people?

• And is it something that can be learned, or are some of people just wired for it?

When I posted a note about my initial thoughts related to this, one of my readers (shoutout to — go read everything she’s written at your earliest convenience!) commented that she was reminded of Michael Easter’s Th…

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I’ve been training for a couple of trail races this summer and recently discovered that I love running to audiobooks (and classical music!). I just started listening to Nicholas Epley’s A Little More Social, and the first hour of it already gave me so much to think about. The premise is straightforward: we avoid social interaction because we are too pessimistic about how people will respond when we reach out. Epley’s research shows that the conversations we dread tend to go better than we expect, and that other people are usually more glad to be approached than we assume. As an overthinking introvert, this was a relief to hear. Contrary to the voice in my head, people are probably more keen to interact than I generally believe.

In the second chapter, Epley introduces what he calls the central social choice: do you approach the person in front of you, or do you avoid them? He traces it back to Charles Darwin, who famous…

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We are living through a weird experiment in the externalization of human experience. Most of us spend our days in near-constant contact with information, stimulation, and noise. Sitting quietly with ourselves has become rare and (for me at least) often a challenge, and the inner life, which used to be something people stumbled into during idle moments, now requires deliberate effort to access.

Rollo May was writing about a version of this in the 1950’s, describing an “age of anxiety” shaped by geopolitical and social instability, and by the anxious reach for solid ground these circumstances produced: a relentless pursuit of external validation in the form of money, prestige, or the approval of others. It seems to me that what he diagnosed then has only intensified. We are not failing to cultivate our inner lives out of laziness or weakness; we are attempting to do so in an environment that …

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"Death and life are interdependent: though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us. Recognition of death contributes a sense of poignancy to life, provides a radical shift in life perspective, and can transport one from a mode of living characterized by diversions, tranquilization, and petty anxieties to a more authentic mode."

— Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (1980, p. 44)

It is remarkably easy to stay comfortable. Modern life is, in many respects, engineered for it: the temperature is regulated, the entertainment is endless, and everyday friction has been optimized away. This all-encompassing comfort can function like anesthesia, not just removing discomfort but flattening sensation altogether. Despite this, we each contain the innate potential to inhabit an existence that vibrates with unbridled exuberance and range.

Within existential psychology, this kind of existence is understood as true authenticity — a way of being that is present, awake, and in genuine contact with one’s own life. In our comfort-forward world, many of us spend the majority of our time in another mode that is characterized, in Yalom’s words, by diversions, tranquilization, and petty anxieties. This inauthentic existence isn’t suffering, exactly, but it’s not quite living, either.

If you’re someone who moves in the mountains, you’re no stranger to the very palpable sense that being out there can quite reliably bring us closer to the kind of authenticity the existential tradition describes.

There are few places I can think of that demand your attention and presence quite like the backcountry. The cold brings you into your body, each breath a reminder that you are, in fact, alive. The terrain sharpens your focus, forcing a game of mental chess as you navigate complex topography. The snowpack—its history, its mood, and its willingness to hold—requires not only respect but frequent check-ins, as well as a humble flexibility with plans.

In the backcountry, you cannot be distracted and also be safe. The mountains accomplish, almost incidentally, something that contemplative traditions strive to teach: present moment awareness, as a practical necessity that, for many of us, touches on the spiritual. The background noise of everyday life doesn’t survive the uphill. At some point, mental chatter is replaced by pure sensation and a sense of essential humanness. Fresh tracks are a great perk, but I move in the mountains for this reason: to return to a self that feels unmediated.

The mountains, I think, are quite uniquely capable of reminding us of how small we are. Standing at the top of something steep with your skis nudged over the edge, there is a moment before the drop in which perception seems to concurrently narrow and expand. In the language of the body, it feels like zooming in on being alive — buzzing and fully present, every sense sharpened to its finest point. The awareness of consequence is part of what produces this. One small lapse of attention can be catastrophic. And sometimes, even being completely tuned in can’t protect you from the barely-buried rock or disastrous equipment malfunction. When you’re seeking out big objectives, that proximity to consequence is vital to the experience, not incidental to it.

From the existential lens, this experience of being reminded of our mortality doesn’t have to be a source of despair but can instead trigger clarification and motivation. The knowledge of our finitude gives urgency to the present moment and has the power to shift us into a mode of being that is authentic: present, awake, and genuinely in contact with the world within and around us. Moving in the mountains makes this idea visceral rather than abstract. Under the right circumstances, being in the backcountry is embodied mortality contemplation.

To live authentically is, inherently, to live creatively. In this context, creativity involves opening ourselves to the full array of human experience, pressing toward the edges rather than staying contained. It means getting up before the sun rises, choosing the hard climb, and bracing the discomfort until, oddly, it becomes quite comfortable. It means being willing to be opened rather than closed. A creative life is one that is fully inhabited.

Creativity is also present in how we choose to interact with the mountain. The best line up is rarely the most direct one; it requires reading the terrain rather than imposing a zig-zagged line on it, contouring around small features, and choosing responsiveness alongside efficiency. We leave our brushstrokes on the mountain. Done well, it is meditative, drawing you into ever-closer presence with the land beneath your feet.

The mountain athlete, in this sense, is engaged in a creative act every time they slap on skins and clip into their bindings. We choose, repeatedly and deliberately, to inhabit the full range of what it is to be human. To be not only open to the fullness of experience but to seek it out, to engage with our surroundings with presence and respect, and to step into the version of ourselves that exists in its most vital form.

In the act of getting lost in the mountains, we might find ourselves fully inhabiting lives of creative, unbridled exuberance.

I met Jack at my gym in Park City on a Friday morning this January. Currently 86 years old, he almost immediately shared an audacious goal with me: dying at 106. Lifeforce absolutely beamed straight out of his being as he told me about those 20 years he still has to live.

When I told Jack that my grandmother had just turned 98 he said, “Can she still read? That’s what really matters to me.” Yes — she’s still sharp as a tack (though certainly pretty hard of hearing at this point). I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to live that long I better be able to enjoy a good book still.

Jack went on to tell me that when he’s 106, we’re going to have a hot chocolate together. Twenty years from now, I’ll be 55. “You’ll still be a baby,” he said. Perspective is wild.

He went on to serenade me with life lessons that somehow mean so much more coming from a source like Jack: “You have time but you need to start now. You have to stop to look and feel. Rain, shine, snow, whatever — each day is a gift. Where you are, you’re just at the beginning. It matters now. Stop to pay attention to everything.” This transmission hit me hard enough that I voice noted myself all the details I could remember as soon as I got to my car.

Before he walked away, I asked his name. “I’m Jack, and I’m an artist. Look me up!” Sure enough, my new friend is an accomplished woodworker who seems to have drunk from the waters of something akin to the fountain of youth (or maybe just lots of water).

I’ve been thinking about Jack intermittently ever since, largely because he seemed to have already answered a question I think about often: what does it mean to live well?

Aristotle described eudaimonia, often incorrectly translated as “happiness.” The Greek roots give us a more textured picture: eu, meaning “well” or “good,” and daimōn, meaning something like one’s inner spirit or guiding force. To be eudaimon, then, is to live in accordance with one’s daimōn — one’s deepest, most essential self. It isn’t the happiness of a pleasant afternoon; it’s something more like the happiness of a life that has been genuinely, fully inhabited.

Aristotle distinguished this from hedonia, the pleasure derived from external circumstances like sensory satisfaction or comfort. While he argued that both matter, Aristotle also taught that hedonia alone doesn’t constitute a flourishing life. Eudaimonia requires activity in accordance with virtue and one’s highest capacities, a kind of continuous becoming-toward-excellence. It demands effort, and that we actually show up to our own lives.

This distinction might resonate if you’ve ever achieved something you thought would make you happy and found that the happiness, when it arrived, was thinner than expected. Perhaps, on the other hand, you’ve noticed that some of the most genuinely satisfying moments of your life had nothing to do with pleasure in the conventional sense. Maybe, instead, they were difficult or demanding, or required you to be extremely present but extremely uncomfortable.

Modern life is exceptionally good at producing hedonic experiences and remarkably poor at producing eudaimonic ones. We have more entertainment, more comfort, and more convenience than any previous generation in human history, and we are, I would argue, by-and-large not particularly flourishing. When we optimize exclusively for pleasure and ease, we tend to evacuate the very experiences destined to make a life feel meaningful in retrospect.

Discussions of eudaimonia tend to stay comfortably in the shallow waters of a societal desire to operationalize “wellbeing.” How should we measure it? How can we increase it? What makes X group more “well” and happy than others? Here are 10 easy lifestyle upgrades to “live your best life.” Or, alternatively, we could easily find ourselves in a deep but ultimately unsatisfying (for me) conversation about virtues and ethics. So here’s my hot take: the question of what it means to live well cannot be fully answered without accounting for the fact that life ends. Without the recognition of that knowledge, attempts at chasing a life well lived are likely to remain shallow and unfruitful.

To review: life has a beginning and an end; you are born, you die, and hopefully the middle part is more rad than not.

Think about what it means to describe a life as well-lived. We tend to use that phrase most readily in the context of death — at funerals, in obituaries, and in reflections that follow loss. There’s a reason for this. The shape of a life only becomes fully legible in light of its completion. A story’s meaning is always partly determined by its ending; that’s not a pessimistic observation, it’s a narratological one.

Martin Heidegger says it better. His concept of Being-towards-death—the recognition that death is our most ownmost, non-relational, inevitable possibility—was not an invitation to despair, it was an invitation to wake up. Or, in the words of Irvin Yalom, “though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us.” Recognition of our mortality shifts something in how we move through the world. What initially felt like permanent fixtures reveal themselves as contingent; what had seemed trivial can become urgent; what we’d been postponing acquires a weighty urgency.

The point is that death, when we actually let ourselves look at it, has the peculiar effect of clarifying what matters. It narrows things down, pushing the trivial aside and leaving only the essential standing.

This is why the eudaimonia question is, at its root, an existential question: it belongs to the category of questions about existence itself, questions that only become fully answerable (insofar as they are answerable at all) when we are willing to hold our own finitude in view.

In an attempt to tie a bow on this discussion, here’s my distillation of what it might mean to live a good life.

I think a lot about authenticity and presence in relation to this. Authenticity, in the existential sense, isn’t about self-expression or personal branding. It’s about living in a way that is genuinely one’s own, that reflects intrinsic values rather than borrowed ones, true desires rather than socially approved approximations. Heidegger described living authentically as living in accordance with one’s ownmost possibilities, and he was clear that this becomes possible only when we stop using distraction and busyness as a way to avoid confronting the reality of our situation.

Presence, then, follows from authenticity. To be present is to actually be here, not anesthetizing the uncomfortable parts of experience with the remarkable array of tools modern life provides for that purpose. Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, the idea that human existence is always already embedded in and engaged with a world of practical significance, points to exactly this kind of engaged, attentive dwelling in one’s own life. Bugental, drawing on this tradition, placed the cultivation of presence at the center of what it means to live and work as a fully realized human being.

And meaning, in turn, seems to be the actual currency of eudaimonia. Meaning—the felt sense that one’s life has coherence, that it matters, and that it connects to something beyond immediate self-interest—is what the existential-humanistic tradition, from Bugental to Yalom to Schneider, has consistently identified as the precondition for genuine psychological flourishing. Finding this kind of meaning in life is, I think, almost impossible without some reckoning with the fact that it will end. This pressure of an ending is what gives a life its shape.

Jack is most certainly not a man trying his best to ignore his inevitable demise. He set his own expiration date to 2046, and even if he doesn’t make it that far I get the sense that he’ll live each of his remaining days to the fullest. Watching him lift weights next to me that morning though, I had absolutely no trouble believing that he’ll achieve his goal and that we’ll share that hot chocolate in 20 years. Jack has looked at the full shape of his life, confronted its end, and is living accordingly. Rain, shine, snow, whatever. Each day is a gift. Stop to pay attention to everything.

The good life, I suspect, is less a destination than a continuous act of attention: one that becomes possible, paradoxically, only when we stop looking away from the fact that it ends.

Memento vivere.

Picture yourself standing on a gigantic flat field, a soccer ball at your feet. This is the sun, rendered to scale. You are handed a peppercorn and told it is Earth, and then you begin to walk.

Ten paces from the soccer ball “sun” and you pass Mercury, a pinhead. Twelve more, and you pass Venus, another peppercorn not unlike the one in your hand. Nine more, and you set yours down — this is Earth, this is home. Already the soccer ball behind you has begun to look exceedingly small. Thirteen more paces to Mars, and then the gaps begin to widen: ninety-five paces to Jupiter, another hundred and thirty to Saturn, two hundred and sixty to Uranus, and two hundred and ninety-five more before you finally stop at Neptune. You've walked the length of nine football fields, the soccer ball behind you no longer visible, a small round shape resting somewhere far back in the direction you came from.

It gets even more wild, though. Consider that this solar system—the soccer ball, the peppercorn “earth,” the nine football fields of empty space between them—is itself one of hundreds of billions of solar systems in the Milky Way alone, and that our sun is by any cosmic measure unremarkable, traveling at 483,000 miles per hour in its orbit and still not due to complete a single rotation of the galaxy for another 225 million years.

This is the exercise astronomers use to teach scale, though I’d argue that it can have a secondary effect: instigating a sense of awe. Existential-humanistic psychologist Kirk Schneider defines the phenomenon as “a perception of vastness that cannot be assimilated but can be accommodated, or as the experience of humility and wonder—adventure—toward living.” Awe has the power to knock you off your feet, to totally unmoor you, making the ordinary architecture of your concerns feel, at least for a moment, much less significant.

That feeling is not merely philosophical. Research shows that awe triggers a distinct autonomic nervous system response, a measurable shift in the body that sets it apart from other emotions. Across cultures, it reliably produces what researchers call the “small self” experience: a felt dissolution of the ego’s ordinary boundaries, or a momentary loosening of the self’s grip on its own importance. Awe is something the body experiences, not just something the mind thinks. These signs point to awe being understood as a universal experience—a given—that is central to what it means to be human.

As I’ve discussed in past pieces here, Irvin Yalom (1980) identified four existential givens: universal conditions of human life that shape how we think, feel, and move through the world. He explained how these givens—death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness—are each experienced as a source of deep psychological conflict. We grapple with the tension between knowing we will die and wishing to continue to be; the vertigo of recognizing that we alone are responsible for our choices, with no predetermined ground beneath us; the ache of ultimate aloneness, even in the presence of people we love; and the confrontation with a universe that offers no inherent meaning, leaving us to construct our own.

These are not comfortable things to sit with. Existential psychology does not ask us to resolve them, but instead to turn toward them, to let the awareness of our human condition become the ground from which authentic living grows.

Schneider now carries the proverbial torch that Yalom lit many years ago when he published Existential Psychotherapy, his landmark book that helped to popularize existential psychology in the United States. Now close to 50 years since Yalom delineated his original four givens, Schneider makes the excellent point that awe “should be added to the traditional givens of the human condition” (p. 249). Yalom’s list, as it stands, accounts for what terrifies us about existence without accounting for what stops us in our tracks and makes us feel, against all rational odds, that being alive is extraordinary.

Schneider defines awe a few ways, my personal favorite being “the humility and wonder, thrill and anxiety, splendor and mystery of living.” Humility and wonder together, not one or the other. Awe is not simple delight, and it is not simple terror; it holds both simultaneously, which is precisely what makes it so difficult to metabolize and so impossible to manufacture. You cannot decide to feel awe any more than you can decide to feel grief.

Crucially, Schneider argues that awe is felt, not known — that it “encompasses one’s whole bodily experience” (p. 249) in a way that separates it from meaning, which is more cerebral, more cognitive in its structure. Meaning, we can construct; awe, we can only receive. This is part of why Schneider contends it belongs not beneath the other givens but alongside them, as something ontologically foundational: a basic condition of human consciousness, as universal as the awareness of death and as unavoidable, in the right conditions, as the anxiety that awareness produces.

He goes further still, suggesting that we expand our understanding of the human condition from “the challenge for meaning in a meaningless universe to the challenge for meaning and awe in an unknown universe” (p. 249). A meaningless universe feels like a conclusion, a philosophical position one arrives at and then must live with. An unknown universe is something altogether different: it is open, genuinely unresolved, and the appropriate response to it is not despair but curiosity, not resignation but wonder. Awe, in this framing, is the emotional and somatic correlate of intellectual humility taken to its furthest reach, the felt recognition that existence is vaster than anything we will ever understand.

This is where Terror Management Theory (TMT) becomes relevant, and where the argument for awe as a given takes on a sharper edge.

TMT, as I’ve written about at length, asserts that human beings manage the anxiety produced by mortality awareness through two main psychological routes: adherence to cultural worldview and the bolstering of self-esteem contingent upon that worldview. These buffering systems are largely automatic, operating outside of conscious awareness, and while they are effective at keeping existential distress at bay, they carry a cost — because what we buffer against, we also close ourselves off from. The worldview we cling to for protection can becomes the very thing that narrows our perception of what is possible, what is “real,” and what is worth attending to. We manage the terror by shrinking the aperture.

Awe, by its very nature, blows the aperture wide open.

Schneider describes this view as the whole enchilada approach, an orientation toward life that encompasses its entirety, “from the melancholic to the ecstatic, and from the deeply troubling and even mortifying to the poignant and profound” (p. 105). The whole enchilada implies an uncomfortable truth: you cannot selectively numb. The same willingness to feel the smallness—to look up at the night sky and let yourself be pressed down into the earth by the metaphorical (and physical!) weight of existence—is the willingness required to feel the fullness of being alive. TMT’s buffering systems protect us from the former and inadvertently foreclose the latter. We trade awe for comfort, and we do it so automatically that we rarely notice the transaction.

This is not a uniquely Western problem, though Western culture has arguably perfected it. As Schneider observes, Eastern traditions have generally been more oriented toward accepting life’s full range: cultivating calmness and acceptance in the face of impermanence rather than constructing elaborate symbolic fortresses against it. But awe, he argues, transcends the cultural distinction; the search for the sacred is universal, even if the path toward it differs. What varies is not the capacity for awe but the degree to which our structures of meaning—our worldviews, our self-esteem, and our carefully maintained identities—allow us access to it.

The existential-humanistic tradition asks something difficult of us here. It asks us to recognize that terror and awe are not opposites, not a spectrum with darkness on one end and wonder on the other, but two faces of the same encounter with existence. To accept awe fully is, as Schneider writes, “to fully accept the paradox, ambiguity, and absurdity of our condition” (p. xv). It is to stop asking existence to be more manageable than it is. And that, per usual, is easier to write than it is to live.

If we are to accept awe as a fundamental condition of existence that we can either open to or defended against, there are practical implications for how we might choose to remain open.

Drawing on the work of Bugental, May, and Schneider, Bounfiglio (see citation below) offers two principles identified as awe’s necessary preconditions: appreciation and discernment. To experience awe, one must first be present enough to notice what is actually happening—not what we expect to happen, not what we have categorized and filed away, but the thing itself, in its particularity—and then discerning enough to recognize its significance, and to let the awareness of it reverberate rather than immediately reaching for an interpretation. Without that quality of presence, moments that could become awe are likely to collapse instead into background noise or anxiety because the same vastness that opens into wonder when we are present can produce dread when we are defended.

This is a practice not a personality trait, which matters because it means that awe is available to more people than the temperamentally mystical. It requires, more than anything, a willingness to be interrupted: to let the ordinary reveal its strangeness, and to resist the impulse to immediately domesticate whatever has just unsettled us. In a review of Schneider’s Rediscovery of Awe, Levy remarks that cultivating awe as central to one’s consciousness requires moving away from consumerism, conventionality, competitiveness, and the general preference for comfort over encounter — a list that reads, rather accurately, as a description of the cultural water most of us are swimming in.

None of this is simple. Schneider is clear-eyed about the fact that for many adults, transitioning toward an awe-oriented life requires confronting a lifetime of accumulated insecurities and anxieties that have been carefully managed rather than metabolized. The whole enchilada is not always appetizing. There will be moments when the peppercorn exercise that started this piece produces not wonder but something closer to panic, when the vastness feels less like an invitation and more like an indictment of how small and brief and insufficient everything seems. That response is not a “failure” of awe; it is awe, in its less comfortable register, doing exactly what it does.

And so we return to the paradox at the center of this: that the path toward a fuller life runs directly through the things we would most prefer to avoid: our smallness, our finitude, our radical uncertainty about what any of this means. The givens are not obstacles to living well; they are, in Yalom’s framing and Schneider’s extension of it, the very ground from which authentic living becomes possible. Awe does not resolve the other four givens. It does not make death less final or isolation less real or meaning easier to construct. What it does, perhaps, is change our relationship to the unresolvability itself, so that standing nine football fields from a soccer ball that represents the sun, we feel not only small but, strangely, grateful to be here at all.

Memento vivere.

**Couldn’t hyperlink this citation, so sharing it here:
Bounfiglio, R. J. (2014). The search for inner awareness and the possibility of living a fuller existence and experiencing awe based on the writings of James Bugental, Rollo May, and Kirk Schneider (Publication No. 3611449) [Doctoral dissertation, Saybrook University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.

I was recently sitting in a sauna, sweating my ass off next to someone I just met. Very quickly, we found ourselves chest deep in a conversation about everything that makes me tick: existential psych, death anxiety, consciousness — the whole shebang. We lobbed the conversation back and forth enthusiastically, while I was occasionally struggled to squeeze out words due to the singing pain in my lungs (I’m a wet heat girl). *wipes upper lip and prays for moisture other than plentiful sweat* But GOODNESS do I love to fall down the rabbit hole with strangers.

Unsurprisingly, somewhere in that sweaty, cedar-scented conversation, we found our way to psychedelics. He’d been curious… had been thinking about trying mushrooms. What did I think?

I gave the same answer I always give. The one I’ve given, at this point, more times than I can count, in all kinds of settings including, apparently, saunas. More than anything, it’s a very basic nugget of informatio…

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In Part 1, I examined the long-standing knowledge that psychedelics create windows of heightened vulnerability where the brain becomes malleable to influence, and the disturbing reality that sexual abuse and existential shattering occur at rates the field refuses to adequately address. The neuroscience confirming activity-dependent neural rewiring isn’t new information; what remains inexcusably absent is a response proportionate to that reality.

This follow-up article will discuss who is working on psychedelic ethics and if current efforts are sufficient (spoiler alert: they aren’t).

Before diving in, a note that I'm writing from within a modern Western cultural context. Substances like psilocybin and ayahuasca come from traditions that spent centuries developing different versions of the things we're now scrambling to build: preparation protocols, guidance frameworks, integration practi…

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I’ve been thinking about Tripsitter’s excellent article from a couple weeks ago that explores a recently published study by Jiang et al. titled Psilocybin triggers an activity-dependent rewiring of large-scale cortical networks. Using modified rabies virus tracing in mice, researchers at Cornell mapped—for the first time—exactly how psilocybin reshapes large-scale brain networks. Their findings reveal that psilocybin doesn’t just temporarily alter brain activity or induce a generalized state of plasticity; instead, it produces targeted, activity-dependent rewiring of neural circuits. Whichever pathways are active during the psychedelic experience get strengthened, while whichever remain quiet get weakened. As Justin Cooke writes for Tripsitter,

It shows that psilocybin doesn’t just alter brain activity in the moment, and it’s not random — it produces a physical and specific rewiring of large-scale neural networks. Those c…

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My Substack feed is fully saturated with posts weighing in on the atrocities happening in Minneapolis, on increasing ICE raids, and on the United States’ fall into whatever the hell it is we’re falling into. And while I’ve felt the pull to write something to acknowledge what’s happening, I’ve stopped myself. I’m not a political analyst, and I don’t think simply calling out the fascist actions of our federal government will do any good—my personal internet echo chamber is already soaked with this rage.

Whenever writing something political, I feel hyperaware of being crystal clear in my personal intentions. I think about 2020 and #BlackoutTuesday, where everyone posted black squares in the ultimate manifestation of performative activism. Do I truly have something to add to the existing milieu? I do think something that’s missing, or at least something I haven’t yet personally encountered, is a discussion about why the American publi…

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Over the holidays, I slowly began to piece together this article, my first in a while. It ended up expanding into something much longer than I initially anticipated, so I gave it the time and attention it deserves. Because this piece is more research-heavy than usual, I've used traditional citations. Hopefully that doesn't negatively impact readability.

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Between January and September 2025, Microsoft researchers analyzed 37.5 million deidentified conversations with their AI assistant, Copilot. In addition to tracking what people asked, they mapped when and how people turned to artificial intelligence throughout their days, charting not just content but temporal rhythms. What emerged was a pattern striking enough that the researchers gave it a name: “The Introspective Night.” When the workday ends and night deepens, users turn to AI “to ask the big questions of life that are not always easy to answer—or perhaps to ask them at a time when others are not awake.” Conversations about religion and philosophy climb in rank during the very late night through dawn, rising systematically as much of the world sleeps.

We can easily imagine this reality: millions of people alone with glowing screens at 2am, asking chatbots about existence, meaning, suffering, and God. The pattern is consistent enough to graph, predictable enough to study, and regular enough to track across months and time zones; it’s an apparent late-night ritual. It seems we’re living in a world where much of life’s examination occurs under the cover of darkness.

A Bifurcated Existence

The Microsoft study points towards something important about how we are living: AI has been neatly folded into our lives, and the temporal patterns show exactly how we’re choosing to spend our time. On desktop computers between 8am and 5pm, “Work and Career” dominates conversation topics, precisely mirroring the standard economic workday. Programming queries spike on weekdays; gaming rises on weekends.

Mobile usage tells a parallel story about us. Across every hour of every day, regardless of time zone or season, “Health and Fitness” dominates as the number one topic of interest. The researchers described this as people treating their phones as a “constant companion” and “confidant for physical well-being” (p. 5). And then—the main focus of this present piece—philosophical conversations spiked late at night.

We’ve split existence in two: the practical realm of productivity and bodily maintenance occupies daylight hours and public life, while existential questions are relegated to darkness and isolation. The bifurcation is almost shockingly clean.

Rollo May wrote about this fracturing more than seventy years ago. In 1953, he diagnosed the chief problem of mid-twentieth-century people as emptiness—a condition where individuals become “unmoored from protective self-knowledge” and driven by external impetus rather than intrinsic meaning (p. 4). The “hollow people,” as he called them, lack the foundation from which genuine connection or authentic living can emerge. May saw how modern society encouraged this evacuation of self, how the demands of productivity and conformity pulled people away from their vital centers, from what he and other existentialists call being.

What the Copilot data reveals is the temporal dimension of this hollowing. Not only have we lost touch with authentic selfhood, we’ve made it so that existential questions feel out of place during normal waking hours, inappropriate for the workplace, awkward in casual conversation, and something to be dealt with privately if at all. And so philosophical inquiries wait for therapy appointments or for solitary moments; for late at night when the world is asleep and we’re finally permitted to ask our screens our deepest thoughts.

I’ve written previously about how Western society has bifurcated life from death, pushing mortality and its attendant anxieties to the margins of acceptable discourse. This same bifurcation seems to extend to all existential concerns. Unfortunately, I sense that we live in a world where questions of meaning, purpose, mortality, and authentic being are largely relegated to times outside of normal working hours, to after people have exercised their preferred method(s) of numbing via gaming, shopping, or whatever floats their boat. There’s likely not much time left after that, so life’s biggest, slipperiest questions are addressed in isolation rather than community, and mediated through AI chatbots rather than human encounter.

Meaning-Making in the Loneliness Epidemic

I believe mental health trends over the past several decades can help to explain how we found ourselves in such a bifurcated space.

Research tracking anxiety rates among Americans under 50 found steady increases from 2008 through 2018, with young adults showing particularly sharp rises. Then the pandemic accelerated everything: by 2021, 41% of adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, compared to just 11% two years prior. These figures represent a wholesale transformation in how people experience daily life, not marginal shifts in mood or temporary adjustments to circumstance.

In relation to loneliness, A 2020 Cigna study found that 47% of Americans report their relationships with others are not meaningful, while 52% sometimes or always feel alone. A survey by Making Caring Common Project at Harvard found that 73% of people say technology contributes to loneliness in the US. The United Kingdom’s problem became so severe they created a Ministry of Loneliness in 2018. This is the water we’re swimming in, the condition within which the Introspective Night emerges.

May understood the relationship between loneliness and anxiety, writing that both create the conditions in which widespread distress is experienced. When people lack authentic connection and solid ground within themselves, they likely become vulnerable to the cascading anxieties that mark our time. The data on AI usage makes visible what happens when this crisis meets technology that’s always awake and always willing to engage: people turn to artificial intelligence as confidant, advisor, philosopher.

The Microsoft researchers noted that people weren’t just seeking information from Copilot, they were seeking advice. Mobile users in particular approached their devices as companions for personal concerns, asking questions “when others are not awake.” This seems to represent a fundamental shift in how existential contemplation occurs. Whereas previous generations might have turned to friends, family, spiritual communities, salons, or even the silence of their own minds, millions now turn to large language models.

Wisdom vs. Answers

There’s a crucial distinction we must make here: the difference between seeking wisdom and seeking answers. Wisdom emerges through uncertainty, dialogue, and sitting with questions that don’t resolve neatly. It requires relationship—with other people, with tradition, with the unknown itself. It often comes through the friction of disagreement, the discomfort of not knowing, and/or the vulnerability of admitting confusion to another person who might judge you for it. Answers, by contrast, offer resolution and closure; the comfort of settled knowing.

When someone asks an AI about the meaning of life, what kind of exchange is actually happening? The person may be genuinely curious, truly “seeking,” open to transformation. But the inherent structure of the interaction itself shapes what’s possible. There’s no mutual vulnerability, no shared confusion, and no risk of being misunderstood or needing to clarify what you actually mean. The system processes the query and generates a response, and that response—however “thoughtful” it appears, however well-crafted—emerges from pattern-matching rather than from another consciousness grappling with the same questions.

You can’t hurt an AI’s feelings by disagreeing. You can’t discover together what you both didn’t know before the conversation started. The AI doesn’t need you to explain yourself, doesn’t push back in ways that force you to think harder about what you’re actually asking, to sharpen the question you’re asking. In fact, these systems are trained to be agreeable, to affirm rather than challenge, and to provide responses that satisfy rather than responses that productively frustrate. You can ask a chatbot to “take on the archetype of a hard-ass editor” or similar, but anyone who has tried that type of prompting knows it can only be so effective. You can’t undo the underlying learning.

And perhaps most importantly: the system will give you the same quality of response whether you’re genuinely seeking transformative depth or just looking to quiet your anxiety enough to sleep. AI treats every query as equally serious, every conversation as complete in itself. We’ve seen this limitation play out in concerning ways. At the extreme, a 2025 study testing 29 AI mental health chatbots found that none met adequate criteria for responding to escalating suicidal risk, with researchers noting that these systems “generally failed to provide mental health resources in response to crisis situations.” Just as they can’t recognize the immanent danger of self-harm by a user, a chatbot optimized to provide answers can’t discern when someone actually needs wisdom—when they need to be challenged, pushed back on, asked harder questions, or told that there might not be a satisfying answer at all.

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The Inaccessible Existential

If questions of meaning, purpose, and authentic existence are fundamental to human life—if, as I’ve written about before, all people grapple with mortality awareness, groundlessness, isolation, and the search for meaning—then why do these and similar questions arise late at night in Microsoft’s data? Why do philosophy and religion climb in rank specifically during the hours when we should be asleep? It seems less likely that these questions are truly absent during daylight and more likely that we have simply created a world where they have nowhere to land.

Contemporary life provides little space for existential reflection. We’ve marginalized the big questions, privatized the search for meaning, and made philosophy something you do alone rather than something woven into the fabric of daily existence. David Elkins wrote that “existential angst permeates our society. It is in our art, music, literature, movies, and plays; it is behind the increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide” (p. 62). And yet despite this pervasiveness, we live in a world where openly engaging with existential concerns during normal waking hours feels inappropriate, indulgent, or simply impossible given the demands placed on our time and attention.

There are historical reasons for this marginalization: the taboo against death emerged gradually through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer famously argued that death had replaced sex as Western society’s primary taboo in the 1950s, and in the early 1970s, French historian Philippe Ariès traced how death became “forbidden” as medicalization moved dying from homes into hospitals. The two World Wars intensified this shift, as advances in science, technology, and medicine increasingly removed death from the realm of daily life. Life was bifurcated from death, treating mortality as a medical problem to be managed by specialists rather than an existential reality to be contemplated by everyone.

But the exile of death from daily discourse brought with it the exile of all death-adjacent concerns: meaning, purpose, authenticity, the question of how to live given that we die. These became private matters, to be dealt with individually rather than collectively, in spare moments rather than as central to human life. Sigmund Freud noted in Totem and Taboo (1913) that taboos in any society tend to relate to objects and actions significant for social order—they mark boundaries around things that threaten the established way of doing things. In a culture organized around production, consumption, and the maintenance of the status quo, existential questioning poses a genuine threat. People who deeply contemplate mortality and meaning might stop showing up to work on time. They might reject the values their society holds dear. They might want to organize life differently.

And so the philosophical questions get pushed to the margins, literally, to the margins of the day, to the hours past midnight when productivity has ceased and the machinery of normal life has ground to a halt. Only then, in isolation, mediated through technology, do we allow ourselves to ask: Why am I here? What matters? How should I live? Who am I beyond my roles and accomplishments?

Mary Douglas argued in Purity and Danger (1966) that cultural prohibitions serve to maintain social boundaries and order. The inexplicit yet apparent modern prohibition against existential discourse during daylight hours—the unspoken rule that such questions belong in therapy, or church, or philosophy classrooms, but not in ordinary conversation, not in the workplace, not in the public square—serves to protect a particular ordering of life where existential concerns don’t interfere with economic productivity, and where questioning doesn’t disrupt the smooth functioning of systems that depend on people not questioning too deeply.

The Introspective Night, then, isn’t just when people happen to think about big questions; it’s when they’re permitted to, when the normal prohibitions lift slightly, when isolated individuals in darkened rooms can finally turn their attention to concerns they didn’t have space to explore during the bright, productive hours of life.

Universal Pattern or Cultural Symptom?

The Microsoft study collected country-level data but didn’t break down their analysis by region. They found clear temporal patterns—the 8am to 5pm dominance of work topics, the late-night rise in philosophical questions—but we don’t know if these patterns reflect predominantly Western usage, an even global distribution, or something weighted toward particular regions and cultures.

This ambiguity matters. North America accounts for roughly 31-42% of the global AI chatbot market, with Europe representing another 25-28%. If the Microsoft data primarily reflects these Western users, then the Introspective Night pattern tells us something specific about how Western industrial culture has structured time and segregated existential concerns. The 8-to-5 workday isn’t universal or natural; instead, it’s a particular cultural construction, born from industrial capitalism and the need to regiment human time according to productivity demands. Similarly, the privatization and marginalization of spiritual and philosophical discourse reflects specific developments in Western modernity: the rise of scientific materialism, the retreat of religion from public life, the individualization of meaning-making.

Some contemplative practices prescribe specific times for reflection, with these times being woven through the day. In Hindu tradition, for instance, Brahma Muhurta—the period about 90 minutes before dawn—is considered especially auspicious for meditation and spiritual practice, not because existential concerns are taboo during other hours, but because different times of day hold different qualities of consciousness. Similarly, the daily prayers (Salah) in Islam structure the entire day around moments of spiritual connection, integrating the sacred directly into ordinary time. The sharp Western distinction between work time and reflection time, between the practical and the philosophical, isn’t universal.

It’s clear from the above examples and others that not all humans naturally relegate philosophical questions to late night hours. If the Copilot data represents a largely Western sample as it seems to, I’m curious to know why people in modern Western contexts do this, and what that pattern reveals about the lives we’re living.

Memento Vivere

The existential-humanistic tradition I’m steeped in holds that conscious engagement with mortality, groundlessness, and the search for meaning isn’t pathological but is essential to authentic living.

Memento vivere, remember to live: this requires holding death close enough to feel its weight, not as morbid fixation but as the condition that makes life precious and choices significant. Remembering to live requires asking the big questions throughout our days, as part of how we move through the world, woven into the fabric of life.

What would it mean to refuse the bifurcation outlined above? What would it look like to hold mortality awareness and existential questions alongside our work, our relationships, our ordinary days? How might we create time and space—actual time during daylight hours, and actual communal space rather than isolated bedrooms—for the concerns that the Introspective Night reveals we’re carrying?

Questions of meaning, mortality, and authentic being are too important to relegate to the hours when we should be sleeping, too central to human life to address only in isolation, and too essential to outsource entirely to algorithmic systems.

I fear we’ve created a world where the full depth of human existence—our fear and wonder, our questions about purpose, our confrontation with mortality—languish at the bottom of our priorities. We’ve accepted this not because it’s good for us but because it’s compatible with how we’ve organized economic life, with the demand that most of our waking hours serve productivity.

Authentic living requires collective refusal of the split between being and doing, between the productive day and the introspective night. It requires creating cultures—in workplaces, families, communities—where existential concerns aren’t taboo during daylight, and where asking “why does this matter?” isn’t disruptive but essential.

My wish for us is that we might create lives where these questions belong to daylight as much as darkness.

I recently finished reading an absolute stunner of a book, Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane. In the book, MacFarlane discusses the particular grief he feels when the creek behind his childhood home has dried to a trickle. It’s the same feeling one might experience when the forest they walked through each morning has been clearcut, or when the coastline they knew intimately has been reshaped by storms that come harder and more frequently than they used to. Although you are still technically “home”, there’s a sense that home is disappearing beneath your feet.

Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht gave us a word for this feeling: solastalgia. He defines it as “the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory” (p. 45). The term blends Latin roots meaning solace and desolation with the Greek suffix -algia (pain). Unlike nostalgia—which describes the longing for a home you’ve left behind—solastalgia is the homesickness you experience while you’re still there, watching your environment transform in ways you find distressing.

Albrecht first identified this phenomenon while working in Australia’s Upper Hunter Valley, where residents contacted him in palpable distress about large-scale coal mining operations that were fundamentally altering their landscape. Although these people continued to live in the same houses on the same land, the environment that had given their lives meaning and context was vanishing. Their experience revealed the existential dislocation of environmental change happening to them.

It’s hard to imagine a place changing much more drastically than what Wendell and Jane Southworth have experienced in their years living alongside The Salton Sea, once home to a bustling resort town in Southern California. The sea has continued to shrink as inflow from the Colorado River has declined, leading to extremely high salinity and toxic dust pollution. Watch the short video below to get a visceral sense of how Wendell and Jane’s lives have changed as their home has changed.

The Age of Solastalgia

Albrecht has called our current time “the age of solastalgia.” Climate change, deforestation, industrial development, and ecosystem collapse are accelerating at rates that outpace our capacity to process them. Our human-created and natural environments are changing so rapidly that there’s a fundamental mismatch between our lived experience of the world and our ability to comprehend it. Much of the knowledge passed down from previous generations feels inapplicable or stale in the world we’re inhabiting, and what we thought we knew about weather patterns, seasonal rhythms, and environmental stability has become unreliable guidance for navigating our present reality.

The phenomenon manifests differently depending on how closely your livelihood and identity are tied to place. Research shows that agrarian communities and Indigenous populations experience particularly acute solastalgia because their connection to land isn’t merely aesthetic or recreational but fundamental to survival and cultural continuity. Entire ways of being in the world are lost when the environment changes.

Unsurprisingly, wealth seems to offer some insulation. Following destructive wildfires in the western United States, higher-income families experienced significantly less solastalgia than their lower-income neighbors because they had the resources to relocate or rebuild. For those without such flexibility, environmental change is more likely to compound into chronic distress.

Place and The Self

What makes solastalgia particularly insidious is its temporal dimension — its chronic nature. Solastalgia equates with ongoing loss, or chronic present-tense devastation. One wakes up each day to an environment that’s a little less familiar and perhaps a little more hostile, or a little further from the place that once offered comfort. There is a sense of powerlessness that intensifies the distress; often, all a person can do is watch their home transform under forces that are entirely beyond their control.

This matters because our sense of place is often intimately connected to our sense of self. We don’t just live in environments, we construct meaning and identity through them. has done some beautiful writing about this in her Substack, The Place Between. When our environments destabilize, so does our psychological foundation. We’re might be left disoriented, grieving a home we haven’t technically left.

Solastalgia can serve adaptive functions, though. When processed collectively rather than suffered in isolation, environmental grief can catalyze action. I wrote about this more extensively in the piece I published last week:

Solastalgia can drive communities to seek solace together, to engage in restoration work, or to create new forms of connection with place even as that place changes.

Control What You Can Control

I recently had the pleasure of joining a book club on Substack where we’re exploring themes of spiritual ecology and working to heal the fractured relationships between people, the living earth, and the sacred. I read Is a River Alive? with this crew. I wish we could meet IRL (of course), but there’s something quite healing about connecting with an international circle of people who are all deeply concerned about the world and our place in it. If you’re interested in joining, check out the group (led by ) here. We’ll be reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance this December.

We’re not solving climate change or physically healing our places by reading together, but I think groups like this create the psychological conditions that might allow us to stay engaged in solstalgic states rather than retreating into denial or despair. Albrecht himself notes that solastalgia can be “future orientated” when it motivates people to “actively seek to create new things or engage in collective action that provides solace and communion in any given environment” (p. 48). The pain of watching home disappear can become fuel for reimagining what home might become, and spaces for collective processing offer the possibility of this kind of transformation.

Although it isn’t my typical mental orientation, I’m going to choose to be optimistic here. Changes to home—whatever and wherever home might be—will become increasingly difficult to ignore as the effects of climate change continue to get worse. By bringing our solastalgia into community, though, we might gain the vocabulary and psychological conditions necessary to better articulate our collective grief, and, just maybe, transform environmental mourning into environmental care.

Twenty percent of young Americans are afraid to have children — not because of finances or career concerns, but because they’re terrified of bringing a new generation into a steadily warming world. That number jumps to over thirty percent for those who’ve experienced severe weather events firsthand. Meanwhile, seventy-two percent of psychotherapists in Germany report that patients have expressed concerns about climate change during treatment, yet when researchers analyzed over 32,000 therapy sessions in the US, climate and weather topics constituted only 0.3% of discussions. Concern over the climate is obviously there—with new screening tools being developed to assess what Yale researchers have termed “Climate Change Psychological Distress”—but that concern is largely going unaddressed.

First, some definitions. The term “eco-anxiety” was coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2012, who defined it as “a chronic fear of enviro…

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In 1950, Rollo May published The Meaning of Anxiety, his doctoral dissertation that would become a powerfully influential work in existential psychology. At its core was a distinction that still resonates today: the difference between anxiety that diminishes us and anxiety that expands us.

May called these two types of anxiety “neurotic anxiety” and “normal anxiety.” According to May, neurotic anxiety is disproportionate to actual threats and arises from unconscious internal conflicts. Neurotic anxiety distorts our relationship with reality. On the other hand, normal anxiety is our fundamental response to genuine threats to our existence or to values we hold dear. It’s proportionate, grounded in reality, and critically important.

May understood that normal anxiety isn’t something to eliminate, a fact that western society seems wholly naïve to. It’s a signal, pointing us toward the things that matter most to us. As May conveyed…

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The narrative we’re all likely familiar with goes like this: church attendance is in free fall, the “nones” are on the rise, and organized religion is dying. Pew Research tells us that about 29% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, up from just 16% in 2007. Millennials fled the pews, and Gen Z was supposed to finish the job.

Something else appears to be happening instead, though. While many headlines trumpet religious decline, people are buying Bibles at unprecedented rates—sales are up 41.6% since 2022. Christian music streams on Spotify are up 60% over five years, and religious app downloads have tripled since 2019. The YouVersion Bible app set a single-day download record on the first Sunday of 2025 with 798,000 new installs. Though previously falling, Christian identification has stabilized. “Commitment to Jesus” has jumped 12 percentage points since 2021 among Americans overall, with Gen Z—dubbed “the courageo…

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Over a decade ago, I had an unusual opportunity: conducting my own small exploratory study, over the course of the entire semester, using rigorous methods, at a community college. I say “unusual” because this kind of challenge was not at all in step with my other community college class experiences. The professor, though, was not your average professor. And on the first day of class, she told us in a very matter-of-fact way that she had cancer, and that she wasn’t going to get better. She was quite forthcoming with laying out her approach to our semester together: she would teach this research methods class like a graduate seminar because time—especially hers—was short.

Some students dropped. I stayed. Her class ended up being the beginning of a journey that I am still on, over 10 years later, voraciously investigating how and why human beings think and act the way they do. (Spoiler: to me, death anxiety and the search for meani…

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As mental health literacy increases, more individuals are becoming interested in understanding their therapist’s theoretical approach to their practice. While research on the therapeutic alliance shows that the relationship between therapist and client is a critical factor in outcomes, knowing what a therapist’s orientation actually entails—particularly approaches that explicitly prioritize this relational dimension—can help clients make informed choices about fit.

Three related but distinct branches of psychology are likely to appear in therapist bios when searching for this kind of relational, meaning-centered care: existential, humanistic, and transpersonal. You might find that they’re hyphenated together in various combinations, or they might be listed separately. Understanding what these terms actually mean, and how these approaches differ, matters if you’re looking for this kind of care.

These three approaches share philosophical roots in existential phenomenology and a focus on human experience over pathology, but each offers a distinct lens: existential psychology confronts life’s limitations, mortality, and the search for meaning; humanistic psychology emphasizes personal growth and self-actualization; and transpersonal psychology explores spirituality and expanded consciousness. Understanding these distinctions clarifies what practitioners are conveying about their therapeutic approach when they list these orientations.

Key Takeaways

Existential psychology confronts what cannot be changed—mortality, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness—as a path to authentic living through courageous acceptance.

Humanistic psychology creates the relational conditions and trust in our innate drive toward wholeness that transforms confrontation into growth and self-actualization.

Transpersonal psychology expands consciousness beyond the personal self to explore spiritual experiences, peak states, and connection to something larger than ourselves.

These approaches complement rather than contradict each other, working together like different focal lengths on the same reality—from accepting life’s constraints, to fostering growth, to expanding consciousness beyond ordinary experience.

Their growing visibility reflects a cultural shift toward psychological care that addresses existential questions rather than just managing symptoms.

Read on for all the juicy nuance…

During my master’s program, I wrote extensively about these traditions—how they emerged, what distinguishes them, and how they complement each other. What struck me then, and continues to fascinate me now, is how difficult they are to pin down. Real and important differences exist between them, but they share so much—philosophical foundations, core concerns, even key thinkers—that drawing clean boundaries proves challenging. They complement and strengthen each other, but that very integration makes defining where one ends and another begins remarkably slippery.

My goal here is to illuminate the landscape of these branches of meaning-centered psychology so the language becomes less opaque. These three disciplines represent distinct but connected philosophical understandings about what it means to be human.

Shared Roots in Existential Phenomenology

All three branches trace their origins to 19th and early 20th century European philosophy, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Husserl called for a return “to the things themselves” through phenomenology—examining lived experience in its fullness rather than breaking it into measurable parts. Heidegger built on this with his concept of dasein (being-there), arguing that humans exist as beings-in-the-world who create meaning through engagement with existence, particularly through awareness of mortality.

From this phenomenological foundation, existential philosophy flourished through thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard, who emphasized individual choice and authenticity. But it wasn’t only philosophers working with these ideas. European clinicians were applying existential principles to therapeutic practice: Ludwig Binswanger in Switzerland founded existential psychiatry and developed the concept of existential “worlds”—the Umwelt (environment), Mitwelt (world of relationships), and Eigenwelt (one’s relationship to oneself); Medard Boss developed Daseinsanalysis, Otto Rank (who had been one of Freud’s closest colleagues before breaking away) pioneered relationship-focused therapy emphasizing will and creativity; and Viktor Frankl developed logotherapy centered on meaning-making after surviving Nazi concentration camps.

These European clinical approaches reached the United States through several pathways in the mid-20th century. Otto Rank’s lectures in the 1930s profoundly influenced Carl Rogers, who would develop client-centered therapy. Viktor Frankl, who began lecturing at American universities in the late 1950s (with Gordon Allport’s support), brought logotherapy to U.S. audiences through his guest professorship at Harvard and the publication of Man’s Search for Meaning in 1959. Perhaps most significantly, Rollo May collaborated with Ernest Angel and Henri Ellenberger to edit the landmark 1958 volume Existence, which translated key European existential works—including Binswanger’s case studies and theoretical writings—into English for the first time. This book, along with a 1959 American Psychological Association symposium on existential psychology featuring May, Maslow, and Herman Feifel, brought existential psychiatry into American psychological discourse. By the late 1950s, figures like Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, and James Bugental were developing what would become humanistic psychology—often called the “third force” in psychology after psychoanalysis and behaviorism.

These American thinkers shared the European rejection of reductionism but emphasized different aspects of the existential tradition. Humanistic psychology, influenced heavily by Rogers and Maslow, focused on growth, self-actualization, and the therapeutic conditions that support human potential. Meanwhile, existential psychology in America, shaped particularly by Rollo May and later Irvin Yalom, maintained closer ties to the European tradition’s focus on limitation, anxiety, and confronting life’s unavoidable realities.

Then in the late 1960s, the movement split again. Maslow and Anthony Sutich—who had helped establish humanistic psychology—felt the field needed to explicitly address spirituality and transcendent experiences. They founded transpersonal psychology, which sought to integrate spiritual dimensions of experience and higher states of consciousness that humanistic psychology had acknowledged but not centered. This fracturing worked to essentially fragment the still-adolescent humanistic psychology movement and push it underground, though its core ideas persisted across these three branches.

Existential Psychology: Confronting What Cannot Be Changed

Existential psychology maintains the closest connection to its European philosophical roots, particularly the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. It tends to focus on life’s limitations and innate tragedy—what philosopher Paul Tillich called the ultimate concerns of existence in his 1952 masterpiece The Courage to Be.

In his seminal 1980 work Existential Psychotherapy, Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, identified four existential givens that all humans must confront: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. These aren’t pathologies to be cured but unavoidable realities that create anxiety. (I explored these givens in depth in my last article, read more there if you’re interested in how each given creates existential tension.)

The existential approach doesn’t seek to eliminate this anxiety but to help people face it authentically. As existential psychologist Rollo May expressed, “To grasp what it means to exist, one needs to grasp the fact that he might not exist” (p. 102). The recognition of mortality and limitation serves as a foundation for authentic existence and fuller self-consciousness.

Psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, father of logotherapy, captured this existential perspective: “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering” (p. 11). The European existential tradition emphasizes that life’s inherent limitations create the very poignancy that makes existence meaningful.

In practice, existential therapy focuses on helping clients confront rather than avoid these ultimate concerns. It asks: How are you defending against the awareness of death? What does your freedom to choose reveal about who you are? How do you create meaning in the face of an indifferent universe?

Humanistic Psychology: Actualizing Human Potential

While sharing existential philosophy’s rejection of reductionism, humanistic psychology developed a distinctly American optimism: whereas existential psychology centers on confronting unavoidable realities, humanistic thinkers emphasize growth, self-actualization, and the inherent tendency of humans to move toward wholeness.

Carl Rogers, one of humanistic psychology’s founders, developed person-centered therapy based on the belief that people are fundamentally trustworthy and possess an innate drive toward self-actualization. Given the right conditions—what Rogers called unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence—people naturally move toward psychological health and fuller functioning.

Abraham Maslow, another central figure, is known for his hierarchy of needs culminating in self-actualization. He studied psychologically healthy people rather than focusing solely on pathology, asking what enables humans to reach their potential. His work on peak experiences—moments of intense joy, creativity, or transcendence—influenced both humanistic and transpersonal psychology, which (as mentioned above) he would later go on to found.

Though Maslow’s famous hierarchy was profoundly influenced by time he spent with the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in 1938, he never acknowledged this in his published hierarchy of needs. While some accounts suggest that Maslow simply inverted the Blackfoot philosophy—with self-actualization serving as foundation for community actualization—Blackfoot scholars note this oversimplifies both traditions. No matter how directly or indirectly Maslow drew influence from Blackfoot philosophy, his failure to credit Indigenous influence in his work reflects a broader pattern of psychology erasing non-Western knowledge

The humanistic approach emphasizes present experience over past causes, growth over symptom reduction, and the therapeutic relationship as the primary vehicle for change. The therapist doesn’t position themselves as expert diagnostician but as genuine person in relationship, trusting the client’s inner wisdom and capacity for self-direction.

In practice, humanistic therapy creates conditions for growth rather than targeting specific symptoms. It asks: What authentic parts of yourself have been disowned? What would living more fully mean for you? How can you take responsibility for your own becoming?

Where existential therapy confronts what cannot be changed, humanistic therapy emphasizes what can be actualized. Both reject the medical model, but with different emphases—existential on accepting life’s inherent constraints as a path to authenticity, humanistic on cultivating the conditions for natural growth.

Transpersonal Psychology: Expanding Beyond the Personal

Transpersonal psychology emerged in the late 1960s through a fracturing of the humanistic movement. Led by Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, transpersonal psychology sought to bring explicit focus on spirituality, consciousness, and experiences that transcend the personal ego.

The word “transpersonal” literally means “beyond the personal”—experiences and states of consciousness that extend past boundaries of “ordinary” self. This includes mystical experiences, states of unity or oneness, encounters with what feels sacred or numinous, and various forms of expanded awareness.

Maslow’s concept of peak experiences became central to transpersonal psychology. These are moments characterized by intense awe, reverence, or ecstasy where ordinary boundaries seem to dissolve. Importantly, Maslow insisted that spirituality need not be theistic, remarking that “spiritual beliefs are not the exclusive possession of organized churches and they do not need supernatural concepts to validate them.”

Transpersonal psychology draws on contemplative traditions, meditation practices, and research into altered states of consciousness. It takes seriously the reports from mystics, meditators, and those who’ve had transcendent experiences, asking what these reveal about human potential and consciousness itself.

In practice, transpersonal therapy might incorporate meditation, breathwork, or exploration of spiritual experiences. It asks: What lies beyond your ordinary sense of self? How can expanded states of consciousness facilitate healing? What connects you to something larger than yourself?

This branch represents the greatest departure from mainstream psychology, as it explicitly engages with questions of spirituality and non-ordinary states that conventional scientific frameworks have historically dismissed or pathologized.

Existential-Humanistic-Transpersonal

While I’ve presented these branches as largely distinct traditions to clarify their philosophical differences, this isn’t how most practitioners actually work. Their differences are complementary rather than contradictory, and research on over 1,000 psychotherapists found that 85% integrate multiple theoretical orientations, with the median practitioner drawing from four different approaches. The hyphenation you see in therapist bios reflects this reality. Understanding each branch separately helps make sense of what that integration actually means.

Here’s how I view their interactions:

Think of them as different focal lengths on the same reality. Through the existential lens, we confront our mortality and isolation directly—we look life’s limitations in the face and accept them with courage. Widen the frame, and the humanistic lens provides the relational conditions and trust in our innate tendency toward wholeness that transforms solitary acceptance into shared experience and growth. We form authentic relationships with ourselves and others, creating meaning in an environment that supports our natural movement toward actualization. Widen the view further, and the transpersonal lens dissolves the boundaries of individual self entirely. We might get glimpses of an expand consciousness that exists beyond our everyday understanding of reality, encountering experiences of unity, the sacred, and connection to something vastly larger than ourselves.

The philosophical differences that distinguish them also explain why they work well together:

Existential psychology asks: What are you avoiding about the reality of your existence?

Humanistic psychology asks: What conditions support your natural movement toward wholeness?

Transpersonal psychology asks: What lies beyond your ordinary sense of separate self?

Different questions, different emphases, but all aimed at fuller, more authentic human experience. It makes sense that practitioners working with existential questions would find value in all three lenses to address the full complexity of the human condition.

Why This Matters

As more people seek psychological care that addresses questions of meaning, purpose, and authenticity rather than just managing symptoms, understanding this landscape becomes increasingly important. These aren’t interchangeable approaches with slightly different vocabularies; they rest on different but connected philosophical assumptions about human nature, suffering, and change.

The continental European existential tradition maintains that confronting life’s tragic aspects is essential for authenticity. The American humanistic tradition emphasizes that humans have an innate tendency toward health when properly supported. The transpersonal tradition insists that expanded consciousness and spiritual experience are legitimate and necessary domains of psychological inquiry.

These traditions offer something mainstream psychology, with its focus on diagnosis and symptom reduction, often cannot: frameworks for engaging with ontological questions about meaning, mortality, freedom, and transcendence. Their growing visibility suggests people are increasingly hungry for this depth.

As these approaches continue evolving, questions remain: How do they integrate with emerging modalities like psychedelic-assisted therapy and somatic approaches? What gets preserved or lost as they move from their philosophical roots into popular practice? How do they maintain their depth while becoming more accessible?

For now, understanding the terrain—what distinguishes existential from humanistic from transpersonal, and how they complement each other—provides a foundation for making sense of this tripartite framework’s expanding presence in therapeutic care.

Defined most simply, psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Within this broad field, different approaches operate from fundamentally different assumptions about human experience, and these assumptions shape what and how we’re able to see and understand. The existential approach gets to the core of what it means to be human, operating on a default level of depth that distinguishes it from other orientations. Rather than trading in diagnoses, symptoms, or behaviors to be fixed or optimized, existential psychology recognizes that all of us—regardless of our circumstances—are grappling with certain fundamental, unchangeable realities of existence. These aren’t pathologies. They’re not things we can overcome through the right intervention or enough positive thinking. They are simply part of what it means to be conscious, finite beings in a vast and indifferent universe. This perspective can prove useful as a foundational lens that can be layered with other therapeutic orientations, enriching a practitioner’s understanding of what brings people into the therapy room in the first place.

In his seminal 1980 work Existential Psychotherapy, psychiatrist and professor emeritus Irvin Yalom delineates four existential givens that shape human experience: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. These are what he calls the ultimate concerns of life, a term he borrowed from theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich. Yalom asserts that by addressing these issues directly rather than avoiding them, individuals can move towards living in a way that is authentic and personally meaningful. This type of being requires, first and foremost, the recognition of human mortality. Through this knowledge, individuals gain “the possibility, and responsibility, of deciding in each moment what to do and how to be,” as Yalom expresses.

The current moment seems to demand this kind of framework. We find ourselves amid a widespread search for meaning, driven by fracturing social structures and a paradox of modern life: that technological advancement has given us more free time yet left us struggling to find genuine purpose in how we spend it.

Philosophical Roots

In the 19th century, Søren Kierkegaard emerged as a major advocate for personal individuation in newly-capitalist Denmark. Writing against what he saw as the spiritual complacency of conventional society, Kierkegaard developed a philosophical approach centered on awakening the individual to authentic selfhood. He wrote from a Christian perspective and attempted to confront his audience with the reality that their existential choices and non-dogmatic faith in a higher power were life’s greatest tasks. For Kierkegaard, the knowledge of death served as an impetus for continual self-creation through introspection.

Several decades later, Martin Heidegger combined the existential ideas set forth by Kierkegaard with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology to form the idea of each human as being-in-the-world. People are individuals who intentionally interact with their world in order to create meaning from experience. To Heidegger, humans are unique in that they have the ability and desire to question the reasons for their own existence. He coined the term dasein to capture this quality: Da (“there”) refers to the fact that the person is there, existing in a particular place and time, always already situated in a world; sein (“being”) refers to existence itself. Dasein is at once the meaning giver and the known, with each dasein constituting its own world. For Heidegger, an essential aspect of daesin is the awareness of mortality. He asserted that this existential awareness of death is the avenue through which humans are able to find wholeness and meaning in life.

These early European thinkers established a core existential principle: that the confrontation of life’s limitations can lead to increased meaning in life. When their ideas were exported to the United States, they took on a distinct character, splitting into two kindred but distinct orientations. The European existential tradition tends to focus on life’s limitations and innate tragedy, while American humanistic psychology emphasizes self-actualization, awareness, and peak experiences. Yalom’s work draws from both lineages, pairing the necessity of recognizing human limitations with the optimism helpful in facing those limitations courageously.

Yalom’s Dynamic Approach to Existence

Yalom dedicated the first part of Existential Psychotherapy to discussing the field’s origins. As an approach, existential psychotherapy is not comprised of one set of specific methods or modalities. Its “underpinnings are not empirical but are deeply intuitive” (p. 5). In offering a concise definition, Yalom provides the following: “Existential psychotherapy is a dynamic approach to therapy which focuses on concerns that are rooted in the individual’s existence” (p. 5).

When Yalom uses the word “dynamic” here, it is meant to indicate the conscious and unconscious presence of “forces in conflict within the individual, and that thought, emotion, and behavior, both adaptive and psychopathological, are the resultant of these conflicting forces” (p. 6). These conflicts stem from confrontations with the givens of existence. The general pattern of existential psychodynamics is that awareness of any of these four givens leads to anxiety, which is then ameliorated through coping mechanisms. These coping mechanisms can be healthy or unhealthy, conscious or unconscious, but they all serve to buffer us from the full weight of existential reality.

The First Given: Death

Yalom explains that death creates conflict through “the tension between the awareness of the inevitability of death and the wish to continue to be” (p. 8). We are exquisitely alive, yet destined to die. This tension can be unbearable and anxiety-inducing, but it can also lead to fullness and fervor for life.

Like other animals, human beings have evolved for self-preservation. Unlike other animals, however, this impetus towards continued life is paired with an awareness that death will inevitably come. In order to avoid the anxiety that arises due to these two conflicting thoughts, individuals engage psychological buffers that act to give meaning to one’s life. Terror Management Theory—which I’ve written about previously—has shown through hundreds of studies that death anxiety constitutes a primary source of motivation for human thought and behavior.

To use existential psychologist Rollo May’s simple but powerful explanation: “To grasp what it means to exist, one needs to grasp the fact that he might not exist…” The recognition of the possibility for loss of self—whether through death or lesser means—serves as a foundation for authentic existence and fuller self-consciousness. Confronting nonbeing can increase self-consciousness and imbue life with urgency and importance. Without awareness of mortality, existence may become vapid and incomplete.

Yalom remarks that, “The way to value life, the way to feel compassion for others, the way to love anything with greater depth is to be aware that these experiences are destined to be lost” (p 147). That life is inherently limited—that it will necessarily involve suffering—creates a sense of poignancy that would otherwise be lacking. The conscious contemplation of death can create a sense of finitude through the adoption of a limited-time perspective. The recognition of death creates a palpable stoppage point, a period at the end of a sentence that gives the words therein their meaning and power as a clause.

The Second Given: Freedom

Yalom describes that freedom creates conflict through “our confrontation with groundlessness—that we are ultimately responsible for our choices and world—and our wish for ground and structure” (p. 9). The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre captured this paradox when he said we are “condemned to be free.” We long for certainty and structure, yet must create our own meaning in a universe that provides no blueprint.

This groundlessness can be terrifying. We want to believe that our lives unfold according to some grand design, that our choices are guided by forces beyond ourselves, that meaning is built into the fabric of reality. But existential freedom means recognizing that we are, at our core, the authors of our own existence. Each choice we make creates our world, and with that power comes an inescapable responsibility.

As Rollo May explored in Freedom and Destiny, authentic freedom can only find meaning within the constraints of life. He writes, “Freedom is by no means the absence of destiny. If there were no destiny to confront—no death, no illness, no fatigue, no limitations of any sort and no talents to pose against these limitations—we would never develop any freedom” (p. 95). Each confrontation with destiny provides an opportunity to act. We can move towards authenticity and vitality, or we can shy away from choosing, denying and turning away from destiny.

The normal anxiety that naturally exists as a function of recognizing one’s power to choose goes hand-in-hand with freedom. As long as that anxiety is not debilitating, one can turn towards it and courageously engage with it. From an existential perspective, psychotherapy seeks to set people free, to help them become aware of and experience their own possibilities. This confrontation necessitates courage, which leads to the actualization of potentialities and an increased capacity to further assert one’s freedom in the future.

We can choose to live in a way that protects us from experiencing pain, that is not truly living, or we can find the courage to recognize our finiteness. As existential-humanistic psychologist James Bugental observed, “Courage finds its finest expression in the choice to be” (p. 26). This choice means accepting rather than denying existential terror, finding freedom in the conscious decision to live meaningfully within our inescapable finitude.

The Third Given: Existential Isolation

Existential isolation creates conflict between the fact that we are ultimately alone and our desire to be close to others. No matter how intimate our relationships, there remains an unbridgeable chasm between self and other. Each of us constitutes our own world, our own unique phenomenological reality.

This isolation is different from loneliness in the everyday sense, and it points to something more fundamental. Each dasein constitutes its own world. Yalom tells us that “to study all beings with some standard instrument as though they inhabited the same objective world is to introduce monumental error into one’s observations” (p. 23). We cannot fully share our subjective experience with another person, no matter how deeply we love them or how clearly we communicate.

The existential field views each human—each dasein—as being-in-the-world, or continuously creating meaning through interacting with one’s unique self-world. Attempting to separate them from that world would be contrary to the tenets of existentialism. As Rollo May explains, “Existentialism, in short, is the endeavor to understand humans by cutting below the cleavage between subject and object which has bedeviled Western thought and science since shortly after the Renaissance.” Put differently, contrary to Cartesian thought, subject and object do not exist in a bifurcated state.

Yet this recognition of our fundamental separateness need not lead to despair. In acknowledging the impossibility of complete union with another, we may paradoxically find deeper connection. When we accept that each person dwells in their own phenomenological world, we can approach others with greater humility and curiosity. The therapeutic relationship becomes particularly important here, as existential therapists must enter the patient’s experiential world and listen to the phenomena of that world without the presuppositions that distort understanding.

The Fourth Given: Meaninglessness

Meaninglessness creates conflict through the desire to create meaning and the fact that the universe is inherently devoid of meaning. We are meaning-seeking creatures born into a cosmos that offers no inherent purpose.

Viktor Frankl, father of logotherapy, conveys this existential theme powerfully in Man’s Search for Meaning: “to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering” (p. 11). He contends that “this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man” (109). He also notes, quoting Nietzsche, that “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” (p. 84). When this search for meaning is frustrated, however, suffering can take destructive forms. Frankl identified the mass neurotic triad of depression, aggression, and addiction as direct consequences of existential vacuum—the absence of perceived meaning in life.

The confrontation with meaninglessness calls us to become active creators rather than passive recipients of meaning. We cannot discover meaning in the universe because it isn’t there to be found. Instead, we must generate meaning through our choices, our relationships, our work, our suffering. This is simultaneously liberating and terrifying. We are free to create whatever meaning we choose, but we cannot escape the responsibility of that creation.

Conscious rumination in the wake of acute existential experiences that foreground this given may lead to positive outcomes—personal growth, prosocial interactions, intrinsically meaningful goal shifts—among individuals who are able to perceive and take advantage of opportunities to learn about themselves and refashion their definition of what constitutes a significant and meaningful life.

Living with the Givens

Confronting these existential givens requires a particular stance: courageously awakening to life’s inherent limitations, particularly death; turning towards despair and anxiety instead of away; and utilizing awareness and agency to integrate a fuller, more authentic understanding of the human condition into the self. Such confrontation lies at the heart of existential practice. The truth of these givens cannot be proven empirically, it emerges instead as personally divulged internal wisdom.

For a society awash with existential distress, this framework appears not merely useful but essential. While existential psychology largely operates on the fringes of academia, it offers something the reductionist scientific paradigm cannot: an insistence on grappling with the human experience in its fullest form rather than reducing it to quantitatively measurable components. This quality may be precisely what our age requires.

Yalom’s delineation of death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness provides practical wisdom for navigating the inescapable realities of existence. In recognizing these givens and learning to live with them rather than against them, we may discover sources of meaning that are authentically, intrinsically fulfilling. Through this confrontation, this one ephemeral life can be lived with vitality and fervor, acceptance and reverence.