From Gary Cox’s How to Be an Existentialist or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses:
None of us are fixed entities like chairs or stones, but indeterminate, ambiguous beings in constant process of
becoming and change. We are all free and can’t stop being free. We are all responsible for our actions and our lives are fraught with desire, guilt and anxiety, especially anxiety about our being-for-others. That is, our anxiety about what other people think of us. This leads us to suffer such irksome emotions as guilt, shame and embarrassment. And, if all this isn’t bad enough, we are doomed to die from the moment we are born into a meaningless universe where God is at least very elusive and at most downright non-existent. Strange to say, despite heaping up this long, grim list, existentialism is ultimately a positive, optimistic, anti-nihilistic philosophy! I kid you not. So why? Well, because it outlines how you can go on to live an honest and worthwhile life in spite of the fact that human existence is ultimately pointless and absurd. The general idea is that you can’t create a genuinely honest and worthwhile life for yourself on the basis of a fairytale. You have to build your life on an understanding and acceptance of how things really are, otherwise you will always be fooling and deluding yourself as you hanker after impossibilities like complete happiness and total fulfillment.
